By Sean Cudahy
The most successful quarterback in National Football League history is getting set to huddle up with one of the nation’s most prominent airlines.
Delta Air Lines announced this week that it will be joining forces with Tom Brady—yes, that Tom Brady—on long-term partnership it dubs a “first-of-its-kind” arrangement.
Brady will serve as a “strategic advisor” for the Atlanta-based carrier, helping develop employee teamwork-oriented training, contributing to some of Delta brand initiatives, and offering a host of other contributions to the company’s philanthropic and employee-focused efforts.
In an appearance on CNBC Wednesday, Delta CEO Ed Bastian distinguished the partnership from other endorsement and sponsorship arrangements, the likes of which regularly have Brady repeating his signature “Let’s Go!” line on car rental company Hertz’s commercials.
“This is not a sponsorship,” Bastian said on the network’s Squawk Box. “What I’m more excited [about] is that he’s going to come inside the company. He’s going to be talking to our people about greatness, about resilience, about excellence, about performance.”
Indeed, Brady knows about each. Over the course of his more than two-decade NFL career, he amassed seven Super Bowl championships—six with the New England Patriots and one with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers—before retiring following a final postseason appearance in January 2023.
What exactly will he be doing at Delta, though?
In a statement announcing the arrangement, Delta said Brady will partner with Delta on devising training and teamwork tools for its workforce that now numbers around 90,000 employees, the company says. He’ll also support certain Delta “marketing and consumer engagement” initiatives as well as some of Delta’s community projects.
The training role is a timely one, as airlines have been on a hiring spree over the last year in an effort to combat the staffing shortages that hampered travel during the initial rebound from the pandemic. In 2022 alone, Delta onboarded 25,000 employees—more than a quarter of the company—Bastian said on an earnings call earlier this year.
“At this point it does look a little bit different,” says Michael Lewis, an expert in sports analytics and marketing on the faculty at Emory University in Delta’s hometown of Atlanta, comparing the Delta-Brady partnership with other sports star sponsorship deals.
“It doesn’t appear Tom Brady’s going to be on a TV getting into a Delta first class section, that kind of standard sponsorship,” Lewis says.
Whether the partnership ultimately proves fruitful for Delta, though, depends, Lewis said.
“Can he make the transition from working with a group of players on the field to almost going into a room and putting up some powerpoint slides and doing that kind of corporate song and dance?” Lewis wonders. “That’s not clear.”
Besides Brady’s work with Delta, he has quite a full slate of post-retirement activities.
He continues at the helm of several business ventures, including his NFT startup Autograph; his TB12 health and fitness brand; his media company, 199 Productions (a nod to his position in the sixth round of the 2000 NFL draft); and the BRADY apparel brand.
That’s on top of his reported mega-million deal to join the Fox Sports top NFL broadcast booth at some point in the future.
For Brady, though, working with an airline does have a distinctly personal touch. His mother, Galynn, once worked as a flight attendant for TWA.
As such, Brady noted in a statement, “I have always admired the people that make seamless air transportation possible.”
In any case, the arrangement is likely to be more lucrative than his partnership with FTX. Brady reportedly lost $30 million on that deal, and is one of the celebrity defendants in an investor lawsuit over the crypto company’s collapse.
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