In a globalised world, sport has gone from being a unidimensional activity to becoming a multidiscipline whose profitability depends on many factors that go beyond the field of play, the stadiums and the teams themselves. And in the midst of this scenario, the individual figure of the sportsmen and women is beginning to be the most important part of the equation.
This is something that Japanese baseball player Shohei Ohtani and the team around him know, as they have taken American baseball by storm with unusual power and a renewed vision of what an elite athlete should be, which has also led ‘his brand’ to become a true milestone in marketing and advertising.
Judge’s earnings pale in comparison to Ohtani’s
The downside of this situation is that it has been to the detriment of people who should be doing the same, emblems of American sport who have not even come close to finding the magic key that will open the doors to the world in which the Japanese lives and develops, people like Aaron Judge, who, although he shared the honor with Ohtani of being named MVP (he of the American League), has fallen far behind in this crazy race to be a star, according to the peculiar times we live in, a global icon, as the Asian is.
As a global icon and a benchmark for how an elite athlete should be in these times, Shohei Ohtani has become practically a money-making machine, a brand that makes money by the second and earns much more from advertising than from his work on the field, which is excellently well paid. In 2024 alone, Sportico reported that the Japanese star added $72.5 million to his bank account, while Judge only reported $7 million, this in terms of advertising.
Ohtani is doing something that Judge is not
Ohtani consolidated his dominance over Aaron Judge during the last World Series, even though he was somewhat subdued in his only offensive responsibility, and that shows that the Japanese is doing something that the American is not, on and off the field.
That field is called advertising and marketing, a world that American sportsmen and women must enter, but by ‘changing their mindset’, expanding their horizons beyond the borders of their country and thinking of a global market that Ohtani is attending to, especially in Asia, where the expansion of Major League Baseball has long been aimed.
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