The world’s fifth-highest-paid footballer could pay a heavy price for his sleight of hand.

Thierry Henry, who is thought to earn more than £15 million a year from sponsorship deals and his club Barcelona, found himself pilloried yesterday for his unsporting behaviour that helped to secure France a berth in the World Cup.

Politicians and internet users fuelled the backlash, calling on sponsors to dump him and threatening to boycott the products he endorses.

The Frenchman, 32, who was hero-worshipped by Arsenal fans and admired by the rest of England when he played in the Barclays Premiership between 1999 and 2007, has been popular with advertisers.

Besides his football earnings — he joined Barcelona in 2007 on a salary of £4.5 million — he has been the face of global brands including Renault, Nike, Gillette and Pepsi. Between 2001 and 2006 he earned a reported £14 million from Nike, a company he ditched in 2006 to sign with Reebok for a signing-on fee alone believed to be upwards of £9 million. Reebok, ironically, use him in an advertising campaign entitled “Play Responsibly”.

He replaced David Beckham as one of the faces of Gillette. This earns him about £2 million a year.

The company said it picked Henry because he embodied “true sporting values”. He also joined the ranks of superstars endorsing Pepsi-Cola, which is reported to bring him up to £3 million a year. He is also the face of the Tommy Hilfiger fashion label.

However, after his handball that set up France’s winning goal against Ireland, marketing experts were assessing the impact on his image and his future commercial worth.

The controversy could affect his proposed move next year to the New York Red Bulls, the Major League Soccer side, as he attempts to follow Beckham into the lucrative US market where fans, and therefore sponsors, tend to care more about the moral fibre of their sporting heroes.

Nigel Currie, director of Brand Rapport, said: “It is hugely damaging. At a time when so much cheating is being exposed in sport, people expect higher standards of him.

“He’s positioned himself as a global ambassador for sport so, in the long term, he has blotted his copybook.”

Henry, who was born and raised in Paris, has built a personal fortune on an undisputed talent admired well beyond North London, where he became Arsenal’s record goalscorer during an eight-year career. His mixture of football flair, French sophistication and sex appeal has been carefully packaged by publicists to transcend sport, helped by his genuine efforts through his charitable foundation to combat racism in the game and support projects tackling social inequality.

The strength of his following, and his owning up to the handball after the game, may be enough to ensure that he rides out the controversy with little or no damage to his reputation.

Even his messy divorce in 2007 after four years of marriage to a British model he met filming the Renault advertisements, and speculation of an affair, failed to provoke the usual “love rat” headlines.

For now, his sponsors are standing by him. James Nunn, a spokesman for Gillette, said: “This is not going to affect our relationship with him.”

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