Inside Nike's Big-Budget World Cup Strategy
Nike President Amy Montagne told SportsVerse how the brand's World Cup programming and the overall reboot of Nike Football aligns with its overall turnaround efforts ahead of a critical few months.
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. Today’s newsletter is the first of a two-part series unpacking different elements of Nike’s highly scrutinised turnaround strategy, based on wide-ranging interviews conducted recently with the brand’s President, Amy Montagne, and Ann Miller, EVP of global sports marketing.
A cluster of Nike’s most senior leaders gathered for lunch in a grand private backroom at a restaurant in Budapest, Hungary, hours before the Champions League final, at the end of May. Among them were CEO Elliott Hill, brand president Amy Montagne, Phil McCartney, chief innovation, design and product officer, chief communications officer Michael Gonda, and Ann Miller, EVP of global sports marketing (to name just a few). The meeting served as a chance for Nike leadership to come together and reflect, at the outset of what will be a critical summer of sports that could make or break the beleaguered brand’s turnaround strategy.
For reasons still unbeknownst to me, I had a seat at that table, where (in between mouthfuls of Hungarian delicacies), Nike leadership and I spoke candidly about their all-out attack on an era-defining World Cup, the brand’s progress on its turnaround strategy at large, and what the future of Nike will look like should the fruits of their labour come to fruition.
Things got off to a great start for Nike that night, with Nike-sponsored PSG winning its second Champions League final in successive years, which saw the brand benefit from its close association with the team (CEO Hill attended the match alongside PSG president Nasser Al-Khelaifi, while Nike collaborator Travis Scott and athlete AJ Dybantsa were also VIP guests at the game), and also some viral reactive marketing that was so good that it took people hours and in some cases days to work out that the brand had played no part in it at all. In the week that followed, Nike also basked in the sports world’s attention, honing in on two things and two things only: 1) Knicks-mania, with the hair-raising NBA Finals defined so far by standout Nike athlete talent on both sides, from Jalen Brunson to Karl Anthony Towns to Victor Wembanyama; and 2) the build-up World Cup, of course.
Late last week, Nike finally went public with the bulk of its pre-World Cup marketing drive, leading with the release of its long awaited campaign, titled “Rip the Script”, an electrifying, high-budget short film starring just about every star Nike football athlete past and present, with celebrity cameos from the likes of LeBron James, Kim K, Travis Scott, Central Cee, Young Miko and many more.
The timing was nearly as interesting as the commercial itself. While Adidas had spent the best part of the last year drip-feeding product reveals, major in-person activations, special collabs and marketing teasers culminating in the blockbuster “Backyard Legend” film at the beginning of May, Nike opted to sit on the vast majority of its major product and marketing moments before opening the floodgates in the two weeks before the World Cup kicked off.
Produced by Wieden+Kennedy — the go-to creative agency for many of Nike’s best commercials over the years — Rip the Script had an instant impact on the debate as to which sportswear brand was in control of the marketing battle at play in the lead up to a crucial World Cup. If you consider the reach of both campaigns alone, Nike leapfrogged Adidas after its rivals enjoyed weeks of praise for its Backyard Legends film. Rip the Script, still less than four days old, has already racked up 65 million views on YouTube, compared to 6.7 million YouTube views for Adidas’ Backyard Legends spot, which aired one month ago.
But counting up the views doesn’t come close to telling the full story. I’m not here to add my voice to the chatter around which brand’s campaign was better (though I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on the matter; let me know in the comments and poll above).
I think both served the exact purposes that Nike and Adidas intended. For Nike, it was casting as wide a net as possible, using the full extent of its athlete talent roster and its collaborator network to send out a message: that its Nike Football division is once again a core part of the business, and it does not intend to play second fiddle to Adidas or any brand during this World Cup on home soil. Under CEO Hill’s sport offence strategy, football was one of five key pillars of the business around which Nike is building its turnaround efforts.
“We’ve definitely had challenging journeys as a brand, but over the last year or year and a half, we’ve been getting back to what we have called the sport offence,” said Nike President, Amy Montagne. “That means being a sports company leading with the athlete at the centre.”
In recent years, one of the most consistent criticisms levelled at Nike has been that there has been a lack of fresh product and innovation to get consumers excited and spending again. Especially in football, this is one area where Adidas has excelled over Nike, blending the brand’s fashion appeal, sub-labels like Y-3 and collaborators like Wales Bonner with its connection to the heart of football culture through ambassadors like Jude Bellingham and Zinedine Zidane and partners like Real Madrid.
“We’ve been able to align our internal teams across product innovation and design, and support their creations with best storytelling to make sure those stories all come to life — that’s really our formula”, said Ann Miller, who leads the company’s athlete, league, and federation portfolio. “And in the case of the World Cup, we have an additional ingredient in that it’s being played on our home soil, and I think our ability to really bring the beautiful game to the people in the US in a way that they maybe haven’t seen before.”
Nike’s product innovation pipeline was very much stifled under the previous CEO, John Donahoe, meaning there was little for its consumers to turn to in this regard. Flashy marketing moments are all well and good, but ultimately ineffective if there are no products for people to buy.
This time around, things were very different. Rip the Script was released in the same week that all the various national teams were arriving at their camps across North America and playing in their final warm-up games. It was then that Nike chose to reveal a series of interesting fashion-forward collaborations between its key national team federations and various Nike collaborators or sub-brands from the same country. It’s the result of Nike’s renewed focus on localisation, another element the brand shifted away from under the previous regime.
“I think there’s so much more untapped potential in being local, being of the community, and really authentically resonating with these very intentional partnerships,” Miller said.
Localised, High-Heat Collaborations
Nike released a universe of collaborations — comprising sportswear and lifestyle apparel and footwear — with:
the French national team and popular luxury designer Jacquemus;
Nike and Canadian rapper Drake’s sub-label, Nocta and the Canadian national team;
the England national team and British streetwear label Palace Skateboards;
the Netherlands team and legendary Dutch streetwear label, and OG Nike collaborator, Patta; and
South Korean rapper G-Dragon’s PEACEMINUSONE label and the Korean football federation.
Given that team arrival moments are suddenly getting NBA tunnel walk-like treatment in football, the timing of the release and first public sightings of these collaborations couldn’t have been smarter for visibility.
These releases came in addition to the earlier release of the Brazil x Air Jordan partnership, the release of a popular collaboration between British-Nigerian artist Slawn and the Nigerian national team (which sadly didn’t qualify for the tournament), as well as the revival of historic Nike football franchises over the past 12 months, such as T90 (which I wrote about last year), which have served to add yet more layers of product to Nike’s footballing revival efforts.
These releases, geared more toward the fashion and lifestyle crowd, were accompanied by the launch of the brand’s latest instalment of its Mercurial football boot line (a pure performance product), which will be highly visible across World Cup games on the feet of Nike athletes thanks to its bright pink colourway.
Giving each of these federations its own bespoke collaborations was a monumental task, and a strategic play to serve as many consumers across as wide a demographic range as possible, catering to die-hard lovers of the sport but also to more casual fans attracted by the fashion element of football.
“These collaborations are deeply rooted and connected to culture,” said Montagne. “Sport offence means taking [Nike], breaking it into authentic pieces, and understanding which of those pieces help us maximise how we show up for and with our partners in a sport.”
This is a blueprint for how Nike will look to attack the next several years in football — and sports in general, Montagne added. Attention internally has already turned to making the most of the 2027 Women’s World Cup in Brazil, with the Olympics in LA the summer after that already looming large on the horizon from a product development and marketing perspective.
All of this is happening against the wider backdrop of uncertainty and turmoil that has surrounded Nike in recent years. Insiders are painfully aware that the company will be reporting earnings for its full fiscal year 2026 on June 30 — a moment that has the potential to wrestle the narrative back onto discussions about the company’s lack of sales growth right in the middle of the World Cup. Nike stock is still down 30 percent since the beginning of the year, though it has trended more positively in the past month, up 5 percent at the time of writing.
Hill and his executive team are set on returning the company to its sporting roots. The World Cup is the first major tournament where we will see this strategy roll out in real time. The question is whether the market and investors will grant them enough time to see their vision through.
That’s all for today, friends. Thanks for coming along for the ride.
See you next time,
DYM
Insightful read DYM👌. I think what Nike have done better than any other this year is that they have reimagined this campaign as if it was a blockbuster movie release. From the national team kit announcements, each had a distinctive key visual, the athlete & icon Polaroid casting photos, thru to this hero film dropping 2 weeks out. This is theatrical release playbook 101.
What Nike do so well, is they make it fun for the athletes to be part of and the presence of other ambassadors from across entertainment culture 100% reflects the culture in which the World Cup is being hosted - I’ve read people hating on this approach, but they miss the point. It is a world-building marketing approach with ‘Easter eggs’ hidden everywhere for those bothered to look, something you would see across a GTA release. Greg Hoffman (ex CMO) was on a podcast a few years ago, and one thing has stuck with me, he used to always ask his teams ‘What’s the movie poster for the idea?’ - which is to say, if someone can understand your idea in movie poster format, then it’s a good idea. Because movie posters are a communication medium that has to instantly make sense with a few seconds. And In a world where consumer attention is in short supply, executing a brand marketing campaign as a movie studio would, is a smart strategy. Perhaps Nike’s leadership have tapped into some of that think laid down by Hoffman, all those years ago…
Great piece, you did a great job of capturing what is a stake for Nike at the moment. And while you were impressed by Nando's, I'm hyped that you were in Hungary of all places, the homeland of my dear grandfather and the reason for my last name.