The thought of Cristiano Ronaldo’s coke rebuff affecting Coca-Cola share price is nonsense

Cristiano Ronaldo swiping at Coca-Cola drove its stock price down. Or did it really?

The low hanging fruits are always alluring - especially for the media. Multiple global business sites glamored how Cristiano Ronaldo’s behavior of wanting water instead of Coca-Cola in a press conference affected the stock value of Coca-Cola by almost 4 billion euros.

Correlation and causality are not always easy things. It’s easy to find correlation between things but there aren’t always causality. So why Ronaldo’s swipe didn’t have anything to do with Coca-Cola’s stock prices? The most important factor in the stock price dropping almost one percent was the Coca-Cola was paying dividents the same day. The stock price was already falling when the infamous press conference even began.

Stock prices go up and down every day from 0,5 to 2 percent and there is nothing unsual about it. This whole thing goes in frame of that. Also, the American investors are not interested what one footballer does in a press conference that takes place in Europe.

Ronaldo’s swipe at UEFA sponsor Coca-Cola is a bold statement and in my opinion, a good one. UEFA and Coca-Cola will be fuming, but they can also think about how they can do things better. Perhaps offering players Coca-Cola owned waters too?

All in all, the click-driven way of doing journalism drives us to reading articles that aren’t always thought through. That’s the way world works nowadays, but don’t let the press fool you to think Ronaldo had anything to with Coca-Cola’s stock price. It was all in the scope of a normal stock activity.

Photo - Oleg Dubyna