What On is really buying from Kylian Mbappé

On didn’t sign Kylian Mbappé to make an established football business slightly more famous. It signed him while building one — and its own analysts think that’s partly a symptom of weakness, not just ambition.

I’ve worn On trainers for a while, so the news that Kylian Mbappé is leaving Nike for the Swiss company caught my attention. Partly because it feels strange: Mbappé has been associated with Nike since he was a child, and On is still much better known for running than football. But that mismatch is exactly what makes the move worth taking apart properly, rather than filing it under “expensive sponsorship” and moving on.

What actually happened

Mbappé’s relationship with Nike began in 2006, when he was eight or nine years old. That relationship is now definitely over: his contract expired in July 2026, after the World Cup, and Nike chose not to renew it. On 18 September 2026, Mbappé announced he had signed with On instead, and On confirmed it was using the moment to enter football as a category for the first time. Reuters reports the deal includes cash and equity, though the total value and exact length haven’t been disclosed — the “ten-year” figure doing the rounds online comes from announcement-day reporting, not a confirmed filing, and I’d hold it loosely.

Two structural details matter more than the number. First, On has named Thierry Henry as its Director of Football, working behind the scenes on the football entry since late 2025, with a remit covering product decisions, athlete relationships and how the brand builds football culture over time. Second, Mbappé’s own role is described as ambassador and product collaborator, working with On’s design teams rather than simply appearing in the finished shoe. On’s first commercial football boots are planned for 2027, built on its LightSpray technology — an automated robotic arm that sprays a continuous thermoplastic filament to produce a seamless, one-piece upper. That’s a real manufacturing difference, not just a marketing claim, and it matters later.

The traditional sponsorship model is easy to understand: make a product, pay an athlete, put the athlete in the product, borrow some of their fame. Something slightly different is being attempted here. Mbappé isn’t only providing reach. He’s providing evidence — that one of the best footballers in the world is prepared to leave a twenty-year relationship with Nike and attach himself, with equity, to a company that has never made a football boot.

That doesn’t prove the boots will be good. But it changes the question from “why would On make football boots?” to “what has Mbappé seen that makes him want to be involved?” — and that second question is much harder for a rival brand to answer with an advertising budget alone.

Harry Kane did something similar — but it’s a weaker precedent than it looks

Skechers signed Harry Kane in August 2023, timed almost exactly to the launch of the SKX_01, its first serious football boot. The signing landed within days of Kane’s British-record transfer to Bayern Munich, and he wore a masked version of the boot through preseason. Skechers has since built out a genuine roster around that entry point — Mohammed Kudus, Isco, Anthony Elanga, Oleksandr Zinchenko and others have followed.

It’s tempting to read this as proof the model works. I’d resist that. There’s no strong public evidence that Kane shaped the SKX_01’s engineering the way a product collaborator would; Skechers’ own language about “insights from professional players” is generic marketing copy, not a documented design credit. The deal is reported as a “lifetime global deal” — endorsement-shaped, not equity-plus-product-input. And there’s no independent data on whether Skechers Football has actually taken meaningful share since 2023, only that the roster has grown. Kane and Skechers show the timing pattern On is now repeating — practitioner arrives before the category is built — but they don’t yet show that the pattern produces earned credibility rather than just a bigger roster.

On has done this before, and this time there are numbers to check

The more revealing precedent is Roger Federer. In 2019, before On had a single tennis product or a single tennis athlete, Federer invested $50 million for roughly a 3% stake. Co-founder Olivier Bernhard described it at the time as “not traditional athlete sponsorship” — and the record backs that up. Federer was actively involved in designing, developing and testing On’s tennis products: a lifestyle line called The Roger launched in 2020, and a professional tennis shoe built from scratch with him debuted in 2021. On signed its first tennis athletes beyond Federer — Iga Świątek and Ben Shelton — only in 2023, four years after his investment. On built a tennis business around Federer. He didn’t join one that was already expanding.

The financial outcome is now checkable rather than asserted. On went public in September 2021, priced at $24, and jumped 46% on its first day of trading. Federer’s stake is now estimated at $375–600 million — an eight-to-twelvefold return — and Forbes named it the decisive factor in Federer crossing into the billionaire bracket in August 2025. You can build a shoe factory, buy media and open stores. You can’t quickly manufacture decades of credibility inside a sport. People can transfer some of it to you, and the Federer numbers are the clearest evidence I’ve found that this actually happened once, not just that it was intended.

The counterargument that deserves equal weight

It would be easy to stop there and call this ambition. On’s own analyst coverage doesn’t let it stop there. Jefferies analyst Randy Konik called the Mbappé deal a sign that On needs to “spend harder to sustain growth,” not a new growth driver in its own right, adding that “football is one of the most expensive categories to enter and performance credibility cannot simply be bought.” He drew a direct comparison to Under Armour’s partnership with Stephen Curry — a dedicated sub-brand, years of investment, an era-defining athlete — that still accounts for only around $100–120 million of Under Armour’s roughly $5 billion in annual revenue. Curry grew frustrated with the level of investment and eventually left. Konik’s point: an elite athlete alone does not guarantee a category.

That reading isn’t idle scepticism. On’s FY2026 growth guidance was already being cut, from at least 23% to the low-20s%, before this deal was announced, and the stock fell 22% on the Q2 2026 miss that preceded it. The company absorbed roughly $70 million in US tariffs in a single quarter. Read against that backdrop, signing Mbappé looks less like a confident brand entering a new category from strength and more like a company reaching for its most expensive possible lever at the exact moment its cheaper ones are losing power. Both readings can be true at once — the Federer playbook is real, and it is also being deployed here partly because the core business needs a new story. That tension, not the size of the deal, is the actual news.

The harder problem for On

I like On’s trainers partly because the company still feels different from Nike or Adidas — a recognisable design language, a strong technical story, a brand that has stayed fairly premium while becoming much more visible. Growth complicates that. At what point does the interesting challenger become just another enormous sportswear company, and can it scale production and range without losing what made people interested in the first place?

I looked for evidence that this has already happened, rather than assuming it. What I found is a real but limited pattern: aggregated consumer reviews describe recurring durability complaints — torn mesh, peeling soles, laces that snap, insoles that wear out within months — alongside frustration with slow or unhelpful customer service. That’s worth taking seriously as a signal. It is not, on the evidence available, proof that quality has declined: there’s no dated or comparative study showing today’s product is worse than the 2019 version, and the same period produced record revenue and margin expansion, with gross margin reaching 65.4% in 2025. On also appears to be protecting its premium position deliberately — shifting sales mix toward direct-to-consumer, which now accounts for 48.8% of quarterly net sales, and building out nearly seventy owned “brand hub” stores rather than chasing wholesale volume. I don’t think the quality question is answered either way yet. It’s the genuine open risk in this story, not a conclusion.

People can become part of the infrastructure

There’s something here that goes beyond sports sponsorship. Usually we treat experts and practitioners as people brought in once the work already exists — they provide a quote, they validate a claim, they become part of the story after the fact. The more interesting model is when their expertise moves upstream, into the product itself, before the wider market has any reason to trust the result.

That’s closer to what On is attempting, and it’s worth being precise about how far it’s actually got. On’s global brand awareness is around 15%, against roughly 91% for Nike and 93% for Adidas — most of its growth to date has come from running-shoe intensity and direct retail, not from having already won an argument about credibility in a new sport. Mbappé isn’t valuable because millions of people know who he is. He’s valuable because his involvement makes On’s decision to enter football legible before the company has built years of football heritage of its own — in exactly the way Federer once did for tennis, and in a rougher, less-tested way Kane did for Skechers.

The interesting question isn’t whether Mbappé can sell some boots. It’s whether credibility borrowed from one person, arriving at a moment when the lender needed it as much as it wanted it, can still become credibility the product has earned on its own. Federer suggests it can happen. Curry shows it doesn’t happen automatically. Nobody will know which case On turns out to resemble until footballers who aren’t being paid by On start choosing, or refusing, to wear its boots in 2027. Eventually the person stops being the evidence. The product has to become the evidence.