With pop culture becoming an ever-popular aspect of modern society, the major European football clubs are always trying to find ways to form a partnership with popular brands to increase their popularity.
Not everyone watches football and to attract those who hardly follow the beautiful game, teams have tried promoting themselves through pop-culture elements.
Real Madrid, arguably the most decorated team in European football history – is no exception to this either.
Los Blancos have recently redesigned and upgraded their iconic Santiago Bernabeu to attract more fans to attend it.
Incidentally, not only football matches will take place in their stadium going forward. The club are planning on using the stadium as a multi-sport arena and has also planned to host NFL games by 2025.
Not just that, Florentino Perez also wants the likes of Tennis, Basketball and even concerts to take place in the newly redesigned stadium. This is to maximise the profit of the iconic arena and to get back some of the money put into the modernizing of the stadium.
But Real Madrid are not just using their stadium to associate with different brands or sporting events. They have also recently collaborated with Marvel in an attempt to make themselves more popular among fans who follow the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) and those who aren’t really that keen on football.
There are indeed a lot of avid followers of the MCU who aren’t much into following sports or football – and that is probably the key demographic that Los Blancos are attempting to get the attention of with their partnership with Marvel.
Moreover, by collabing with the famous superhero brand – they also get to reward their own fans who are also keen supporters of Marvel as well. However, the product of their collaboration hasn’t really been as awesome as they would’ve hoped for it.
Before their recent La Liga game against Girona, which they incidentally drew, Los Blancos debuted a new training kit for their fans at the Santiago Bernabeu.
It was just a plain blue training kit with a badly done drawing of superheroes like Captain America placed in the middle.
More attires – like hoodies with an Avenger logo on them as well as sleeveless t-shirts with the logos of various superheroes
The entire ‘special attire’ collection came off as really lazy work from whoever produced these collaborated products.
It was clear that not much thinking had gone into producing these t-shirts or their designs, as they looked like a cheap knockoff product available at every other merchant website on the internet.
This collaboration left fans frustrated and wanting more. A lot of supporters have vented their anger at how cheap and lacklustre the products are and how ‘sad’ the entire collab has come off as.
Real Madrid and Marvel will probably have to both step up their product design games if this partnership is to actually work.
Because if they keep on producing such average-looking stuff, their entire collab could be snapped to bits – just like Thanos did to half the Avengers at the end of Avengers: Infinity War.
