Inside Adidas' $1.7 Billion World Cup Win
The brand was ever-present at the tournament played across North America, the sportswear industry's most coveted battle ground. It expects to generate related sales of $1.7 billion.
Hi everyone, welcome back to SportsVerse, my twice-weekly newsletter that tells stories you can’t find anywhere else about the intersection of sports, fashion, business, and culture.
In the sportswear market, just like in sport itself, winning is everything.
Adidas was always going into this World Cup in pole position, given its role as an official sponsor of the tournament.
It meant that — regardless of which team won — Adidas would have the right to have its logo and brand visible everywhere from advertising boards in stadiums, on the match balls, on the referees’ uniforms and on the clothing and footwear worn by performers at the World Cup Final halftime show.
As an example of the power of the company’s role as an official sponsor, you may have noticed during the final’s Halftime Freak Show that Brazil legends (and Nike ambassadors) Ronaldo and Ronaldinho (who for some reason were forced to uncomfortably flank Madonna for her performance) had their Brazil tracksuits awkwardly adapted in certain areas in order to deliberately avoid the use of the Swoosh logo. Adidas has blanket control over many of the biggest moments of the tournament.
To take advantage of Adidas’ enviable positioning as an official sponsor, and to make the most of the expense the brand went through to secure such a designation, the brand poured millions of dollars into its marketing efforts and product releases associated with the tournament, dropping countless campaigns, collaborations and orchestrating high profile moments to show off its prowess as the world’s go-to football brand.
Beyond generating sales, the goal of this expensive push — which included a seven-week-long pop-up and fanzone in New York’s Brooklyn Bridge Park — was for Adidas to be the name associated with the growth of football and the culture around it in the United States. North America is a critical battleground in Adidas CEO Bjørn Gulden’s quest to catch up with Nike — a region in which the latter still dwarfs the former in terms of revenue.
On paper, Adidas executives are no doubt pleased with how the brand performed during the tournament. The company expects to generate over $1.7 billion in World Cup-related sales, according to The New York Times, which profiled Gulden ahead of the final. Gulden also mentioned that Adidas sold four times as many jerseys and twice as many match balls as it did during the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.
But these numbers don’t come close to telling the full story of Adidas’ presence throughout the seven-week tournament.
I asked Adidas’ Chris Murphy, North America senior vice president, brand marketing and a repeat guest on SportsVerse at this point, to put into perspective the scale of the Adidas operation.
“It was an unprecedented tournament for us. From a product perspective, we launched over 3,000 unique products spanning Originals, Performance and collaborations - a historic volume for our supply chain and retail partners. Marketing-wise, it was one of our largest integrated campaigns globally ever,” he said. “On-field, we had representation across all 104 games through our federations, players, the official match ball, and celebrity stadium captains at select games, from Paris Hilton to Timothée Chalamet.”
The final itself was an Adidas show from start to finish (apart from the game-winner, which Under Armour was quick to point out was scored by one of its own athletes, Ferran Torres, who happened to be wearing one of the few pairs of non-pink boots in the whole tournament).
It could’ve all worked out very differently, had England and France won their semi-final games to set up an all-Nike final. But that didn’t transpire. Instead, the final was an all-Adidas affair for the first time since 2014, with Spain and Argentina facing off and the proxy battle between Lionel Messi, the greatest player of all time, and Lamine Yamal, his teenage successor — both highly valuable Adidas athletes.
Interestingly, the most popular image epitomising the Messi vs. Yamal showdown that was shared relentlessly online in the lead-up to the final wasn’t even one created by Adidas.
It was actually the prophetic image from a 2007 UNICEF photoshoot showing a younger Messi bathing Yamal as a baby (not as weird as it sounds) that went viral on the eve of the final, feeding into the “passing the torch” narrative which again focused the world’s attention on Adidas’ greatest active football stars. It also helped that Messi was wearing Adidas sneakers in the image, which could easily have doubled as an Adidas marketing campaign. Instead, the brand got all that exposure for free.
The brand also seized the moment to double down on the narrative.
“I don’t think [the Final] could’ve been scripted better,” said Murphy. “Beyond the immediate commercial lift and jersey sales, it gave us the ultimate storytelling canvas: Messi, the greatest of all time, facing off against the future of the game, Lamine Yamal. As a brand known for bringing together soccer and culture like no other, that generational handoff allowed us to create hero content that resonated far beyond traditional football culture.”
The final also allowed Adidas to drive home its messaging one last time with a big campaign (“La Final”) that brought in many other elements of the Adidas brand outside of football, and neatly tied up the brand’s marketing efforts for the tournament, which began with the blockbuster Backyard Legends film.
“Leaning into the blockbuster moment of Spain and Argentina in the Final, the global campaign embodies the energy, hype and pure cinematic experience we’ve seen throughout the tournament,” said Murphy. “Our full athlete roster has been part of our brand strategy and we added one more creative element the morning of the Final to represent just how much football is the world’s game — and clearly connected to sport in the United States. We used the moment to bridge football with broader sports culture, bringing in sports icons like Anthony Edwards, Jaedyn Shaw and James Harden for our theatre spot. It was a full circle moment for us. We started the tournament with our Backyard Legends campaign which was created to feel like a film, and closed it with a cinematic masterpiece on the world’s biggest stage.”
Adidas’ strategy was to use the World Cup — the single largest and most followed tournament in all of sports — to be a shop window not just for its products, but as a lens through which it could showcase the breadth of its athlete talent, marketing prowess and pop culture proximity.
Adidas had hundreds of players on the pitch wearing its boots, non-football Adidas athletes like Anthony Edwards and other influential football names like Trinity Rodman presenting the Adidas-made match ball before games, and fans queuing up to purchase special Adidas fashion collabs with key federations like Mexico and Argentina.
Even outside of the final, many of the most notable footballing success stories of the tournament (like Jude Bellingham’s standout individual performances for England) were the work of Adidas athletes. Meanwhile, data compiled by Lefty and Karla Otto indicated that two of the top three teams with the highest social media impressions at the tournament were Adidas-affiliated federations (Argentina, #1, and Mexico, #3).
Adidas’ stock is up four percent over the past month, and 19 percent in the last six months. The company is expected to release second quarter earnings at the end of the month, when leadership will no doubt share further details on the commercial boost generated from a very successful World Cup.
It’s also important to point out that just because Adidas “won”, it doesn’t necessarily mean that Nike or any other brand “lost” the World Cup. While there’s no doubt that Adidas dominated the narrative both in person and online, various other brands met their objectives too. Nike CEO Elliott Hill told investors at the beginning of the tournament that World Cup sales were already up significantly from previous years, and the brand executed a well-received product, marketing and celebrity strategy of its own throughout the past seven weeks.
As far as Adidas’ plan to hunt Nike down on its own soil goes, it’s too soon to tell just how much of an impact this World Cup will have. But it will take far more than one successful tournament to get the brand where its competitive leader so desperately wants it. As The New York Times article pointed out, Adidas is still some way behind its larger rival. It made around $5.5 billion in North America sales in its last fiscal year, compared to Nike’s $20.5 billion.
That’s all for today, friends. Thanks for coming along for the ride.
See you next time,
DYM
Great breakdown. Also that moment between Lamine Yamal and Messi is moment for the ages that Adidas can definitely capitalize on for years. In North America, Nike seems to run everything except soccer (football) and that is where Adidas needs to make inroads in those other sports to try and capture that market share.
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