Nike once owned American sports like nobody else.
Then the company swapped the scoreboard for a soapbox. Its customers noticed, and plenty of them walked.
And Nike’s own CEO just put one sentence in writing that reads an awful lot like a confession.
The Sentence Buried in an 860-Word Memo
Nike CEO Elliott Hill sent a memo to employees on October 1, 2026, according to OutKick. The note ran about 860 words.
Most of it read like standard corporate housekeeping. Hill talked up a new campus in India. He pushed faster supply chain modernization. He laid out a plan to reorganize Nike into three regions covering the Americas, Asia Pacific and Greater China, and Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
But one passage jumped off the page.
“Over the past year, we’ve put sport at the center of everything we do. We’re seeing encouraging signs of progress, but we have more work to do to win over the long term,” Hill wrote.
Read that again. A sporting goods company felt the need to tell its own staff that it now puts sport at the center. That’s a little like McDonald’s announcing a bold new focus on hamburgers.
The very next day, Nike’s stock closed at $33.87 a share, its lowest close in more than 12 years, OutKick reported. Back in November 2021, the stock hit an all-time closing high of $177.51. Do the math and shareholders have watched roughly 81% of that value evaporate.
The pain doesn’t stop at the ticker. Nike already cut staff twice in 2026, and Hill has warned of more cuts with decisions starting in 2027. He admitted he doesn’t “yet know the number of roles or specific locations of positions,” according to Fast Company.
S&P Dow Jones Indices also booted Nike from the S&P 100, effective September 21, ending an 18-year run, Protos reported.
A Decade of Lectures, Sold by the Pair
Nobody woke up one morning and randomly decided to stop buying Nike. The company spent years handing them reasons.
In 2018, Nike made Colin Kaepernick, the malcontent who started the trend of kneeling during the national anthem, the face of its 30th anniversary “Just Do It” campaign. Millions of Americans who stand for the flag, and who remember the servicemembers who died under it, took that personally. They had every right to.
After the death of George Floyd in 2020, Nike rolled out an ad called “For Once, Don’t Do it,” which featured lines like “don’t pretend there’s not a problem in America” and “Don’t turn your back on racism,” according to OutKick.
The message to a whole lot of paying customers came through loud and clear. You’re the problem.
Then in 2023, Nike tapped Dylan Mulvaney, a biological male who identifies as a woman, to promote women’s leggings and sports bras. Nike went ahead with it even after watching the backlash Bud Light took over its own Mulvaney partnership.
Ask any woman who actually competes in her sport how that one landed.
There was also a 2017 “Equality” commercial declaring that “the ball should bounce the same for everyone.” Fair enough. But Nike didn’t seem to apply that principle when it came to its own biggest star.
The Caitlin Clark Fumble
Which brings things to Caitlin Clark.
Clark dragged the WNBA into living rooms that never cared about women’s basketball before. Ratings, ticket sales, jerseys, the whole works. She’s the reason casual fans even know when the season starts.
So you’d think Nike would sprint her signature shoe out the door. Nope.
Nike didn’t release Clark’s signature sneaker until June 2026, according to OutKick. Sportswriter Ethan Strauss wrote that the company felt it had to debut A’ja Wilson’s sneaker first, even though Wilson ranked fifth in WNBA jersey sales and Clark ranked first.
Wilson is a terrific player. Nobody disputes that. But a business that benches its top-selling attraction to satisfy identity politics isn’t running a business. It’s running a seminar.
And the WNBA’s own woke, activist posture has already chased off plenty of fans who just want to watch basketball. Nike chose to follow the league’s lead instead of the customers’.
Wall Street Has Its Own Theories
To be fair, the money crowd points at more than politics.
Fast Company reported Nike’s first-quarter revenue came in at $11.21 billion, down 4% from a year earlier. Hill himself told investors, “Simply put, we’ve been oversupplying our iconic retro product,” according to Protos. Motley Fool analysts also blamed weak demand, inflation, tariffs, and a tough fight to win back wholesale shelf space.
On the tariff piece, a company that built its empire on overseas factories was always going to feel it when Washington finally started leveling the playing field on trade. That’s a choice Nike made decades ago, not a plot against the swoosh.
So no, one ad didn’t sink Nike. Two ads didn’t either.
But a brand lives and dies on how people feel when they see the logo. And for a huge slice of the country, that logo spent the better part of a decade wagging a finger at them.
What the Swoosh Still Doesn’t Get
Here’s what should worry Nike’s board. Hill’s memo never apologized for any of it. It never mentioned Kaepernick, Mulvaney, or the lectures. It just quietly said “sport at the center” and moved on to India.
Maybe that’s smart strategy. A quiet pivot might beat a loud apology. Then again, people who felt insulted for years usually want to hear somebody say the words out loud.
Hill told employees that “The future will belong to companies that can move faster, serve athletes and consumers more locally, and invest more aggressively in innovation,” according to Fast Company. Nothing wrong with that. But the customers Nike lost didn’t leave over supply chains.
OutKick pointed to the slide in NBA ratings after 2020 as another example of fans tuning out once politics crowds the game. Nike looks like the sneaker version of the same story.
Every corporate boardroom that spent 2020 racing to post the right hashtag should pin Nike’s stock chart to the wall. Going woke didn’t come cheap.
OutKick reached out to Nike for comment and didn’t get an immediate response.
And customers will believe the “sport at the center” talk when they see it on the shelves instead of in a memo.
Sources:
“Nike CEO may have just admitted the company went too woke as stock hits 12-year low,” OutKick
“Nike layoffs loom as its stock price hits punishing new lows,” Fast Company
“Nike warns of layoffs as stock hits 13-year low,” Protos
“Should You Avoid Nike Stock, Even at a 12-Year Low?,” The Motley Fool (as cited by Nasdaq)