Stephen Yalof runs a company that owns outlet malls. He went on CNBC to explain that people bought more discounted merchandise this summer because they were thinking about the World Cup. The World Cup happened in 2022. This is 2024.
Let's accept his premise. Consumers wandered into Tanger outlets, saw a Coach bag marked down from $400 to $310, remembered that Lionel Messi exists, and decided to complete the transaction. Makes perfect sense. The transitive property of sports enthusiasm and bargain hunting has been well documented in zero studies.
The CEO of a publicly traded retail company told financial media that soccer increased his sales numbers. Not a specific promotion. Not a marketing campaign tied to the event. Just the ambient cultural awareness of soccer. The ball is round, therefore the discounts are compelling.
Retail executives have discovered they can say anything to CNBC and the stock will move anyway. Traffic was up because of pickleball. Sales jumped because of cloud formations. Margin expansion came from Mercury in retrograde. None of it matters. The chart either goes up or it doesn't.
Some day trader in Michigan is now building a thesis around international sporting events and outlet mall correlations. He's got a spreadsheet. He's tracking the Olympics. He's convinced the next earnings beat is hiding inside the FIFA schedule. His wife is asking about the 401k and he's explaining that the European Championship is a leading indicator for off-price apparel demand.
Yalof gets paid millions of dollars to attribute quarterly performance to whatever large event happened near the same time period. It's astrology for MBAs, and somehow less predictive.
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