Woke-Bashing of the Week: Telegraph plays ‘go woke, go broke’ card with Kylian Mbappé’s Nike exit

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again, since the dawn of the culture wars, the right has insisted that woke means broke.

The phrase has become a favourite among critics of corporate social responsibility, implying that companies face a binary choice: embrace progressive values or make money.

The latest company to be wheeled out as supposed proof is Nike, following footballer Kylian Mbappé’s decision to leave the sportswear giant for rival brand On.

The Telegraph was quick to frame the move as further evidence of Nike’s supposed malaise, pointing to the company’s removal from the S&P 100 after 18 years, its falling share price and the more than £150bn wiped off its market value since 2021.

Nike has had a difficult few years but presenting its current struggles as the inevitable consequence of being ‘woke’ is a very different proposition, and one the evidence doesn’t support.

Nike’s ‘woke’ problem, according to the Telegraph

The Telegraph’s headline says it all: “Go woke, go broke”: The fall of Nike.

The article dredges up the Republican boycott of Nike following its 2018 decision to feature former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick in its ‘Dream Crazy’ advertising campaign.

Kaepernick had protested racial inequality and police brutality by taking the knee during the US national anthem. His decision to work with Nike provoked fury on the American right, with some Trump supporters burning their Nike trainers and clothing in protest.

Donald Trump declared that Nike was being “killed” by anger and boycotts and wondered whether the company had anticipated the backlash.

There was just one problem with that particular culture-war prediction.

Nike’s US sales rose by 31 percent in the three days after the Kaepernick advert was released.

The Telegraph’s own article therefore contains evidence that rather neatly undermines its central thesis.

The ‘go woke, go broke’ myth

The piece quotes Republican Senator Ted Cruz celebrating Nike’s falling share price and boasting about buying other trainers after the Kaepernick controversy.

“Go woke, go broke,” the article concludes, has become a popular expression for Nike’s ‘malaise’ and its supposed prioritisation of social justice over making good trainers.

Except there is a rather large hole in that argument.

Nike remains one of the world’s biggest and most profitable sportswear companies, generating more than $11bn in quarterly revenue and maintaining one of the most impressive portfolios of athlete endorsements in global sport.

According to Players Couture, Nike remained the undisputed leader in athlete endorsements in 2025, with a strategy built around elite sporting talent, cultural relevance and storytelling.

And Nike is hardly unique.

Research challenges the wider “go woke, go broke” narrative. A 2025 study by film data analyst Stephen Follows, presented at the Zurich Film Festival, examined whether supposedly “woke” films really perform worse at the box office.

The answer was considerably more complicated than the culture warriors would have us believe. Follows’ research suggested that some genres, including horror, sport, drama and music-themed films, could actually benefit commercially from diverse casting and identity-driven storytelling.

Meanwhile, economic research has found no direct causal relationship between inclusive policies and corporate financial failure, while identifying economic benefits from greater inclusion, reduced discrimination and lower poverty.

So perhaps progressive values aren’t quite the corporate death sentence the right keeps promising.

Which brings us back to Mbappé.

After almost two decades with Nike, a relationship that began when the French football star was just eight years old, he has reportedly signed a deal with On.

It is entirely possible that this has rather more to do with business than wokeness.

Nike has paid Mbappé hundreds of millions of dollars since he turned professional and continues to sponsor the youth team he played for.

But On has reportedly offered Mbappé a deal involving both cash and equity, similar to the arrangement Roger Federer received when he left Nike for the Swiss brand in 2019.

Sportswear companies also have commercial limits on how much they can spend on individual sponsorships. Nike reportedly has a rule of thumb of spending no more than 10 per cent of a department’s revenue on sponsorships, a factor that has previously been cited in the loss of Federer.

Perhaps, then, Mbappé’s departure is not evidence of Nike being punished by the woke gods after all. Perhaps one of the world’s most commercially successful footballers simply decided another company was offering him a better deal.