As football and athletics come under intense scrutiny over the Fifa and Salazar investigations, Nike is facing an unwelcome PR storm

Bribery and doping allegations in football and athletics are threatening to drag sportswear maker Nike into two simultaneous PR crises that could tarnish the iconic swoosh brand.

While the company, currently valued at almost $90bn, is used to battling threats to its reputation, having to defend its globally recognised brand on two fronts is an unwelcome novelty that the company could do without, according to experts.

“Behind sponsorship is the idea that you are trying to borrow associations from the properties you are sponsoring,” said Dr Leah Donlan, lecturer in marketing at Manchester Business School. “If people start to develop negative associations about those properties, it is reasonable to expect that they might start to project those negative views on to the Nike brand.”

Much now depends on Nike’s response. It has weathered many storms before, and come out stronger. But it has never before found itself dragged into a corruption scandal of the magnitude of that which has engulfed Fifa during the past two weeks.

The indictment filed by the US Department of Justice against 14 Fifa officials and marketing executives refers to how, in 1996, “Company A” – now accepted to be Nike – agreed to pay $40m in “marketing fees” to the Swiss bank account of an affiliate of Brazilian sports marketing firm Traffic “on top of the $160m it was obligated to pay”, apparently to secure the sponsorship of the Brazilian football team. The indictment also stated that Traffic billed the company for an additional $30m in fees between 1996 and 1999.

Nike has strongly defended itself against insinuations that these overpayments were a form of kickback, saying that the indictment does “not allege that Nike engaged in criminal conduct” or that “any Nike employee was aware of or knowingly participated in any bribery or kickback scheme”.

The US investigation has, however, prompted the Brazilian Senate to revisit its own inquiry, started 15 years ago, which revealed Nike’s extraordinary influence over the Brazilian team. Under its sponsorship deal, Nike was allowed to arrange five friendly matches a year for the team. It was even allowed to select the opponents and players for the so-called “Nike games”.

This in turn has helped revive damaging rumours that the sponsorship deal led to the selection of Brazil’s star striker, Ronaldo, in the 1998 World Cup final, even though he was ill. Both Nike and the player have consistently denied the allegations.

But while football, which generates nearly a 10th of Nike’s $28bn global revenues, is identified as a future growth market, the sport of running is where the company made its reputation. It carved out a name for itself sponsoring Steve Prefontaine, the maverick middle-distance runner, who died in a car crash in 1974, aged 24.

A statue of “Pre”, the original sports rebel, is on display at the Nike Oregon Project in Portland where Alberto Salazar, considered America’s most powerful running coach, has trained a number of highly successful competitors, including Britain’s Mo Farah.

Salazar now stands accused of violating anti-doping rules and encouraging one of his top runners, Olympic silver medallist Galen Rupp, to use banned substances. Both men deny any wrongdoing but the fallout from the allegations is unlikely to disperse soon.

The BBC reported that US Olympic runner Kara Goucher and at least six other former Salazar athletes and members of staff have gone to the US Anti-Doping Agency with their concerns.

Nike is familiar with doping scandals. Salazar was coaching Mary Decker-Slaney when she tested positive for testosterone, and Nike helped fund her legal challenge against a ban. More recently, the company was forced to jettison its relationship with Lance Armstrong following the cyclist’s spectacular fall from grace.

Nike declined to talk to the Observer, but in an earlier statement it said: “We take the allegations very seriously, as Nike does not condone the use of performance-enhancing drugs in any manner.”

The company’s share price has hardly moved since the two scandals emerged. It has weathered crises in the past, notably in the 1990s when allegations that it used sweatshop labour prompted then-chief executive Phil Knight to declare that the “Nike product has become synonymous with slave wages, forced overtime and arbitrary abuse”.

Back then, the company provided a textbook PR response to the crisis, introducing a series of changes to its supply chain, such as raising the minimum wage of its workers, increasing monitoring in its plants and promoting clean air standards in its factories.

More recently, it chose to ride out the Tiger Woods adultery storm, sticking with the golf star when other sponsors dropped him.

“Nike is such a juggernaut: it seems to have this ability to override all kinds of crises,” said Ellis Cashmore, professor of sociology at Aston University, who has written about Nike in books and articles.

Indeed, the company is well aware that scandals can provide opportunities. In the past, it has made much out of its association with two of sport’s biggest bad boys – footballer Eric Cantona and tennis star John McEnroe.

Even reformed dope cheats are not considered beyond the pale. In March, Nike caused a furore by signing Justin Gatlin, the US sprinter who has served two bans for doping.

As Cashmore observed: “Nike doesn’t just have its finger on the pulse; it dictates it.”