Electronic Arts becomes latest company to end relationship with world No 1 Tiger Woods, a 15-year assocation that has brought in almost $771 million
Tiger Woods lost one of the most lucrative and long-standing endorsement deals in sport on Tuesday as EA Sports dropped him as the face of its computer golf game after a 90 per cent decline in sales in five years.
The company’s move to end the 15-year association, which has yielded Woods £480 million – almost seven times the world No 1’s on-course earnings over the same period – is a symbolic one for the American, who has retained only two of his original sponsors since his 2009 sex scandal.
While both Nike and Netjets, a private jet company, have remained unstinting in their loyalty, EA Sports has become the seventh major corporation to jettison Woods after Gillette, Gatorade, AT&T, Accenture, Buick and Tag Heuer all abandoned him in the aftermath of his adultery.
But this time the trigger was not the perceived damage inflicted by his cheating but a sharp decline in his marketability, with the 2013 version of Tiger Woods PGA Tour having sold just over 300,000 copies so far, compared to 3.39 million in 2008.
Woods’s agent, Mark Steinberg, who confirmed that he was already looking for a replacement video game platform for Woods, tried to put a positive spin on being jettisoned by such a long-term partner.
“We had an incredible run,” he said. “Outside of John Madden, you would be hard-pressed to find a sports figure that meant as much to a game company as Tiger did to EA. But times are changing: EA had to re-evaluate the partnership and frankly, so did we.”
It all sounded like the cold language of divorce, as EA vice-president Daryl Holt dispassionately announced that he “wished Tiger well”. But Steinberg was right in one sense, in that the trends among a younger golfing fan base are moving quicker than even Woods, at 37, appears able to keep up with.
Tellingly, Woods has not been the main selling point for EA’s golf franchise since 2011, when he had to share the cover of the game with young rival Rory McIlroy. Last year Rickie Fowler, the sport’s other emblem of youth, also joined the publicity images.
EA has consistently stressed that it would stick by Woods in light of his multiple extramarital affairs. But now that EA is advancing to a ‘next-generation’ release of the game, Woods has been left behind entirely, even though it is unlikely he will suffer much financially.
With five titles this season he has reinforced his status as the highest-earning sportsman in the world, with an estimated net worth of £367 million. Nike continues to pay him £12.5 million a year as he toasts his success in winning the US money list for a 10th time. The man who became the first athlete to earn a billion dollars before tax is not exactly destitute.
Still, the timing of EA’s move was far from ideal, given Steinberg’s insistence this season that a host of international blue-chip companies were ready to open their chequebooks for his star client.
Woods has profited from his return to form by recovering at least part of his denuded portfolio, signing deals with Rolex, sports nutrition firm Fuse and, more implausibly, a Japanese company which makes a back rub called Kowa. There has also been an upturn in his course design business after projects in Dubai and North Carolina were halted by the global credit crisis. The first course with Woods as architect is due to be opened next year in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.
In the day job, however, Woods is conspicuous by his absence here at Sheshan International in Shanghai, venue of the one World Golf Championship that he has never won. Somehow he has still found time to collect a £2 million appearance fee for his exhibition match against McIlroy in Haikou, in the knowledge that he will be pocketing the same again by turning up at the Turkish Airlines Open in seven days’ time.
Woods has issued a veiled threat, too, to the Golf Channel, that he expects it to run a televised apology for a column written by American analyst Brandel Chamblee, which argued that his series of rules violations this year amounted to cheating.
Otherwise, Woods is holding true to his promise to “move forward” from the row with Chamblee, whom he has accused of reigniting controversy by failing to apologise properly.
Proving Ernie Els’s wisdom that autumn is the time to “get the wheelbarrow out”, he is understood to be spending the rest of his Far East excursion at a variety of meet-and-greets in the casino resort of Macau.
Again the HSBC Champions, which he skipped last year on the premise of conducting “corporate work” in Singapore, finds no place. Giles Morgan, head of sponsorship for backers HSBC, has described Woods’s two-year-long snub of the event, widely dubbed ‘Asia’s major’, as “disappointing”.
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