Here are some of the best and worst commercials that have starred football players over the years:
This 2000 advert for Nike entitled “The Mission” was like a cross between Goal and Die Hard. Featuring some famous players trying to rescue their football from a building that was guarded by samurai robots, this bizarre yet high-octane commercial is etched in the memory for all the wrong reasons.
One of the more bizarre adverts to star football players, this commercial was designed to showcase how spacious Turkish Airlines’ Business Class accommodation was and involved some of the biggest names in football playing tiki-taka through the aisle. Just some of the stars featured here included Wayne Rooney, Sir Bobby Charlton and the Da Silva twins. We didn’t know whether to cheer or laugh.
One of this soft drink brand’s most memorable adverts showed football giants Francesco Totti, Ronaldhino and David Beckham as mercenaries forced to defend a 17th century Mediterranean town from armed bandits with their ball kicking expertise.
David Beckham must love starring in adverts since he also made an appearance in the Footballitis ad by Adidas during 2002, the very same year that Becks injured his foot right before the World Cup kicked off. It was deliciously ironic, then, that this advert was introducing the world to the concept of footballitis, yet another medical concern that the nation needed to worry about!
The famous lager brand made this amazingly good advert during the 2002 World Cup which showed Jason McAteer laying waste to Ireland’s footballing competition to pave the way for his nation to raise the trophy! Unfortunately, it wasn’t a correct prediction of the future but at least it was entertaining viewing.
One of the worst ever adverts starring a footballer was for the Cartoon Network. This kids’ TV channel actually paid Carlos Tevez real money to dance for the longest 28 seconds ever just to promote their product. Plain weird.
A soft drink that divides opinion everywhere it goes, you either love it or hate it, but you’d have a hard time to love their advert featuring Jason Scotland which was released when he went to the World Cup as part of the Trinidad and Tobago team.
For years now, (since 1995 to be precise), Gary Lineker has been the face of Walkers Crisps, pumping out one cheesy ad after another to promote the nation’s favourite crunchy snack brand. Although most of the younger generation won’t remember Lineker for anything other than sitting on park benches munching packets of crisps, to those of us who remember the electrifying World Cup final against Poland back in 1986 he’ll always be the guy who scored a hat trick in the first 35 minutes of play.
This ghastly commercial has been dug out of the archives to prove that footballers were always looking to supplement their income with a paid commercial even back in the 1970s. Starring big name footballer of his day Kevin Keegan, this dreadful advert for Brut deodorant may have been grainy but was no less sweaty and unpleasant for all of that. Definitely one to keep in the past!
It’s no wonder that so many footballers are so keen to make adverts, however bad, when you look at how much they can expect to be paid for their efforts. Even a short commercial can command thousands of pounds and celebrity sportsmen have been paid as much as £25,000 for just a single day of filming, which makes Carlos Tevez’s 28 seconds of dancing for Cartoon Network look well worth the effort!
Some can obviously command more than this, and in the case of Gary Lineker with his ongoing relationship with Walkers Crisps, although the star hasn’t been frank about precisely how much he’s paid by the brand, with annual earnings of almost £2 million, it stands to reason that a large chunk of that amount must be from the many commercials that he makes about the favourite snack products.
With such large sums on the cards, it seems clear that we’ll be seeing plenty more adverts featuring footballers in the near future.