For years we've heard our sponsors are going to help fund this and that and they end up funding sh!t. It's a nonsense myth. Fact is if Madrid made a big bid for the player, Puma would have little they can do about it.
It's not always as obvious as "X makes a super good offer, so they can't refuse"... First of all I'm not sure if such contributions would even be made public. Secondly the example of Reus himself already shows that kit suppliers have a hand in negotiations.
Dortmund's officials will have a certain valuation of a Reus deal (something like "monetary value of the fee" - "loss of squad strength" - "loss of attractivity for other players" +- "replacement player"), if a club comes along and offers a fee close to that number then we can expect Puma to pull their strings and influence that equation, be it by offering money, by calling in promises or by club politics. But that does not necessarily mean that their efforts will be enough.
Puma have no say in where Reus goes, and I'm pretty sure the more high profile the player has, the happier his sponsors will be. Puma would be happy with Reus playing v Schalke with little or no global attention or lining up with Ronaldo and Bale in El Classico? Or even in the CL?
To answer that question you have to know how much money they make from selling jerseys and how they would approximate the gain in marketing value that would come from his increased exposure. The fact that Puma pay him €2-3m a year for staying at Dortmund suggests that they value him there though.
With Reus or without him, Dortmunds shirt sales will stay the same. Did their hirt sales tumble when they lost Gotze or Lewandowski?
It's not that simple, a team's shirt sales are influenced by more than one or two transfers. Not all players sell the same amount of Jerseys though, so if they replaced Reus with someone less popular then it seems logical that sales would suffer from that and on the flipside whoever bought Reus would probably sell more jerseys in Germany.
Your Dortmund point makes no sense. For the last two years I've read German posters claim money isn't a problem for Dortmund, they can't be bullied into selling players etc. now they're conservative despite letting their two best players run down their contracts and getting nothing for them.
Doesn't scream conservative to me.
Well... how about: wages and transfer fees are two different things. Transfer fees are one time
earnings, wages are annual
payments over many years. Once your wage bill is inflated it's hard to get under control again, because every player wants to get paid at least as much as players of similar statue earn. So if they suddenly decide to raise their maximum wage by €5m for Reus they can expect other players to want more as well, because "we offered you as much as we could" won't fly anymore if the next player earns twice as much and since their near bankruptcy their leadership always stresses that their first goal is to not let that ever happen again by spending within their means (having a wage bill you can only afford if you go deep in the CL or sell players doesn't go to well with that).
Turning down transfer offers on the other hand is much simpler. One thing that comes with Dortmund's conservative spending is that their finances are rock solid, they plan their finances so that their running costs are never higher than their income. So when someone offers them money for one of their stars they aren't forced to do anything, they probably just look at what they would get, how much the loss of the player would impact their squad and what kind of replacement they could buy from the money. If were talking about a player who has technically outgrown the club (like for example Reus), no remotely realistic fee would enable them to buy a worthy replacement, so in most cases they refuse to sell, because having a star player often is better than having a weakened squad because you could only buy an overpriced replacement that isn't on the same level.
I don't even know why we talk so much about Puma tbh, their involvement is just one among many reasons (and probably the least compelling) why a transfer this summer can be ruled out.
