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The Dallas Cowboys, as of yet the only NFL team to take merchandising in-house, are now looking across international borders for growth.
The Cowboys have signed an alliance with Mexican sports apparel manufacturer Atletica that will result in the team's apparel being sold in that company's 15-plus stores in Mexico and the Cowboys selling Atletica's soccer jerseys in the 35 Cowboys-owned stores in the United States.
Atletica is the dominant sports apparel brand in Mexico and Central America. It formerly made and marketed uniforms for Mexico's national team and still supplies many of the country's most popular soccer teams, including the renowned Chivas de Guadalajara.
Atletica also will sell and distribute Cowboys apparel to other Mexican retailers. In return, the Cowboys get exclusive rights to distribute Atletica soccer jerseys in the United States.
"This gives us a powerful Mexican brand as we look for growth outside of our home market, and it will allow us to continue to target Hispanics in and around Dallas," said Jerry Jones Jr., the team's vice president and chief sales and marketing officer.
The agreement with Atletica does not prevent the Cowboys from opening their own stores in Mexico, although Jones said there are no immediate plans for that. The idea of opening a Cowboys store outside of the five-state area around Texas, most likely in a heavily trafficked tourist destination, has been on the drawing board for several years.
In essentially representing its first sports property outside its immediate family, Dallas Cowboys Merchandising is showing that its objectives lie outside just the NFL and beyond the U.S. border. While other NFL clubs and teams across the sports landscape have been following the Cowboys' efforts at building a vertical merchandising unit, with the NFL Trust that cedes club licensing rights to the league expiring next year, this move will bear even closer scrutiny.
The Cowboys' appeal to the Mexican fan base both in and out of Texas has always been strong. The team's American Bowl game against the then-Houston Oilers in 1994 drew a record NFL crowd of 112,376.
NFL games have been on Mexican TV for around 35 years. Add it all up, and Mexico has the biggest NFL fan base outside the United States — and the majority of those fans are Cowboys fans.
With the looming expiration of the NFL Trust, the Cowboys see south-of-the-border opportunities in merchandising as well as in Mexican-based sponsorship deals — an area now controlled by the league. Licensing was controlled by the league before the Cowboys put up a guarantee and took it on themselves.
The question for the league, under severe pressure from ownership to reduce costs, is how many teams will want to assume the risk of taking licensing in-house. Conceptually, senior NFL officials have been floating the idea of outsourcing all but the biggest licenses for the promise of a financial guarantee.
Clubs will have to decide whether it is easier and cheaper to let the league administer licensing — and continue to support that overhead — or to adopt the Cowboys' model.
Cautioned Jones, "Other teams could do it, but you need a national following to do this, and there are only a handful of teams that really have that."
