You might not have noticed, but Ruben Dias is on a journey.
Shortly after becoming a treble winner, the Manchester City centre-back embarked on a new mission to set himself up for life after football. If that sounds strange, given he is 27, super-rich and one of the world’s best defenders, then welcome to the new era of legacy investing.
Dias, a Portugal international and former Premier League player of the season, is one of many footballers working on a personal brand to become even more relevant in the years ahead.
Gone are the days when “only the football matters”. Brand deals, partnerships, spin-off opportunities and collaborations are increasingly significant for the sport’s elite talents, who can also afford to be more picky about what they choose to do. The days of “just taking the money” for an advert or photoshoot are long gone.
Interacting with followers, speaking passionately about their off-field interests and sharing a sample of life off the pitch are all ways to grow an audience. Not that Dias needs much help in that — he has 7.5 million followers across various active platforms that, according to those close to him who spoke to The Athletic anonymously because they did not have permission to talk, are estimated to be made up of 4.2 million individuals.
Yet it’s there that the opportunity lies. Dias is bright and curious enough to recognise his value, not just on the field for City, but to those who want to know more about his life away from the pitch.
Dias is plotting his life after football (Stu Forster/Getty Images)
Dias linked up with compatriot Paulo Malva Do Vale, an expert in commercial sport strategy and the founder of Nebula Sports LLC. He spent five months with him working out precisely what he wanted to stand for — a more complicated question than it might seem.
“Ruben felt like there was much more to his character than what he was showing on the pitch, and already that was a lot,” Malva do Vale says. “So instead of just picking up on his existing image and a social media following almost as big as Portugal, and selling him as part of a package of football players, we took a different approach. We said: ‘Let’s identify your brand space, your core values, and then create a brand architecture around you in the same way that a corporation would’.”
A growing trend among athletes is to connect with partners who share the same values or interests. Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton recently linked up with Dior as an ambassador but also a guest designer. Tennis legend Roger Federer left Nike for Japanese retailer Uniqlo in 2018, allowing him to become an investor in the Swiss performance footwear company On and promote its shoes.
“Federer has done it so well,” Malva do Vale says. “You can see that he represents excellence, sportsmanship. He started creating that as he was playing on the court, but also off it. Today he has a much stronger brand image than the first time he won Wimbledon, even though he’s retired.”
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Forget transfers — this has been the summer of the player sponsorship deal: from Gucci and Hellman’s-sponsored Jack Grealish to Crystal Palace’s Eberechi Eze and City’s Phil Foden with Burberry.
Dias, who is sponsored by Nike, is in no rush to extend his portfolio of partnerships and has not decided his next step after football, although the groundwork has started.
A word to describe his personal brand has also been agreed, but for now, that remains private. “It will become clear over the next six months,” Malva do Vale says. “And if we do our job as well as we think we can, you will see him become more of an icon of that space.”
Eberechi Eze has a tie-up with Burberry (Daniel Leal/AFP via Getty Images)
The clues are likely to be in his sporting success story, which has been one of resilience. As a youngster, Dias was a swimmer with poor technique but still won medals because of his competitive instincts. It was the same with karate. That mentality helped him win titles with Benfica and Manchester City, as well as the Champions League in 2023, and Malva do Vale sees those qualities as being transferable to other aspects of professional life.
With a larger number of youngsters now following “idols” instead of teams — think Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, Kylian Mbappe and Erling Haaland — there are opportunities to do so much more than just play football. Dias is already creating a database of what Malva do Vale calls “real Ruben fans”.
But that is just the start. As Malva do Vale puts it: “What we’re creating is a sort of brand insurance.”
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Personal branding is so big now that both footballers and lead entrepreneurs advertise for assistance in that specific area. Forward-thinking players such as Dias are starting early and moving away from more “traditional” investments.
In June 2023, Joe Davis, a former footballer who used to play for Port Vale and Leicester City, founded DRIFT, a service that helps players transition out of football and into a new career.
“There’s a rise of the athletic entrepreneur,” he tells The Athletic. “It used to be restaurants, bars, properties. Now we’re seeing charities, foundations, e-commerce, fashion. In my day as a player, we were not encouraged to do that. The ‘stupid footballer’ tag has gone now because brands realise players can bring a lot to the corner.”
Older players are also recognising the value of starting a business while still in the spotlight. Mario Gotze, 32, scored the winning goal for Germany at the 2014 World Cup and still plays for Eintracht Frankfurt. He wrote about the changing direction after football in a lengthy social media post recently: “The best time to start is when you are still playing. Athletes nowadays have a unique chance to leverage their potential and expand to different fields.”
Mario Gotze says players should start thinking about a new direction while they’re still playing (Cathrin Mueller/Getty Images)
Strategies vary from player to player and some are more obvious than others.
Ash Jones, a personal brand strategist and founder of Great Influence, helped the former Wales striker Hal Robson-Kanu in the early days of “getting out there” with his turmeric shot business, The Turmeric Co, when he was transitioning out of football.
Robson-Kanu wanted to establish himself in the business world and be recognised as more than a footballer, so he asked for advice.
“We had hours and hours and hours of conversations, first trying to gain an understanding of his experiences, then learning more about his personality and trying to find out the DNA,” Jones tells The Athletic.
“As a strategist, you find out what is most interesting because it’s often hard for people to stand outside of themselves and do that. It’s what is missing with players now because they are managed, rather than given clarity of who they are and what they’re trying to do.”
Jones has also worked with Gary Neville, the former Manchester United and England defender whose achievements as a television pundit and businessman arguably emulate what he did on the field.
“He’s so talented at being public-facing, but he’s also been on a journey. Look back to the first interview he did on TV as a player at Manchester United compared to his first appearance on Monday Night Football and you’ll see a big difference” Jones says.
Gary Neville has set the standard for having a business career post-football (Catherine Ivill/Getty Images)
Experts in the industry all say the same thing: there’s no quick fix and building a personal brand takes time. Jones, who talks about reputation, trust, influence and status “opening every single door possible”, shares an example from working with Steven Bartlett, now a successful entrepreneur, public speaker, panellist on British television show Dragons’ Den and host of the Diary of a CEO podcast, as well as being a Manchester United fan.
“When you watch his podcast you think: ‘This guy can articulate himself so well’. But that was not the case in the slightest during the first video he did,” Jones recalls. “I was in the room and it took eight hours to film a two-minute video!”
One advantage athletes have over others in building a brand is the impact their big moments can achieve.
Ollie Watkins gained almost 200,000 extra followers on Instagram after scoring a last-minute winner for England in the European Championship semi-final against the Netherlands, while Jude Bellingham’s following increased by nearly 1.8million to 34.8million across the tournament.
More than ever, players are recognising the importance of not just performance data, but also useful metrics that help highlight their true value.
Last year, The Athletic reported how Manchester City’s Kevin De Bruyne used an analytics company, Analytics FC, to highlight his worth during contract negotiations. Dias, his City team-mate, is one of many others to sign up for another service, ProDataStack, that pulls together performance figures and useful extras such as social media reach and sentiment.
The Athletic asked founder Fiona Green for a demonstration on a range of players picked at random in metrics, such as how they have performed against an individual team, or when played next to a particular team-mate — measures included specifically on the advice of Dias, who felt it was an important area to develop when he signed up to the service.
Away from football, players are also increasingly interested in measuring the success of their social media activity — how well posts perform, primarily — and how marketable they are through their online presence.
Take Grealish. On the day we searched his name, he was mentioned more often in Uganda than in any other country apart from the United Kingdom and the United States. Equally surprising was the popularity of Real Madrid midfielder Eduardo Camavinga in Venezuela.
The figures — updated daily and presented in a dashboard, like the one shown below — are pulled together from 55,000 global digital platforms ranging from X to Reddit and other smaller websites, all providing useful information for building personal brands.
Green also points to the potential “reach” metric — produced by combining mentions and interactions — as the most important. “We’re so obsessed with social following, but reach is the most valuable,” she says. “It’s like saying how many people are touched by that brand.”
It’s not just for the elite, either. One young forward in the Championship is also a client, using it to see if there are areas to improve his overall appeal and whether any marginal gains can be made by looking deeper into his social media output.
Ex-Sweden international Maria Karlsson De Cecco, the CEO of agency CMG, which exclusively looks after female players and managers, sees the benefit of using data to help her clients.
She works with more than 70 clients, including Brazil captain Rafaelle Souza and Arsenal’s Lina Hurtig, and believes harnessing data can help develop the women’s game.
“Everything is moving forward rapidly and we want to be a part of it,” she says. “There are some areas in the women’s game where we can be more innovative — like the structuring of salaries — so data can help.”
Davis has noticed a change in the way footballers build reputation and strengthen their appeal, such as employing experts to help run specific social media accounts on TikTok or LinkedIn, while the way brands are partnering with players is also changing.
“Brands look for the assets of players that make them marketable,” Davis says. “Like Grealish’s calves, for example. There are none quite like it. They’re really specific on what they want. It’s a developing space.”
Jack Grealish’s calves are his USP (Stu Forster/Getty Images)
Social media changed the game a long time ago, but those savvy enough to recognise the opportunities are finding ways to make it work to their advantage.
This summer, Dias has opened up more of his life on Instagram, sharing insights into his holidays, downtime, love for other sports including Formula One and tennis, his affection for his dog, Simba, and fondness for fashion.
Other than showing off his Nike footwear, there’s barely a mention of any other brand. His designer clothes, at least on social media, are relatively plain, partly because it’s his style, but also because showing off other brands so freely might reduce the appeal for future partnerships.
For players nowadays, tactics and strategy off the pitch are just as important as they are on it.
(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Ben Goldfarb)