Maskgate

In the last times, the attention abut football teams and players’ aesthetic details during football games has increased over and over. It is a proof the last ‘case’ that involved Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, Borussia Dortmund’s phenomenal striker with a tendency for… ‘masked celebrations’.

The 27-years-old Gabonese prodigy, in fact, already celebrated some goals in the past wearing famous superheroes’ masks. Like Spiderman’s - already seen during his Saint-Etienne years - and Batman’s. During Bundesliga’s last match day, though, ‘Auba’ took advantage of his habit - we don’t know if for his will or others’ - to show off his brand new mask, with a similar style, not randomly, than Nike’s last Hypervenom promotional campaign. 

Beaverton’s company, in fact, in the last few weeks has been promoting the ‘Strike Night’ - we’ve talked about that - to present the new Hypervenom 3 worldwide. The campaign is based on black and orange colors and on the same pattern of Aubameyang’s mask. Of course, that caused quite an agitation in Dortmund’s management, as at the time it's sponsored by PUMA. Borussia’s CEO Hans Joachim Watzke went down quite hard on the Swoosh: “This behavior is unworthy of a big corporation. It can’t be that we have to force through the economic interest of Nike in this way. Our partner is PUMA. We are surprised that a competitor puts a player in such a situation.”

The coach Thomas Tuchel also talked about the matter, hoping for a reasonable position by Aubameyang in case of a possible fine from the management. It’s a pity that a goal celebration - an important one also, as it was scored during Ruhr’s derby agains Schalke - became an occasion to polemicize about a commercial aspect of the game. At least, we should hope that ‘Auba’ won’t loose his passion for masked celebrations, as we still love them.