How Walmart Can Turn the Broncos Into the World’s Team

Now that the Denver Broncos have officially reached an agreement with Rob Walton, heir to the Walmart fortune, to sell the team for a record-busting estimate of $4.65 billion, speculation is rife about whether the new owners will want to refurbish Empower Field at Mile High or build a new stadium and what kind of spectacular new development might spring up around such a facility.

But there’s a more global question, as well: Will Walton and Walmart board chair Greg Penner, who’s married to Rob’s daughter Carrie, seek to maximize this massive investment by aggressively promoting the Broncos at all of the firm’s affiliates across the planet?

The company has made no such announcement, and on a June 8 visit to a metro Denver Walmart, there was no sign of any campaign to emphasize the fresh connection between the mega-corporation and the team. But the concept makes sense from a dollars-and-cents perspective – the kind that helped Walton and his family become so incredibly rich in the first place.

Should such a plan be implemented, the idea of the Dallas Cowboys being America’s team, as the franchise has long been identified, will seem quaint – since the Broncos will be the world’s team.

According to Walmart, the company “operates approximately 10,500 stores and clubs under 46 banners in 24 countries and eCommerce websites. We employ 2.3 million associates around the world – nearly 1.6 million in the U.S. alone.” But the list of Walmarts by country on the World Atlas website actually includes 27 nations scattered across multiple continents. Here’s the rundown:

1. United States – 5,362
2. Mexico – 2,448
3. United Kingdom – 633
4. China – 433
5. Canada – 411
6. South Africa – 390
7. Chile – 375
8. Japan – 331
9. Costa Rica – 257
10. Guatemala – 250
11. Honduras – 106
12. Nicaragua – 103
13. El Salvador – 97
14. Argentina – 92
15. India – 25
16. Botswana – 11
17. Zambia – 7
18. Mozambique-  6
19. Nigeria – 5
20. Ghana – 4
21. Namibia – 4
22. Lesotho – 3
23. Kenya – 2
24. Malawi – 2
25. Swaziland – 1
26. Tanzania – 1
27. Uganda – 1

The size and scope of this reach no doubt makes National Football League executives salivate. In recent years, the NFL has been engaged in a high-profile effort to make its product as popular outside the U.S. as the sport known as football (the one we call soccer) is internationally. The most public effort in this regard has been an expanding slate of games played on foreign soil, and indeed, the Broncos are scheduled to take part in just a contest during the upcoming season – a Sunday, October 31, tilt at London’s Wembley Stadium versus the Jacksonville Jaguars.

Stocking all of Walmart’s stores with Broncos gear, and hyping the squad as the flagship of the sport, dovetails nicely with this blueprint and would presumably endear Walton to other NFL owners – particularly in light of the fact that he’ll be the richest of them all when the deal is officially blessed, as is widely anticipated. And in new quarterback Russell Wilson, the Broncos have the most appealing ambassador of the sport imaginable.

Granted, such a tack would represent something of a strategy change for Walmart stores, which are hyper-local when it comes to sports merch. During a recent visit to a store in Albuquerque, a city that’s roughly equidistant from Denver and Phoenix, home of the Arizona Cardinals, the branded sports-clothing section was dominated by stuff related to the University of New Mexico.

And a celebration of all things Broncos definitely wasn’t under way at a Walmart in unincorporated Jefferson County the day after the pact was confirmed. Walmart outposts maintain a legendarily tight control on inventory, only stocking items when they’re most likely to sell and clearing them from shelves as soon as the optimum period has passed, which explains why this one was jammed with shirts emblazoned with the logos of the Colorado Rockies and the Denver Nuggets, but no Broncos items that we could find. (We’re guessing the Colorado Avalanche togs are on back order.)

Still, Walmart is all about making the most of its investments, and the folks most closely associated with it just made a huge one in the Broncos.

Today Denver. Tomorrow the world.