In 2014, the Boys From Brazil Will Score for Nike

Given the still-sorry state of the economy in Greece, perhaps I am tempting fate to suggest that a stock named after its goddess of victory might be a top-performing equity in 2014. Yet Nike NKE can score big again next year, not on account of ancient Athens, but thanks to an increasingly modern nation some 6,000 miles to the south.

To be sure, Nike is neither an undiscovered story nor a pure fútbol play. As the globe's largest maker of sporting goods, newly added to the Dow, it needs no introduction. But let's start with a few facts. 1) Shares have risen every year for the past half decade, and are hitting the highest level in their history even as I write this article. (An approximately 72% stock price surge over the last 12 months puts the S&P 500 Index, itself no slouch over the same period, to shame.)

2) The company recently reported a 22% jump in annual net income and did more than $2.4 billion of business in China, allegedly an Achilles' heel for its athletic shoes.

Meanwhile the monumental reach of this company, which outfits everything from golf to tennis and also owns Converse, can even be seen in the plight of poor Perry Ellis PERY. On Wednesday, with markets scaling fresh summits, that sorry stock tumbled 22.96% to post the worst performance on all of the Nasdaq. Its sole bright spot? The Nike Swim brand this fashion firm has a licensing agreement with.

Soccer is already becoming an increasingly important component of Nike's business, generating $1.93 billion in sales and growing at a 7.7% pace. Long gone are the days of American fans having to catch marquis overseas matches on crackly old shortwave radios, or schlepping out to dodgy bars in the Bronx in search of games on week-old tape delay (I speak from experience). No longer dismissed as the "USA's biggest babysitting service," the sport is now both a spectator and participatory pastime in this country, where NBC's high-def English Premier League offerings attract ever-increasing audiences.

A latter-day Ronaldo, Cristiano Ronaldo (pictured here), the preening Portuguese prima donna who is named after Ronald Reagan and has 64 million Facebook FB followers, shrugged off an injury in time to take the field clad in Nike's Clash Collection cleats for the recent World Cup qualification playoff against Sweden in Lisbon. Other superstars who don Nike include Mario Balotelli, the Italian whose grass allergy hasn't stopped him from becoming one of the world's top players, and Brazil's wonder kid Neymar, who is such a hot-shot in Nike's Hypervenom Phantom boots that Barcelona recently broke the bank for his services.

So there we are. To paraphrase a Nike slogan, Justin Did It, selecting the sneaker stock as his top pick for 2014. In terms of predictive powers, I may be no match for the clairvoyant Paul the Octopus, who now sadly sleeps with the fishes but at the 2010 World Cup demonstrated an uncanny accuracy in correctly calling results involving both Germany and eventual winner Spain. (Each outfitted, it must be said, by Nike's archrival Adidas ADDYY.

The following article is from one of our external contributors. It does not represent the opinion of Benzinga.