Harry Kane may have thought he had done enough to avoid wearing lederhosen, and the birth of his fourth child seemed to offer a pretty good excuse. But the contractual demands of Paulaner, the brewer and long-term sponsor of his new club, Bayern Munich, are unambiguous and permit no exceptions.
And so, while the arrival of Henry Edward Kane on 20 August meant the England captain missed the annual leather-clad team photoshoot, in which the team dress in traditional Bavarian costume and gurn with glasses of frothing beer, there was no escape when he returned to work this week.
Kane’s shorts were “a little bit tight”, he said after forcing down some German sausage at a specially arranged photocall (conspicuously, no Paulaner beer was drunk), but as he and every footballer knows, what club sponsors want, club sponsors get. You may be one of the best-paid people on the planet, but if your contract requires you to wear embroidered German leather – suck it up.
It could have been worse, after all. Did the Croatian centre-back Dejan Lovren know, when he signed for Liverpool in 2014, that he would one day find himself shaving a balloon as part of Nivea Men’s longstanding partnership with the club? His bewildered expression in the advert would suggest not.
At least he is not ridiculed for his technique when de-fuzzing his own chest, as befalls Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain in another ad. “Ooh that’s poor shaving performance!” exclaims a commentator as James Milner and Joe Gomez, and the entire viewing public, wince.
These are filmic masterpieces, however, compared with the output of repeat offenders Manchester United.
Take 2013, for instance – the year Ryan Giggs made his 1,000th appearance for the club, helping them win the Premier League in Sir Alex Ferguson’s final season. For some, this will always be the year he found himself filming a Japanese advert for tomato juice, attempting some terrible Japanese with a grin and uplifted finger in a much-mocked advert for manufacturers Kagome, who had signed a three-year deal with the club the previous year.
Does dubbing Robin van Persie with bizarrely loud gulping noises really appeal to the Japanese beverage consumer? The results of his endorsement, alongside Giggs, Michael Carrick and home star Shinji Kagawa, are sadly not recorded.
Giggs made an appearance in another memorably bad advert that year, though he is far from the worst offender in the promo for Casillero del Diablo, the “official wine partner of Manchester United”. Watching the advert today provokes many questions: was CGI really that terrible in 2013? Why does the clip for a Manchester team show a mysterious shape zooming past the Houses of Parliament in, er, London? But most of all: why was Wayne Rooney given a dramatic acting part?
“Guys, we have a problem,” robotic Rooney tells a troubled Patrice Evra and, in comparison, frankly Oscar-worthy Giggs. A new devil is arriving, Rooney tells them. “They say. He is a legend.” The pitch explodes, and Rooney strokes his chin, ominously. In the next advert for the brand, he was very noticeably not given a speaking part.
There is plenty more Rooney content out there – a 2016 tie-up between the club and 20th Century Fox required him to nod meaningfully at the superhero Deadpool, now apparently playing for United, in one particularly bizarre TV promo.
It’s not as if no good adverts have arisen from team contracts – the Brazilian seleição’s collective efforts for Nike before the 1998 World Cup in France, in which Ronaldo, Romário, Roberto Carlos and others have a knockabout in an airport, is rightly regarded as a classic (having John Woo as a director doesn’t hurt).
A few years later, Neymar, Robinho and Ganso even managed to make it through a parody of Beyoncé’s Single Ladies on behalf of the chicken firm Seara without embarrassing themselves too badly.
For pure mortification, however, little can surely top the advert Blackburn Rover’s players were obliged to film for Venky’s chicken in 2011 after the Indian poultry company’s owners bought the club. The players, including David Dunn, Ryan Nelsen and Michel Salgado, stand in a circle before making the sign of the cross, for some reason – not necessarily a good sign before one eats.
They then sit and tuck into plates of brightly coloured chicken with conspicuous relish – we are presumably meant to ignore the players giggling in the background. “I had to pretend to love it but the truth is, one bite and my stomach was in knots,” Salgado told Four Four Two later that year. However, “if it’s on behalf of the club you can’t say no”.
In any event, “everyone’s talking about it, so it worked”. Twelve years on, he’s right.
