Michael Jordan earned a record amount from his shoe brand

Michael Jordan’s shoe business is doing better than ever. ZumaWire / MVPHOTOS

With Michael Jordan seems to be the Midas touch in addition to basketball gifts. One of the most famous athletes of all time earned more in 2022 than he did in his entire playing career, thanks to a deal with sportswear brand Nike.

Air Jordan, which grew from Nike’s shoe series into its own brand, is the basketball player’s biggest source of income, and the year 2022 was much more profitable for him than the previous ones. According to Front Office Sports, the shoe brand made record revenues of $5.1 billion last year.

Today, Jordan, who owns the NBA club Charlotte Hornets, nets five percent of the shoe brand’s results, which means that last year brought the man about 256 million dollars. That’s more than twice what the sports superstar earned during his successful sports career with the Chicago Bulls and Washington Wizards from 1984 to 2003.

Grabbing Jordan has turned out to be a jackpot for Nike. The parties started cooperating already in the mid-80s, when the player was just starting in the world’s best basketball league, but the fruitful relationship could have remained completely unfulfilled if Adidas had not been doing worse at that time.

The athlete’s manager David Falk said in the Last Dance documentary on Netflix that young Jordan was initially interested in a contract with Adidas.

– Adidas was in a very uncertain situation at the time. They told me they would have liked to take Jordan, but the shoe deal didn’t work out at that point, Falk recalls.

– I couldn’t even get Jordan on the plane and visit Nike. So I called his parents.

Jordan’s shoe deal is even becoming a movie, directed by a Hollywood star Ben Affleck.

The financial magazine Forbes estimates Michael Jordan’s net worth at 1.7 billion euros. Jordan was the first athlete to earn over a billion.