How Sharapova became wealthiest female athlete
Companies can bank on tall, blond, powerful image
Maria Sharapova is in a pretty good mood for someone who might be about to lose a tournament. It’s mid-March and she’s just made the two-hour drive from her beachfront home in Los Angeles to the desert town of Indian Wells, Calif., the site of the BNP Paribas Open.
The tournament is owned by Larry Ellison, the software mogul and seventh-richest person in the world. In the past five years, through $100 million of upgrades and the help of sponsors such as Rolex and Emirates Airline, he’s turned it into one of the premier stops on the men’s and women’s tour.
At the pre-match news conference, Sharapova, in blackand-white exercise pants and a billowy grey tank top, handles questions gracefully.
She’s held steady this year in the No. 2 spot in the women’s rankings. Number Two. Few people in the history of the game have struck the ball as cleanly as she does from both sides of the court, and at 6-foot-2, she has the reach and athleticism to thrive on both hard and grass courts. And yet she’s spent her career in the shadow of Serena Williams, the No. 1 player in the world — perhaps of all time.
Sharapova was just 17 when she beat Williams in the 2004 Wimbledon final. A U.S. Open title followed soon thereafter. She’s since won the Australian Open twice and the French Open once, bringing her total Grand Slam wins to five.
It seemed almost certain that Sharapova and Williams would end up arch-enemies, trading major opens in the style of John McEnroe and Björn Borg or Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova. But Sharapova beat Williams in their next faceoff and then never again. Their head-tohead record is 17-2 in Williams’s favour, with Sharapova losing their last 16 meetings.
The lopsided run is partly a result of a series of major shoulder injuries Sharapova had in the mid-2000s that weakened her once spectacular serve. This left her without the weapon she needed to gain an early edge in matches, to maintain momentum in the middle, and to rescue her when she was down.
Second place has its consolations, though, especially if you are tall and blond.
Sharapova is the highest-paid female athlete in the world, according to Forbes data, and she’s topped the list for the past decade. She made $ 22 million from endorsements in 2014, including an eight-year, $70-million deal with Nike, a five-year contract with Evian, and deals with Cole Haan, Tag Heuer, and other brands. Williams, who also has a deal with Nike, as well as one with Gatorade, lags behind by more than $10 million each year.
While a tennis player may grow up in Compton or in the shadow of a nuclear meltdown, somehow the game maintains an aura of pearls and polo horses, and luxury brands love it.
The sport’s audience is not as big as that of soccer or basketball, but it’s just as global — and vastly richer. At the BNP Paribas Open, almost 90 per cent of attendees are college graduates, and 70 per cent of them have household incomes in excess of $100,000.
At the U.S. Open, the average household income of fans is $156,000.
“Tennis, like horse riding, golf, or sailing, is associated by the wider public with glamour, wealth, and savoir faire,” says Luca Solca, an analyst with Exane BNP Paribas who specializes in the luxury sector.
Not long after Indian Wells — she was upset in the fourth round by Italian player Flavia Pennetta — Sharapova is in Florida for the Miami Open, at a cocktail party sponsored by Volkswagen’s Porsche.
The occasion is her second year as the company’s global brand ambassador, and she arrives in a black Panamera, a kind of sports sedan, driven by her agent, Max Eisenbud of IMG, who has represented her since she was 12.
Sharapova touches the car affectionately for the photographers. She looks like a model at an auto show, but Viktoria Wohlrapp, a senior marketing manager for Porsche, says that’s not why they hired her. Porsche is the most profitable auto brand in the world, but 85 per cent of its customers are men.
The company has been plotting how to sell more cars to women for years, and management says it hopes having a prominent female athlete associated with the brand might help correct the gender imbalance. So it signed Sharapova to a threeyear deal.
A week later, with some unexpected downtime thanks to a second-round loss to Australian Daria Gavrilova, Sharapova tweets a photo from behind the wheel of a Porsche (#girlstrip, #horsepower) to her 1.58 million followers. Can Sharapova sell cars? “That’s very hard to say,” Wohlrapp admits. “But for us, it’s an image thing. It was very important to find someone who matches the brand, and we feel like Maria and Porsche is a good thing.”
Harvard Business School professor Anita Elberse, who wrote a case study in 2010 about the building of Brand Sharapova, has found celebrity endorsements can boost a company’s bottom line by as much as four per cent.
With a brand like Nike, the Sharapova effect is relatively easy to measure: The company sells a line of Sharapova tennis apparel (designed by her), and the demand for those items is an indication of the value she creates. With watches and cars, it’s harder to gauge the impact.
In 2012, Sharapova started Sugarpova, which makes candy gummy lips and tennis ball chewing gum, and has since branched out into clothing and fashion accessories. She spent $500,000 of her own money to fund the company, which sold 30,000 bags of candy online in its first six months.
Those endless losses to Williams might have destroyed the confidence of anyone else, but Sharapova continues to chase her better half.
After every point, whether she’s won or lost, Sharapova does the same thing. She walks back behind the baseline, faces the stands, adjusts her strings, then flips around to the net like a soldier coming to attention. She makes a fist as a subtle grimace travels across her face. Then she tosses the ball to serve and starts all over again.