London, 12th September 2026 — EBM Weekend Read — By Nick Staunton
Nike will drop out of the S&P 100 on 22 September, ending an 18-year run in America’s blue-chip index. It isn’t being delisted, and it isn’t leaving the much larger S&P 500 — only the narrower 100-company tier built around market capitalisation, where Nike simply no longer qualifies. Dell, Palo Alto Networks, Arista and SanDisk take its place, part of a broader rotation toward AI infrastructure that’s also pushing out Honeywell Aerospace, Simon Property Group and Colgate-Palmolive on the same date. Nike’s crime, in index terms, was getting smaller: market cap down from roughly $264bn at the end of 2021 to about $57bn today, a stock that’s lost close to 80% of its value in five years, and a valuation reset from around 50 times earnings to 24.
The obvious question — did Nike’s run of culture-war marketing cause this — deserves a straight answer, because it’s genuinely contested and the timeline matters more than the vibes.
The controversies are real and well documented
Nike’s 2018 “Believe in Something” campaign, fronted by Colin Kaepernick, triggered boycott calls and a brief stock dip before shares recovered to record highs within weeks — the ad is now generally regarded inside the industry as a marketing success, not a failure. The following year, Nike pulled its Air Max 1 “Betsy Ross flag” sneaker from sale after Kaepernick raised concerns it had been co-opted by extremist groups — a genuine controversy, but a narrow, single-product decision rather than a strategic shift. In 2023, Nike paid transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney to promote its women’s leggings and sports bras, drawing sustained criticism online and comparisons to the much larger backlash Bud Light faced the same month for a similar partnership — though unlike Bud Light, which lost billions in market value within weeks, Nike’s stock showed no comparable measurable reaction. And in 2024, Nike ran “Winning Isn’t for Everyone” ahead of the Paris Olympics — a campaign that actually drew criticism for being too ruthless and unapologetically win-obsessed, the opposite of “woke,” and one industry analysis credited with helping offset a quarterly revenue decline.
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SubscribeThat last point matters, because it complicates any tidy narrative. Nike’s marketing over the past eight years has swung between social-conscience positioning and unapologetic competitive aggression, and neither direction correlates cleanly with the stock’s trajectory. If “getting woke” reliably cost Nike money, “Winning Isn’t for Everyone” should have been a relief rally. It wasn’t.
What actually moved the numbers
During the pandemic, then-CEO John Donahoe set a target of earning half of Nike’s revenue directly through Nike.com, and cut ties with long-standing wholesale accounts including DSW and Olympia Sports to get there. It worked spectacularly while the world was shut indoors and buying everything online — Nike hit its all-time stock peak in November 2021. The mistake, as Nike’s current CEO Elliott Hill has since admitted with unusual candour, was that the company didn’t shift back to its old playbook once the world reopened. Hill, who returned in October 2024 after Donahoe’s departure, told analysts directly that wholesale partners now feel Nike turned its back on them, and that the company had let its product go stale, over-relying on legacy franchises like Air Force 1 and Dunk while competitors innovated around it. The figures back him up: Nike launched just two new running shoes in 2024, against eleven from Asics and ten from Adidas.
Consumer Behaviour
That gap is where the real consumer-behaviour shift shows up — and it isn’t about politics at all. Running went mainstream again in the 2020s, and a new generation of runners went looking for shoes built specifically for the sport rather than lifestyle sneakers that happened to be comfortable. Nike has been losing ground to a scattered field of challengers — Hoka, On, Salomon and others — that didn’t meaningfully exist as competitors a decade ago. Hoka and On built their entire identity around that shift, with maximalist cushioning and a running-first aesthetic that didn’t exist in Nike’s core lineup. Hoka’s sales grew from $153.5m in 2018 to $2.587bn in 2026 — a seventeen-fold increase — while Nike lost share in both running and lifestyle footwear simultaneously in 2025. This wasn’t a boycott. It was a generation of buyers whose taste moved to a place Nike’s product roadmap hadn’t reached yet.
China compounds the problem rather than explaining a separate one. Historically Nike’s most profitable market, Greater China sales fell roughly 10% as local rivals like Anta have gotten faster at reading domestic taste and now undercut Nike on price with technically credible product. Layer on tariff costs, and you have a company whose core business simply produces less profit than it used to, for reasons that have nothing to do with any advertisement.
There are early signs Hill’s course correction is working: Nike shares climbed roughly 11% following his appointment, North American wholesale orders rose about 12% in the following quarter, and running shoe sales reversed a two-year decline with 7% growth. None of that recovery has anything to do with reversing any political positioning — it’s wholesale relationships being rebuilt and product lines being refreshed, the unglamorous work of fixing a distribution model that was broken on purpose during Covid and never properly reassembled.
Where I Land: The politically satisfying version of this story — Nike went woke and paid the price — doesn’t survive contact with the numbers. The stock recovered from Kaepernick within weeks. The Mulvaney backlash never showed up in Nike’s share price the way it did Bud Light’s. The 2024 campaign that actually drew sustained criticism was accused of being too ruthless, not too inclusive. What actually happened is less dramatic and more damning for anyone running the company: Nike broke its own distribution model during Covid, stopped innovating at the pace its category now demands, and got outflanked in its two most important growth markets by competitors it didn’t take seriously soon enough. Buying habits did change — just not for the reason the culture war wants credit for. Runners wanted better running shoes, and for several years, Nike simply wasn’t making enough of them. An index rebalancing is a symptom of that. It was never the disease.
