Nike stock fell to a 12-year low Monday on the New York Stock Exchange, closing at $40.18 — nearly 80% below its all-time high of $177.51, reached in November 2021.
Earlier this month, JP Morgan downgraded the stock from neutral to underweight, warning that Nike’s “Win Now” turnaround strategy “will likely drag on earnings through at least fiscal 2028.”
What makes Nike’s unraveling especially striking, however, is that it was predictable. In fact, the warning signs were identified five years ago — not by a Wall Street analyst or retail industry expert, but by sports writer Ethan Strauss, who recognized a dramatic shift in Nike’s once-iconic advertising.
Aware that his brutal assessment was unlikely to be well received by the outlets he typically wrote for, including ESPN and The New York Times, Strauss published his missive, titled “Nike’s End of Men: Why Nike no longer wants us to Be Like Mike,” on Substack in August 2021.
“Mike,” of course, is a reference to Michael Jordan, an alpha male whose obsessive determination to win was one of the defining characteristics of his career.
Nike was already a major athletic-shoe company when it signed Jordan in 1984. But the Jordan partnership — and especially the launch of Air Jordan in 1985 — transformed Nike’s stature, helping turn it from a successful sportswear company into a dominant global brand with enormous cultural cachet.
Called the Nike top years ago.
Nike:
1. made Kaepernick the face of the 30-year anniversary campaign
2. cancelled the Betsy Ross sneaker
3. partnered with Dylan Mulvaney.
4. set goals including 35% U.S. racial and ethnic minority representation in the corporate workforce and… https://t.co/YOl8jJpLVv— Douglass Mackey (@douglassmackey) August 18, 2026
Strauss introduced readers to a Nike ad released in 1996 called “Good vs. Evil”
[Where] Nike’s best soccer players team up to play Satan’s literal army. The blending of sacrilege, theology and comedy just worked, like a more ambitious version of Space Jam that somehow took itself less seriously than Space Jam.
Action movies of this era usually featured a hero who coolly tagged his kills with a catchphrase and this ad was no exception. Extremely French superstar Eric Cantona pops his collar, his trademark look, and calmly intones, “Au revoir,” before literally killing Satan with a fiery screamer of a goal, right through Beelzebub’s belly. This ad rules. 10 out of 10.
“These ads weren’t just pure ephemera,” Strauss wrote. “Michael Jordan’s commercials were so good that, as he nears age 60, his sneaker still outsells any modern athlete’s.”
This ad was one of many Strauss used to argue that Nike had begun abandoning the very identity that made it one of the world’s most powerful brands.
Strauss contrasted Nike’s iconic advertising of the 1990s and 2000s with its newer advertising. The older campaigns celebrated athletic greatness, fierce competition, irreverence, and winning. Winning, he noted, was presented as glorious and losing was painful.
The newer ads focused on social activism, identity politics, and progressive cultural messaging. They delivered political and social messages. He pointed to Nike soccer advertisements rejecting “toxic masculinity,” a Euro Cup campaign emphasizing inclusion and social causes, and basketball advertising celebrating women partly by denigrating men. His contention is that Nike had stopped “marketing greatness” and begun “marketing resentful insecurity.”
His central concept is what he calls “Existence Dissonance”: Nike was built around athletic excellence and, in particular, the hypercompetitive ethos embodied by Michael Jordan, yet the company had increasingly come to regard aspects of that traditional competitive masculinity as something problematic. At the same time, Nike reorganized its business away from individual sports such as basketball and soccer and toward men’s, women’s and children’s divisions, while aggressively pursuing women as an underdeveloped market.
He traces some of the change to Nike’s internal upheaval following allegations of sexual harassment and discrimination, which resulted in the departure of several senior male executives. He argues that management subsequently became increasingly responsive to younger, socially progressive employees and that both Nike and its advertising agency had fewer people deeply immersed in sports culture. The result, he said, was advertising driven more by progressive ideals and language than by an instinctive understanding of athletes and sports fans.
He attributed Nike’s sputtering growth to its “identity crisis.” The company became enormously successful by selling aspiration, competition and victory. Once dominant, it began distancing itself from those qualities and from the core audience — masculine men — that had made the brand successful in the first place.
He acknowledged that Nike’s enormous reservoir of brand loyalty could sustain it for a time. But in his view, the company was steadily alienating the very customers who had powered its extraordinary rise, gambling that a new, more progressive audience would take their place. In the process, Nike was dismantling the formula that had made it one of the most formidable brands in the world.
Over the past few years, Nike has discovered that maybe paying millions to former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick — who became famous not for his football prowess, but for kneeling during the national anthem to protest systemic racism and police brutality — wasn’t such a great idea. Nor was caving to the DEI hires in its marketing department, who cared more about staying woke than appealing to the company’s core customers.
Nike’s story has become a case study in the oft-repeated maxim, “Get woke, go broke.”
[Note: Though lengthy, I highly recommend reading the piece in its entirety.]
In 2018, NIKE made an abrupt pivot into woke marketing.
They tried to make a hero out of Colin Kaepernick for disrespecting the American flag.
They paid Kaepernick a staggering $25M and dished out a fully guaranteed multi-year contract.
The message was loud and clear: if you… pic.twitter.com/9YF8iXZXOE
— Pro America Politics (@proamericapol) August 17, 2026
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