Tim Cahill is hammering a tennis ball in a tropical downpour but seems oblivious to the rain. Backhand, forehand, this time with more topspin.
The soccer star has been based in south-east China for the past 12 months, playing for Shanghai Greenland Shenhua and Hangzhou Greentown. It’s July 2016 and Melbourne City chief executive Scott Munn has been deployed to bring Australia’s most famous footballer home. The fourth day of negotiations is testing Munn against Cahill and his managers, Chris and Jake Elder. For four hours each morning in elegant Hangzhou they’ve gone back and forth in the arcane and ritualistic way that highly specialised football contracts demand. From 2.30pm to 5pm every day there is tennis, both for Cahill to stay in shape and because he loves the game.
“Tim wanted to do a deal face to face, so I flew there. It’s a bit of a Chinese way of doing business,” Munn says. “It’s the way he is with both football and business. He wants to do long-term deals and that extends to finding out what your plans are, about your family and so on.”
Eventually Cahill signs. Under the $4 million-a-year deal he will compete in the A-League for the first time, kicking the round ball most Australians associate with Europe for a club controlled by the $US3 billion ($4 billion) Abu Dhabi and China-backed City Football Group.
Under the three-year Melbourne City package, Cahill will earn more than any footballer in any code in Australia. That should not come as a surprise: Cahill might have spent his two-decade career overseas, playing in Britain and the US before China, but since 2004 he’s also played for the Socceroos.
As contemporaries such as Harry Kewell and Mark Viduka retired, Cahill kept scoring goals for the national team, to the extent that many now consider him the best Socceroo of all time. His tally of 48 goals for Australia is more than anyone else in history. Cahill was part of the Australian team that won the Asian Cup in 2015, has played in three World Cups for the Socceroos and is aiming for a fourth in Russia in 2018.
Not just the main guy
Not that Cahill, who has just turned 37, wants any of that to define his return home. “I don’t want to be known as the best player Australia has produced, or come home and be the main guy,” he tells The Australian Financial Review Magazine. “If that’s what people want to portray, then that’s fine, but it doesn’t bother me.”
Cahill repaid Melbourne City’s faith in him on his October debut, when he scored a stunning goal against cross-town rival Melbourne Victory, smashing the ball from just inside the attacking half to help his team to a thumping 4-1 win. It joins a list of famous Cahill goals that includes a spectacular left-footed volley when playing for Australia against the Netherlands at the 2014 World Cup, and two against Japan in the same tournament back in 2006.
It’s not just City that’s counting on Australia’s most marketable soccer player. Cahill’s ambitions upon returning home have been conflated with a perception that Australian football needs saving. While soccer is the most popular sport in the world, it’s well behind Australian Rules, cricket and rugby league in local audience stakes. In Australia, it’s a sport that seems perennially on the verge of hitting the big time.
The Football Federation of Australia no doubt hopes Cahill will help change that, bringing new fans to the game through his combination of skill, profile and theatrics. Bigger audiences would help the case for a mooted $80-million-a-year television rights deal, double the amount the federation gets from its existing arrangement, which expires in June. Significantly, the deal under negotiation could put the A-League onto one of the big three commercial TV networks for the first time.
Why come home
Playing for the A-League and helping boost the game’s profile factored somewhere in Cahill’s decision to join Melbourne City, as did bringing home wife and childhood sweetheart Rebekah Greenhill and their four children. But as he sits down with the AFR Magazine at the club’s training base in Melbourne’s sleepy northern suburbs, Cahill emphasises that he’s not here to do the bidding of the sport’s governing body, nor as a dumb athlete chasing one last pay day.
“I’ve never been owned and I never will be owned,” he says firmly. “I know what an image rights contract is. I’ve always owned my image rights. I do what I want to do, not what people want. You’ve got to have your own portfolio, you’ve got to have your own vision.”
That vision spans not only sport but business, where Cahill has set himself apart from many athletes by rejecting standard endorsement contracts in exchange for those which give him skin in the game. In 2014 Cahill established a menswear brand, Cahill+, in partnership with Melbourne-based suit company Shoreditch International. Featuring jackets, T-shirts, pants and shorts which retail for between $49.95 and $209.95, the range is sold through Myer, Topman, Culture Kings and Glue Store.
Australia is a small market and Cahill doesn’t expect vast profits in the short term. At this stage it’s about getting the brand out there domestically, though it’s also sold in a couple of Canadian boutiques. “Australia is not about making money … straight away. In Australia you have to earn your stripes. Just because Cahill+ is sitting next to Alexander McQueen in Myer, yes it’s fantastic, but it doesn’t make you millions and millions.”
Chinese venture
Cahill has helped launch into China Australian men’s grooming brand Vitaman, of which he owns 10 per cent, and he also promotes Dynamic Tape, a Vanuatu-domiciled company in which he has an undisclosed shareholding. Dynamic Tape makes the strapping used to manage injuries. Established by Australian Ryan Kendrick and recognisable for its sleeve-tattoo-style prints, it’s used by English soccer player Dele Alli and Australian tennis player Nick Kyrgios.
Cahill is linked to the Star casino group in Sydney, but as an ambassador for its hotel and entertainment properties, not its gambling interests. He doesn’t gamble, nor will he shill for the online betting companies. “And they pay a helluva lot of money,” Cahill says. “Half my job is to stop them using my image.”
On top of his investments, Cahill has longer-term sponsorship arrangements with Weet-Bix, Australia Post, New Balance, Fox Sports and Foxtel. Further association with City sponsors Etihad and Nissan looms.
“I take an ownership stake in the business instead of a set fee,” Cahill explains of many of his associations. “I help drive the brand from underneath as well as the commercial side of it. It’s about owning shares and building a company, and who knows where it can go? But I’m willing to take that risk and learn about business.”
Protecting his personal brand
The pay-off, he believes, is more rewarding than taking big cheques from a variety of sponsors for short-term campaigns or promotions. He has, after all, his own brand to protect. Cahill, who says he rebukes most offers, only wants to be involved in things he likes or wears, hence the fashion label, men’s grooming products and the sports tape company. His wealth was estimated at $36 million on this year’s BRW Young Rich list.
“Short-term goals mean no longevity. I focus on longevity. It may take me longer to earn but I think the return is there for forever, rather than just two minutes,” he says. “Offer me $100,000 for a photo shoot for an app or something, then no. I prefer to take a four-year contract and give me a percentage and let’s work together and grow it. I think that has more value than the short-term things with athletes where they take anything and everything. I think that has an adverse effect on what you’re trying to build.”
A relentless networker, Cahill was at Flemington racecourse for Derby Day in late October, not to watch the horses but to talk shop with Myer executives in the swanky Birdcage. He counts News Corp chief executive Robert Thomson, Fox Sports CEO Patrick Delany and Foxtel boss Peter Tonagh as mentors. He holidays with British billionaire Joe Lewis, and cites Planet Hollywood owner Robert Earl and West End theatre producer and former Everton chairman Bill Kenwright as friends.
Cahill is ubiquitous on social media and his commercial instincts can sometimes set off a torrent of abuse on his Twitter timeline. He walks the fine line between arrogance and confidence and has been accused of self-aggrandising.
Sometimes the villain
Playing for the cashed-up Melbourne City on a pay packet significantly above any other footballer means Cahill is also sometimes cast as villain. Booed relentlessly at a November game in Brisbane, Cahill stayed on the pitch an hour afterwards to sign autographs. If he noticed the jeers, it didn’t appear to bother him.
He released his autobiography last year, Legacy, and has co-authored a series of children’s books which have sold more than 100,000 copies. Cahill’s Tiny Timmy books are designed to promote sport and healthy living to a younger audience. “We write it, and the illustrator draws it, but they are all my scenes. They are all what I’ve grown up with. The next stage of Tiny Timmys will be the biggest thing ever because I have four kids and I think I know what they want.”
Cahill confounds typecasting; his brand straddles not only vastly different industries but also a wide age demographic. Munn, who has observed Cahill’s interest in business at close quarters, says the soccer star is a unique kind of sportsman.
“I’ve not seen any other player who can combine both,” says Munn. “He can quickly turn to the commercial side and deal with that. He is very good at compartmentalising.”
Yet Cahill says he’s still training as hard as ever, and knows every formation and player of the other nine A-League sides. It’s something Football Federation Australia chief executive David Gallop has noted. “You see some successful sports people start to become too occupied with their off-field pursuits,” says Gallop. “But as much as Tim has going off the pitch, it is clear that playing is still his priority.”
English experience
It’s two decades since Cahill, who grew up in Sydney’s western suburbs with an English father and Samoan mother, headed to England to try his luck on its professional circuit. His parents took out a loan for him to travel for trials with several professional clubs. In 1998, the 17-year-old was offered a contract with Millwall, at the time a third-tier club supported by the rough and tough dockyard workers of London’s south.
Cahill stayed for seven seasons before moving in mid-2004 to Everton, a struggling club from Liverpool which played in the hugely popular Premier League, where massive broadcast deals were putting a rocket under player salaries. It was at Everton where Cahill really made his mark, scoring goals as a marauding midfielder and helping lift the club up the ladder of the richest club competition in the world. He was handsomely rewarded, earning at least £4 million a year and becoming much loved by the club’s fans. Cahill stayed in Liverpool for eight seasons, rejecting offers from bigger clubs such as Manchester United.
At 32 he decided it was time to move again, this time across the Atlantic to play in North America’s MLS or Major League Soccer competition. He signed on to play for the New York Red Bulls in 2012, living with his family in Manhattan while training with the team over the border in New Jersey.
Reflecting on the move, Cahill says he has always “dictated what is right for me and my family”, and that taking a chance in the US was right. “I could have stayed at Everton and retired at 35 and not played in a third World Cup and won an Asian Cup,” he says. “But I wanted to travel, I wanted to go to the MLS.”
At the Red Bulls, Cahill played alongside greats such as French star Thierry Henry. Both were marquee signings, placed in target markets by MLS management to boost club fortunes in the most competitive sporting market in the world. The move opened Cahill’s eyes to the commercial opportunities athletes and business owners could avail themselves of. That’s where he worked out that equity is the best kind of performance fee. “I want a stake in it and I want to drive it, which is what I learnt from the NBA, the NFL and other athletes,” he says. “That’s what they do.”
He was also impressed by MLS teams deciding to build their own stadiums. That push began in 1999, when the league realised that playing in stadiums designed for the larger crowds of the National Football League and college games was not good for audience growth. Most of its stadiums are now built specifically for soccer.
Lessons from the stadiums
It’s a lesson Cahill believes the A-League should heed and that the Australian Football League already understands, the latter having recently signed to buy Melbourne’s Etihad Stadium for about $200 million. “The biggest thing I have seen happen in Australian sport is the AFL buying Etihad Stadium. That is genius. That is not just luck, that is someone learning from the Americans,” Cahill says. “Australia needs to understand that we [soccer] have the biggest sport ... but we have to wait our turn, because our infrastructure needs to be built and we need to have a plan that takes us to the level of the MLS.”
Owning its own stadiums would mean A-League clubs could, like the AFL will at Etihad Stadium, derive all the revenue from tickets, corporate boxes and the like rather than just renting a venue.
China was a rewarding but perhaps less challenging turn. Cahill spent just over a year there, from March 2015 to July this year. He arrived after signing the most lucrative contract of his career, worth at least $8 million a season, with Shanghai Greenland Shenhua, owned by the giant property group Greenland. After a season there he moved to the nearby Hangzhou Greentown, which is backed by the developer Greentown China Holdings.Cahill says he was close to the chairmen of both clubs, who were nevertheless not interested in his own business ambitions. “You can’t be a footballer and a businessman in China, but you can be everywhere else. They just want you to play and score goals.”
Vitaman launched its range of Australian-made face, hair, shaving, sport and anti-ageing products in China while Cahill was there. The experience taught him the importance of time, patience, and actual presence.
“You need people on the ground, that is the key,” he says. “If you are going ... to be in China, you have to commit and invest enough money to show the people that you really want to be there. You can’t be doing anything blind, because when they move and do something, they do it really big. You are going into [a market] of hundreds of millions of people there.”
The Cahill+ range is made in China, using fabrics from Europe and elsewhere. Cahill borrows from the language of the garment industry in recalling his first lessons in menswear. “The designers I used to like are so expensive, but I thought ‘it’s all the same thing, made in the same country, probably made in the same factory’. I went to the factory and I looked. I thought, ‘the only thing separating you and me is your logo and your commercialisation and your investment into marketing’,” he says. “In China, they can make everything. Anything. One of the biggest things I’ve ever seen was going to a Chinese market that was 10 levels. It was amazing, their craftsmanship, their work rate.”
His clothing line shares rack space in stores with the brands he once coveted but he is unwilling to be goaded into an expensive marketing war. “Men’s brands in Australia, they come and go. You can go into Glue and there’s 20 brands. Placement is very important, alignment and cross activation is smart, and marketing is expensive – and with my brands we don’t do a lot of it. I have to do market research about what is selling. You’ve got stock, you’ve got prices, you’ve got overheads. It’s a tough market but I’m happy I’ve broken down barriers slowly.”
Longevity off-field
Few Australian athletes have outlived their on-field appeal. Only someone such as golfer Greg Norman has managed to carve out a brand that resonates in both the sporting and business worlds. Indeed, many of Australia’s much-worshipped Olympians have suffered far more ignominious fates than fading into dignified retirement. Whether the Cahill brand can make the leap remains to be seen, given he’s not yet even retired.
Rob Mills, chief executive of sports consultancy Gemba, notes that Cahill is the fifth-most popular athlete in Australia across all sports, and that this and his determination will help. “Tim is unique because he puts a lot of sweat into [business pursuits]. He is incredibly energetic about it.”
Patrick Delany of Fox Sports, which helped fund the Melbourne City deal and telecasts the A-League, concurs: “Rarely do you get talent calling you personally about the last couple of parts to finalise a deal. Tim did that. He has a very good sense of who he is, and what his brand is.”
Cahill’s strategic thinking extends to his choice of club. Melbourne City is part of a network of clubs that includes Manchester City, New York City FC and Japanese team Yokohama F. Marinos. Owned by Abu Dhabi ruling family member Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan and a consortium led by China Media Capital Holdings, the network is said to be looking for a team in China. Cahill has played in every continent the network has a presence in and is working on getting his coaching qualifications by taking, as other players do, the FFA-accredited courses. If and when it comes to coaching, that means he could arguably fit in anywhere in the network.
Whatever happens post retirement, Cahill intends to keep working hard, arguing that his relentless determination will not simply disappear. “Why can’t I be successful off the pitch? Why are there some negative thoughts out there about wanting to be involved in business?” he asks. “I’m just a sports guy who grew up in Sydney and did well on the park as well as making sure I’m strategic off the park. As the best mentors and people close to me have said, you are not the same person without a challenge.”
The AFR Magazine is out Friday, December 9 inside The Australian Financial Review.
