When Nike signed Michael Jordan in 1984, the company was hoping his shoe would do about $3 million in sales by the fourth year of the deal. It brought in $126 million in its first year.
Nike paid the Chicago Bulls rookie $500,000 a year for five years, according to Fox Business. The deal also gave him his own signature shoe, which was unusual for a rookie.
He Wanted Adidas
Jordan came out of North Carolina in 1984 as the No. 3 pick in the NBA draft, and he didn’t want to sign with Nike. He wanted to go with Adidas.
He didn’t even want to take the meeting with Nike. His mother made him go. “My mother said, ‘You’re gonna go listen. You may not like it, but you’re gonna go listen,’” Jordan recalled, according to Fox Business.
Adidas didn’t come close. Its reps told him, “We’d love to have Jordan, we just can’t make a shoe work,” according to Fox Business.
Jordan’s father told him, “You’d have to be a fool not taking this deal. This is the best deal.”
A $3 Million Goal
Nike didn’t expect much at first. Jordan’s agent, David Falk, said in “The Last Dance,” ESPN’s 2020 documentary on Jordan and the Bulls, that the company’s goal was to sell $3 million worth of Air Jordans by the end of the deal’s fourth year, Bleacher Report noted.
The first Air Jordan, designed by a team led by Nike’s Peter Moore, went on sale to the public on April 1, 1985, according to the shoe’s history.
$126 Million in Year One
By the end of the first year, the line had brought in $126 million, Falk said in the documentary.
He later called it the best and the worst deal he ever made. “No one had a clue—including Nike—that you could sell $100 million worth of shoes for a rookie in his first year,” he said on “The Herd with Colin Cowherd,” as reported by Bleacher Report.
Jordan Brand has grown far past that. In 2022, it brought in $5.1 billion for Nike, according to the brand’s history, and Forbes estimated in 2020 that Nike had paid Jordan about $1.3 billion over the years.
The story of how the deal came together became the 2023 movie “Air,” with Matt Damon as Nike’s Sonny Vaccaro and Ben Affleck as Phil Knight. Viola Davis played Jordan’s mother, Deloris.
