Khan has bling under wraps as substance outpoints style
The watch may be the ultimate in bling, but Amir Khan is not ready to sell his chances of becoming a boxing legend for fast money.
The prodigy’s biggest sponsorship deal, worth an estimated £2 million with Reebok over the next three years, was announced yesterday, an endorsement of the pulling power of the boy from Bolton. But his management team has turned away several other multinationals waving chequebooks offering deals worth millions more. Drink and gambling sponsors were shown the way to the exit because they are not right for one of Britain’s most high-profile Muslims.
A source in the Khan camp said yesterday: “The deals on offer would have gone into seven figures, but if the deal isn’t right, it isn’t right.”
Asif Vali, Khan’s business manager, is proving to be as shrewd about the boxer’s earning power, refusing to overcommit while the youngster is on the threshold of a spectacular career. Reebok, though, is a perfect fit for Khan, a company founded in Bolton, the home town to which he is determined to remain loyal.
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Unlike Lewis Hamilton, who has decamped to Switzerland claiming that he is hounded by fans in Britain, Khan revels in the recognition. “I love it when people are waving and honking their horns,” he told The Insider. But that is on a rare night out – when the £50,000 diamond-encrusted Audemars Piguet watch that he adorned yesterday, at Reebok’s unveiling of an advertisement featuring the boxer shot in 3-D, is kept out of sight.
Neither is Haroon, his 16-year-old brother, allowed to show off the watch, or any of his others. “My brother keeps trying to sneak out with it on,” Khan said. “Anyway, it is too dangerous these days, isn’t it?”
Not if you have a budding boxing world champion in the family.
Dream jobs that ask for wishful thinking
Two plum sporting jobs on the market this week. Glasgow wants a chief executive to spearhead preparations for the 2014 Commonwealth Games, with a “significant salary” on offer, while Sport England is offering a six-figure package to its new director of sport, who will need to be “passionate, highly effective, credible, outstanding, motivational and empathetic”. No problem there, then.
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David Pleat’s new term as football adviser to UD Marbella opened with the signing yesterday of Carl Cort from Leicester City. Pleat is giving the Spanish third division side advice on transfers and Cort was their first choice. Not that Cort probably needed much convincing: Leicester yesterday, 6C and overcast; Marbella, 17C and brilliant sunshine. You choose.
The unreconstructed Barry Fry, Peterborough United’s director of football, describing his environmental credentials to FourFourTwo magazine: “My missus keeps f***ing telling me you’ve got to be putting this thing in this f***ing bag and that in the other one. But I just lob everything in the bin. Then I get a b******ing.” Oh dear.