NEW YORK, USA (AFP) — An embattled Tiger Woods faced a dwindling roster of sponsors yesterday, after Swiss watchmaker Tag Heuer said it was dropping its US advertising campaigns featuring the golf champion.

Tag Heuer’s move came in the footsteps of consulting firm Accenture ending its six-year deal with the golf superstar and razormaker Gillette dropping him from its advertising, after the 33-year-old Woods took an indefinite break from the sport and acknowledged infidelity.

“We recognise Tiger Woods as a great sportsman, but we have to take account of the sensitivity of some consumers in relation to recent events,” Tag Heuer chief executive Jean-Christophe Babin told Swiss newspaper Le Matin on Friday.

The company, a unit of French luxury goods empire LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton, would continue to back Woods’s charity foundation, Babin said.

It was the end of a partnership that saw the luxury watchmaker praise Woods for “his personal obsession with results and perfection, his ability to withstand pressure, to meet expectations and exceed them, but also his love of discipline — all this makes him a natural partner for the brand.”

That statement was still on the company’s website early yesterday.

A string of alleged affairs with at least 14 women — including a porn star and a cocktail waitress — have decimated the 14-time major champion’s squeaky-clean image.

The golfer’s wife Elin — a former Swedish model — hired famed Hollywood divorce attorney Sorrell Trope, according to a report on Friday, as details emerged about a 2007 deal between a US magazine and Woods to hush extra-marital affair.

Promoters were behind 90 per cent of the funding that made Woods the first sports billionaire, but his power as a marketing juggernaut unravelled long before his confession of extramarital affairs one week ago.

The firestorm, which erupted on November 27 after Woods crashed his Cadillac Escalade SUV into a tree and a hydrant just outside his home, entered a fourth week with no end in sight and sponsor support eroding.

AT&T, which backs the US PGA Tour event operated by the golfer’s foundation, is re-evaluating its relationship with Woods.

Yet US sportswear giant Nike, which pays Woods an estimated 40 million dollars a year, still backs him as it has since his 1996 pro debut, with chairman Phil Knight telling Sports Business Journal the unfolding saga is a small problem.