Dan Wetzel blasts Nike’s treatment of Caitlin Clark: ‘One of the great marketing failures’
· Yahoo Sports
The Indiana Fever defeated the Toronto Tempo on Tuesday night, marking the team’s fourth-straight win after a pedestrian 5-5 start to the 2026 campaign. However, as positive as Indiana’s momentum has been of late, Tuesday’s win, which saw Fever superstar Caitlin Clark go off for a 21-point, 14-assist double-double, was largely overshadowed by the unveiling of Clark’s debut signature shoe with Nike.
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Dubbed the Caitlin 1, the sneaker is set to hit retail shelves on October 1, begging the question: What took so long? Clark is entering her third season as a professional, and the shoes won’t hit shelves until after her season concludes, five years after she signed her first deal with Nike.
ESPN’s Dan Wetzel appeared on The Dan Patrick Show on Tuesday to discuss what he feels has been a massive failure on the part of Nike.
“I was shocked when I go: ‘She doesn’t have a signature shoe?’ What’s the backstory here?” Patrick asked.
“Well, there’s a lot, and it’s not just the signature shoe, which can take a while to develop and you want to design it right and construct it and all that. And it’s a big investment. There’s only been one brief Caitlin Clark television commercial,” Wetzel responded.
“There’s very little promotion in stores. There’s very little pop-up events. There’s almost nothing that links Caitlin Clark, arguably, at least for a while, if not still, the most popular athlete in the country, male or female, to Nike, who built their entire business on seizing people like Caitlin Clark…”
@DanWetzel discusses Nike’s failure in marketing Caitlin Clark pic.twitter.com/L3UjhRZb4r
— Dan Patrick Show (@dpshow) June 18, 2026
“The shoe is one part of it, but even on their social media, they barely play her. So she has been on the back burner for Nike for most of these four years.”
Wetzel went on to note how the other companies Clark has sponsorship deals with, such as Gatorade and State Farm, have featured her heavily in their own national advertising campaigns, making Nike’s reluctance to highlight her all the more puzzling.
“She’s everywhere except with Nike, and that’s been the weirdest thing,” he said. “The signature shoe is part of it. It’s going to come out in October. That’s five seasons they’ve had her, and they’re finally getting the shoe out… But it goes into all the other stuff of like, ‘Why? What were we waiting for?'”
Wetzel went as far as to call Nike a “poorly run company the last five years,” citing the Swoosh’s massive loss in market valuation and revenue while its competitors are thriving, whilst also acknowledging the negative optics that could’ve come from debuting Clark’s signature shoe before Las Vegas Aces’ star A’Ja Wilson, a significantly more accomplished Black player.
It’s not too late for Nike to capitalize on having Clark, arguably the biggest athlete in the country, male or female, but Wetzel sees it as a head-scratching blunder to not capitalize on the peak of her popularity in 2024.
“It’s just one of the great marketing failures, sports marketing failures, and it’s from Nike of all places, who almost invented sports marketing.”
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