Last month, I reported that Nike shares had closed at $40.18 — a 12-year low — on the New York Stock Exchange. A JP Morgan analyst had just downgraded the company from “neutral” to “underweight,” warning that Nike’s “Win Now” turnaround strategy “will likely drag on earnings through at least fiscal 2028.”
In the three weeks since that bearish revision, Nike shares have languished near that level, hitting a new closing low of $38.40 on Friday. Since reaching an all-time closing high of $177.51 five years ago, the stock has shed nearly 80% of its value.
Companies eventually pay a price for that kind of performance. So, few were surprised when index provider S&P Global announced that Nike would be removed from the S&P 100 as part of its quarterly rebalancing. The change will take effect before the opening bell on Sept. 21.
The S&P 100 is a stock market index composed of 100 of the largest and most established publicly traded U.S. companies. It is a subset of the S&P 500.
The index is weighted by market capitalization, meaning its largest companies exert the greatest influence on its performance. Removal from the S&P 100 does not mean Nike is being delisted from the stock exchange — or removed from the broader S&P 500. It means Nike no longer meets the criteria for inclusion among this narrower group of blue-chip giants.
At any rate, the reasons for the company’s precipitous decline are hardly a mystery. In 2018, Nike went all in on woke marketing.
Nike paid millions to former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who was more famous for kneeling during the national anthem to protest systemic racism and police brutality than for his football prowess. Although Nike never disclosed the precise terms of the contract, Kaepernick’s multiyear endorsement deal was reportedly worth millions of dollars annually and included royalties from branded merchandise.
At the same time, Nike made diversity, equity, and inclusion a central pillar of its hiring strategy, dramatically expanding its ranks of DEI-focused personnel. The new DEI hires abandoned — or perhaps were not even aware of — the formula that had propelled Nike to the top of the sportswear industry.
Sportswriter Ethan Strauss documented this transformation particularly well in a 2021 analysis of Nike’s once-iconic advertising. In the piece, titled “Nike’s End of Men: Why Nike no longer wants us to Be Like Mike,” he predicted the company’s eventual fall from grace.
Instead of preserving the brand’s traditional emphasis on male athletes, excellence, and competition, Strauss noted, Nike was increasingly infusing its advertising with social activism, identity politics, and progressive cultural messaging.
He contrasted the company’s celebrated campaigns of the 1990s and 2000s — which glorified athletic greatness, fierce competition, irreverence, and the relentless pursuit of victory — with its more recent output. In the old Nike universe, Strauss observed, winning was glorious, and losing was painful.
The newer campaigns, he wrote, struck a markedly different tone, subordinating athletic achievement to political and social messaging. Strauss cited soccer advertisements repudiating “toxic masculinity,” a European Championship campaign centered on inclusion and social causes, and basketball ads that purported to celebrate women partly by denigrating men. His conclusion was devastating: Nike had stopped “marketing greatness” and begun “marketing resentful insecurity.”
As the X user reminds us in the post below, “Tragically, they forgot Michael Jordan’s sage advice: Republicans buy sneakers, too.”
Nike’s embrace of woke politics was a major strategic blunder. The company lost sight of both its identity and its customers. The brand that once inspired generations to “Just Do It” stopped celebrating greatness and began lecturing the very people who had made it great.
Nike’s removal from the S&P 100 does not mean the company is finished. But it is a powerful symbol of how far this once-dominant American brand has fallen. Nike traded aspiration for activism, alienated a significant portion of its customer base, and squandered much of the iconic status it had spent decades building. Now, after years of telling Americans what to think, Nike is getting the boot.
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