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25 years at the top of the game.

Marcos Motta: The man behind the sports biggest deals

Lawyer to Brazil's top soccer star among others, Marcos Motta brings a quarter century of cross-industrial experience to the industry's biggest deals — and we got into everything that goes on behind the scenes.

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Known as one of the most renowned legal rep in the world of sports and entertainment, Motta is deeply committed to mastering the complicated intersection between athletes and branding — connecting the influence of his clients to major powerhouse brands. With decades of work under his belt, Motta knows how dynamic every entertainment industry is — and the importance of keeping up with the pace, especially in today's rapidly changing world.

METCHA - Marcos Motta - sports industry's - Neymar Jr. wearing black leather football boots

Keeping the power of authenticity at the forefront, he approaches brand deals with a humanized perspective that holds consumer experience at the core. Scroll to get into his insights across today's biggest industries.

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In addition to sports, you work with the entertainment industry as a whole. How do these two universes connect?

This is a very interesting question. When I started this area back in 1999, I went to England and really had access to the international sports market, purely sports. Then, when I came back to Brazil in 2000, what I actually had to work with was nothing more than a spin-off of what was already being done in Brazil in Sports Law — something that was still very incipient, local, and regional. Especially because of Brazil's relationship with soccer. There were very local businesses with a very strong local product, but still very amateur internationally. So, what I did was create a new product — I named an existing product with an international name, relabeled it and took it to the market to be sold — and the product had a very good response.

Since then, I’ve been working with it for 20 years. Our office turned 20 this year. We have been working in this area of sports and experimenting over time, along with the entire industry. We are part of many studies, government, legislation groups... We even participated in the drafting of a Brazilian sports act, the Pelé Law, and in international regulations. I was part of study groups and of what we called FIFA task forces to regulate the international market. I always tried to be a little ahead of the market, trying to understand the trends — and these parts of entertainment, design, fashion, audiovisual, have always attracted me a lot.

My family is also full of culture — my aunt is a poet and an academic, my grandma was a teacher, another aunt is a designer — in other words, it is in my veins. I grew up in the middle of it in terms of culture, so this part of entertainment has always pleased me, and I have always tried to identify the trends of the sport industry there. Just as we transformed in the year 2000 by relabeling the international sports law product. Over time, as we tried to identify trends in sports we discovered that we always had the tendency to create a bubble around us, especially regarding soccer in Brazil. That bubble will eventually burst, and several times it has come close to bursting due to economic reasons — and now, with the pandemic, the bubble has burst.

In my lectures, and the articles I have written on the subject, I always say that the recovery curve of the sports industry is necessarily collaborative — and it goes through a slightly more holistic view and in synergy with other industries. That's what's happening today in the retail industry, where we serve several strong brands. We serve the fields of art, fashion, audiovisual, cinema, television, streaming, and productions — and I always try to bring examples from these other industries to the sports industry, and vice versa. I think that the recovery curve of all these industries is a collaborative one.

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The sport moves a multi-million dollar market that you can see up close. When did you realize that you were participating in historical moments? When did everything change?

I am privileged to have participated in great global moments in the industry — I've followed it closely since the beginning, and my training was great. First, I was the director of Flamengo in the late ‘90s when the soccer industry was still very amateur in Brazil — but at the same time, that gave me some very important pillars that I still have today. When you're in an amateur position with little financial resources and few possibilities, I always tell my students that the lack of alternatives makes the mind amazingly clear. The lack of alternatives is almost like the mother of creativity — that's when we really see the creative minds developing successful products.

Back when I worked at Flamengo, we dealt with the lack of conditions — I was always in the locker rooms of the youth team, beginner players without a lot of financial power. The club didn’t have much structure either, these were very interesting moments that I overcame — we traveled with the team in buses without air conditioning, slept under stadium bleachers, traveled all over Brazil to participate in youth championships. That humanizes the industry, unlike the multi-billion-dollar industry that it is today. From then on, I had the honor and privilege of working as the director of Flamengo with Romário.

Afterward, as a professional in the field of international sports law in the early 2000s, after Flamengo's contract with the largest sports marketing agency in the world, ISL — which later went bankrupt — was also a very interesting learning experience. I was Flamengo's international representative, as I lived in Europe — I was doing my master's program in England and I was the link between the club and the Swiss. When you start dealing with the biggest sports marketing agency in the world, which owned the content of the ATP, World Cup, and more, you raise your bar — because the demand is much higher, the level of professionalism is different. It was a very interesting moment of perception, although this partnership did not last long, shortly after it we had Roberto Carlos as a client. That was the golden age of Real Madrid's famous “Galacticos” — it was a great case of sports marketing, as Real Madrid also is.

Real Madrid managed to relabel a product, create a brand with the galacticos, with Ronaldo, Robinho, Roberto Carlos, Zidane, Figo, Beckham. All those personalities under a legal entity created a spectacular vehicle for branding, marketing, content — and that was when I had the first contract opportunities, a work contract on the one hand and a marketing contract on the other. The relationship was very strong between the club and the athlete; it was a combination of two very strong assets: the athlete with their content as a player; and the club with its content and its brand capacity. Without a doubt, that was a spectacular learning experience for me, and the rest is history.

The great Operation Neymar was also a major a moment of change in the market. Hiring Neymar definitely changed the sports market as entertainment once and for all — I don't think soccer will ever be the same after that deal, for several reasons. I undoubtedly had the privilege to participate in it and learn from great cases of the sports world — but unquestionably, above all, the entertainment world — because this is nothing more than entertainment.

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How do you see the relationship and contracts between players and brands, connecting both in a universe that transcends their origins? Who wins the most in this relationship?

I've talked about this recently, it was Pelé's birthday and I noticed that now I don't see him playing — I don't remember his final moments in the '70s, but I experienced them and I remember his campaigns very well. I think Pelé was the first great athlete to really understand himself as a brand and humanize the image. There were the Pelé comics, drawings, coffee. He played a part in the Hollywood production “Escape to Victory”, back in 1981. He ventured into the United States, he played on those football fields still marked with the American football lines, he had his own brands there. I think he was the first great athlete to realize his capacity to reach the masses — and brands also realized that athletes are nothing more than the humanization of the consumer's desires.

Sports are very interesting for that reason, because you can hardly find an industry like sports and entertainment with the three pillars: cultural, social, and economic. Working in sports and entertainment, that I branded it as “Sportainment” you can create a very interesting synergy — and this synergy is explosive for brands because consumers want to connect, the emotional will always override the rational. The consumer wants to believe in a humanized idol who cries and laughs — someone just like us who experiences the full range of emotions — which the soccer player does, because they are natural persons. Brands, they are nothing more than legal persons — the natural person status is exactly what humanizes and creates the sense of collectivity that brands are looking for today.

A study published this week by Deloitte reported that Barcelona generated almost 800 million euros, in the year of the pandemic — of which almost half or more is commercial revenue, and Barcelona is a very regional club whether we like it or not. Nowadays, it is very easy for us to make an employment contract, the biggest difficulty we have today is the negotiations of the image contract, the content. Because of the importance they have in this globalized market where brands and clubs, which are nothing more than content hubs, really look for that connection with their fans beyond the four lines and the city where it is based.

During the pandemic, we noticed this a lot, because there is nothing more powerful in sports marketing for brands than the principle of repetition. You see your idol entering the field, or the court, or the rink, on a regular basis. That repetition of the brand with the idol is fundamental for sports marketing. Take the NBA finals, when sneakers are launched — the following days of the championship, the pairs sell out, because it arouses that emotion based on the effect of repetition that governs sports marketing. When you do not have this repetition, like during the pandemic, brands are facing a big challenge. So, they try to look for those athletes who had a consumer connection that went beyond 90 minutes and the four lines — to create multidimensional content where the athlete showed themselves.

We are experiencing this constant transformation, this dynamism in the market — and brands that do not undergo this transformation, which is accelerated by digital transformation, will really be left behind. That is why big brands today become big content hubs, smart media brands — they create a connection in which e-commerce and sale is the subliminal message, and it comes with much more organic content that makes the connection and creates that sense of community. Once you feel part of a community, you don't leave it, because the relationship is organic and not purely commercial.

METCHA - Marcos Motta - sports industry's - Neymar Jr. holding black leather football boots

How do you envision the future of the direct relationships between sport and brands?

The future is truly now, it was accelerated. I think we all experienced transformations in our lives that were pushed down our throats due to the pandemic. This year is still a very difficult one, participating in the market daily has exposed great challenges. Some brands have been facing a lot of difficulty for lack of capital, some brands try to do the bare minimum to stay active there because it will pass. Now, the most important thing is that we are persistent, because this is not a 100-meter race. I said it in March last year to the first class I gave during the first week of the pandemic. We already felt that something big was coming, because we work a lot with Asia and Europe. When the pandemic hadn't even arrived in South America, China was already experiencing a way out of the pandemic in some cities — I talked a lot with our Asian colleagues at the time and I realized that something big was coming. Then I said, "now, it's not a 100-meter run anymore, it's a marathon."

The digital world, the disintermediation of information, has made us very agile — so little was never known about so much, and so much about so little. This nature of digital transformation is a great challenge for brands to keep up with this speed. Because it was so accelerated, such a rupture of paradigms and models that have been presented until now, that I think this transformation will continue. Brands are going to become more organic — when things begin to return to normal, we will ask ourselves what this normal is. What do we want? Maybe fast food will turn into slow food, maybe fast fashion will turn into slow fashion — because, like it or not, people have become more organic. The big challenge is going to be when it somehow cools down and we try to understand and extract what we have learned from all this and where we want to go. I think that the great leaders who managed to stand out in a year as complicated as 2020 was, and probably will be 2021, are those who dominated the narrative of their industries and occupied the spaces that were left there and opened throughout the year.

Another major market is the music industry — do you think that sports is becoming the new music industry in terms of strength, weight, and financial power?

The music industry is very dynamic. I had the honor of representing Pacha group, the famous nightclub in Ibiza, for many years. Back in the early 2000s I went to São Paulo to negotiate the possibility of bringing Pacha's label to Brazil. I was talking to João Marcelo Boscoli, who had a very avant-garde record label called Trama, in São Paulo. I asked him if he was concerned by the growing relevance of Napster and LimeWire. He said to me: "But Motta, it doesn’t scare me at all." And then I asked him, “How come?”, to which he responded "I don't sell the CD, I sell the music. It doesn't matter the platform.”

In other words, that was a lesson I learned. Industries transform. My wife, Babi Beluco, is a model for great designers in Europe, and I was talking to the owner of her agency the other day about the fashion industry. I said "You don't sell fashion editorials anymore. You sell content. The editorial can be on a magazine cover, on a platform, on some digital product, an info product." What I mean is that these transformations happen in all industries, and soccer is no different. Soccer is adapting to these new possibilities, to the new consuming public. We hear a lot: "No, the new generation doesn't watch soccer." They do not watch soccer on television, but they play, for example, on a Playstation.

You see the challenge the industry is facing, trying to adapt and communicate with this new range of consumers. There is all this capacity for generating an image remotely, new possibilities for public interaction, and sports betting. Stadiums themselves are changing — today, people arrive at the stadium sometimes two or three hours before the match and leave only four or three hours after it because there is a wide range of entertainment there, it has become a major entertainment center. It's not just a game! It is a whole experience. That is the great challenge the industries face, not just sports. Music is great entertainment, I really like the music industry because I think it has a very strong communication power — there is nothing stronger in communication than storytelling, and music is storytelling. I am Brazilian, the land of Bossa Nova. “Águas de Março” (Tom Jobim, 1974) is one of the most powerful storytellings ever. You can even fell the March rains soaking you to the bone. That's why I think it's a spectacular, promising, transformational industry, but it needs to adapt and it's adapting very well. I never imagined that I would buy a song online for $1.99 or $1 — nowadays, we click there and we do the streaming and download. This is the great challenge that comes along with this transformation.

If you were to write an autobiography, what would be the best backstage story among your big clients that you would tell?

I actually have a project to write a book, a book about the stories of the world of sports and entertainment. I have worked for many years with great personalities from sports, television, and music. I think about the possibility of writing this project, covering 20 years in the office and over 25 years in the industry — it is an extremely multicultural industry, an industry that involves people above all. My clients cry, laugh, have good days, have bad days — so, you can imagine, as all interpersonal relationships, they are sometimes difficult relationships. Sometimes, the client doesn't want to look at our face and sometimes we are the client's great passion. It is the same as with our daily lives, our interpersonal relationships with family, with friends. That's why the industry is so beautiful, there are many stories and I have been saving them for this book. But, every time I bring this idea of the book to my associate Bichara, he says: "Calm down, there are still a lot of people alive." So, I am going to put off this story for a little.

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