The last few weeks saw some stunning developments in the world of football. A couple of weeks after Messi ended his 17-year run with FCB, social media was abuzz once again with #CR7transfernews trending after the news of Cristiano Ronaldo’s return to his former club, Manchester United, broke out last friday.

CR7 – as Cristiano Ronaldo is referred to by millions of his fans after the iconic No.7 jersey he wore during his earlier stint with Manchester United – was re-signed by Manchester United, after his former club reached an incredible $38 million transfer agreement with Juventus. This is after initial reports indicated a concerted bid by Manchester City to sign on the ageing superstar (Cristiano Ronaldo is 36 years old).

While Manchester United may have taken their premier league bid into extra-time with this deal and Manchester City may have narrowly avoided scoring an own goal, it’s the Agnelli Family – majority owners in the publicly-listed Juventus Football Club – that appears to have found the back of the net with a long-range strike.

But first, as always, the back story.

Why was CR7 signed on by Juventus?

When viewed only within the ambit of the game it appears that Juventus broke from tradition, to sign on the star player with the singular goal of winning the Champions League. (I say ‘broke from tradition’ because Juventus wasn’t really a club that cultivated a large roster of ‘star-players’ in the manner of say, a Real Madrid or a Manchester United).

Trophy aside, there is also an estimated total of €300 million in television money that’s up for grabs.

Apart from giving its sporting ambitions that much needed shot in the arm, Juventus (while incredibly popular in Italy) was also keen to go ‘international’; and, increase its presence in markets with potentially massive fan-pools and viewing audiences like Asia (Think: The Edge of Infinity = China + India + Indonesia). This appears to be a key reason for the Turin-based club to sign on Cristiano in that jaw-dropping €100 million deal in 2018.

The CR7-Juve combination

And the CR7-Juventus combination delivered immediately: within 24 hours of the sign-on Adidas sold $60 million of CR7’s new jersey and soon enough the mega Jeep sponsorship deal revved in. The Jeep-Juventus partnership, first established in the 2012/13 season and last renegotiated in 2019, ensured Juventus received a minimum annual fee of $51.2 million. The deal was renewed earlier this year at $55 million per season. Jeep’s jersey sponsorship fees forms the bulk of Juventus’ €69.4 million annual revenues (figures from first half of 2020/2021) from ‘sponsorship and advertising’. Adidas and Allianz round up the Turin-based FC’s list of top sponsors.

The Jeep sponsorship deal, in particular, was a great example in unlocking brand synergies in two distinct assets: A football club and an automobile brand.

What could be common to Juventus and Jeep?

They are both owned and controlled by Exor, the Agnelli family’s holding company (Exor owns 14.35% of Stellantis, the company that now owns FCA brands like Chrysler, Dodge, Ram and Jeep; and, Peugeot). The CR7 signing was, in essence, a carefully crafted move by the Agnelli family to ‘internationalize’ a quintessentially American automobile brand and a quintessentially Italian Football Club.

All hunky-dory until that infamous bogeyman of 2020 struck?

The CR7-Juventus-Exor partnership appeared to be chugging along well. Juventus’ adjusted revenues – which had dropped to €473.7 million in 2018 soared 24% to €587 million in 2019. Was this the beginning of an uptrend in the fortunes of the financially beleaguered football club?

What comes after 2 and 4? 6 or 8?

Well, you need at least three ‘reasonable’ data points to establish a trend and that is exactly why the 2020 topline number would have been significant (had it not been anomalous due to the impact of COVID).

Juventus saw its adjusted revenues for 2020 drop 6% as that infamous bogeyman of 2020 – COVID – crushed ticket sales. Revenues from ‘ticket sales’ and ‘player registration rights’ – the right to use the image of a player to promote the team – contracted by 85.8% and 86.7% respectively. You might recall: Italy was one of the first countries to announce complete lockdowns. Tellingly, Juventus played only one match (Vs. Sampdoria), on 20th September 2020, at home, in front of an audience limited to only one thousand!

2020 weighed down heavily on the already financially-strained football club as player wages spiked 6%; with Cristiano Ronaldo’s € 30 million annual salary forming approximately 20% of the €148 million total player wage bill.

It would have been interesting to know the CR7-Juventus endgame if the pandemic had not hijacked 2020.

Yeah, then again, if ‘ifs and buts’ were candies and nuts we would all have a Merry Christmas.

For now, 52 seconds wishes Cristiano Ronaldo, the superman from Portugal, five-time Ballon d’Or winner, winner of over 30 major trophies, including five UEFA Champions League titles and the European Championship for his native Portugal, the very best in his upcoming stint with Manchester United.

Disclosure: I do not own shares of either JUVE or MANU. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it from any of the companies whose stock is mentioned in this article.

Your product design works. You are happy. You then turn it up a few notches. That works as well. You are now both happy and warm. Pleased? Hell No! You now crank it up really big. You don’t know it yet but you are now in the realm of Overdesign. It might still work but it’s pointless really and eventually the design – in its cranked up form – trips over itself. Today at 52 seconds, we explore – yeah, there is a bit of time travel here involving some really cool set of wheels from ancient Egypt – the ridiculous art of Overdesigning and why some companies are awesomely good at it in a really bad way when you look at their products’ design in its entirety.

This is the Spirit of Ecstasy: a bonnet ornament sculpture found on the hood of a Rolls Royce car.

This figurine is perhaps the most famous of all hood ornaments but it wasn’t definitely the first of them. The first known hood ornament – as stated in the all-knowing Wikipedia – was a sun-crested falcon (to bring good luck) mounted on Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun’s chariot.

While the Pharaoh may have put the Falcon on his chariot for good luck, Rolls Royce designed its hood ornament to cover the ungainly radiator cap! Result: Rolls Royce now had an uber-luxurious hood ornament on an uber-luxurious car!

This Inception-like luxury-within-a-luxury approach prevailed among competitors as well. Other notable Hood Ornaments were: The Jaguar Leaper, Mercedes Benz’ Three Pointed Star, Bugatti’s Dancing Elephant, Bentley’ Flying B and Cadillac’s Silver Swan.

As the battle for decorative hood ornaments heated up, companies like Desmo and Smith (now defunct) and Louis Lejeune (founded in 1933 and the only surviving maker of custom car mascots) made their fortunes by designing and sculpting these ornaments for automobile manufacturers.

Hood Ornaments peaked out in the 50’s and only declined in usage from thereon primarily due to the their safety hazards, especially to pedestrians struck by hood-decorated cars. However, well before that the radiator caps had already gone under the hood! And that makes you wonder why the radiator cap had to be embellished with an ornament instead of simply relegating it to where it eventually went.

Today, Hood Ornaments, like other rare art and collectibles, exist in the space of Alternative Investments and have investment attributes similar to some of the other Alternative Investments like Art, Coins, Figurines and Vinyl Records. Those attributes are: Trophy Valuations, Price Opacity, Illiquidity and a high risk of Counterfeiting.

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When personal computing devices – like the Apple Mackintosh – went mainstream in the 80’s, the Skeuomorph Design Form – a design form in which (often virtual) icons are used to represent a real world object – played a starring role in their success. Recall that this was the first time a personal computing device was entering households worldwide. The introduction of GUIs (the Graphical User Interfaces) was a major catalyst in the products’ eventual success as novice users, leaping across a yawning chasm of techno-ignorance, understood the function of the icons displayed on their computer screen simply by relating to what they looked like and worked like in the real world. A well-known Skeuomorph example is the recycle bin icon used to trash unwanted files. There are some really bad examples of Skeumorphs as well: Ever used those ‘virtual calculators’ with ‘raised buttons’ on a smart phone?

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And that brings us to, what I believe is, the most ridiculously overdesigned product in modern times: The Necktie.

I have two zenmasters at home. They are 9 and 6 years old and like most zenmasters in that age demographic they have the ability to peek into the eyes of a product and reach the depths of its soul.

Their question was as innocuous as it can get: Why does anyone wear a necktie?

My response – knowing that the zenmasters appreciate large weights to ‘cause-and-effect’ in responses to such questions – was:

“The primal man felt cold. He then cloaked himself within the fur-skin of a hunted grizzly bear. He then realized that the cloak restricted his hands and so he cut out holes, in the cloak, for his hands. He then realized that his neck was still bare and so he created a rough-and-ready collar. Yeah, so far so good. The zenmasters nod their heads appreciatively. I try and build upon my winnings. Any refuge from those icy – pre-climate change – blasts wasn’t possible if the collar remained open. And so buttons were created to hold the entire contraption together. The rest is easy. The necktie was possibly created to hide those ugly buttons.”

That’s my explanation for how neck-ties came into existence. What’s yours?