The legal feud between Nike and Odell Beckham Jr. has finally come to an end.
In a Thursday evening Instagram post thanking his legal team and jury, the NFL star stated that “justice was served.” However, neither Beckham nor Nike actually received any monetary award as a result of the trial.
Beckham sued Nike Inc. in November 2022 in a lawsuit claiming that the athletic powerhouse “failed to live up to its promises and refuses to abide by its contract.” According to Beckham, Nike was “willfully withholding millions of dollars” from the longtime Nike athlete and NFL star, who has worked with the Swoosh since 2014. Beckham sought more than $20 million in damages. Nike filed a countersuit shortly after and argued that Beckham violated his contract with Nike by wearing gloves with another brand’s logos during the 2021-2022 NFL season.
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Nike said in a statement to FN that Beckham received no monetary reward and that his claims were all decided against him by the jury. Overall, the jury found that neither Nike nor Beckham breached their contacts, so neither had to pay the other.
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“The decision confirmed that Nike complied with its commitments,” Nike said in a statement. “Nike is grateful to the jury and the Court for their careful attention to this case.”
“JUST DO……RIGHT @nike,” Beckham wrote in his post on Instagram. “I wanna take this moment to thank God first and foremost thank you Heavenly Father. I wanna thank my team for every hour they have spent preparing on this case. I wanna thank the jury for simply doing what’s right in a world full of wrong… my message to whoever needs this is, STAND UP FOR WHAT YOU BELIEVE IN! JUSTICE WAS SERVED!!!”
Beckham initially agreed to an endorsement deal with Nike in 2014 and extended the contract in 2017, after Nike matched the terms of a competing $47 million deal from Adidas. However, Beckham claimed that while Nike stated its competing offer would match all the terms of Adidas’ offer, Nike changed the language and terms of the agreement as it was finalized to keep guaranteed extensions for the contract based on “earned royalties” rather than “net sales.”
This change, the lawsuit said, “decreased the value of the contract to Mr. Beckham by tens of millions of dollars.” The suit also claimed these changes were made “in bad faith” because Nike did not put out enough royalty-generating product in the market to hit the required amount for the contract to extend. Nike also “intentionally depressed sales” of these products in the last fully guaranteed year of the contract as well, the suit stated.
In the complaint, Beckham claimed Nike failed to provide him a payment of $2 million in 2022 and did not follow through on its obligation to create certain player-edition product offerings, including some that would bear Beckham Jr.’s name.
