The Anatomy of a World Cup Kit Launch
The humble jersey reveal has become a global marketing festival, featuring splashy IRL events, celebrity guests and rollouts stretching half a year.
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The football world is abuzz with talk of World Cup kits.
Nike, Adidas and Puma — which, between them, design and manufacture the playing kits and training apparel for over 90 percent of teams at this summer’s World Cup — have all gone bigger than ever before with their rollouts over the past week.
Kit launches have been a fixture of the football-sportswear world for many years now. Long gone are the days when teams would retain the same jersey designs for two or more seasons. But there’s no doubt that this is the highest ever level of financial investment and marketing activity being pumped into the pre-World Cup kit launches by the major sportswear brands.
It appears that these days, a simple online and/or in-store reveal is far from sufficient. The multi-pronged kit launch template now includes:
Splashy IRL parties and activations, flying in big-name performers, celebrity guests, legendary athletes and international media;
Specific federation kits getting special treatment with collaborations or their own release dates (e.g. Adidas’ Jamaica kits in collaboration with the Bob Marley estate, or Nike’s Team USA jerseys)
Separate release activations for “home” and “away” kit launches, often months apart, designed to prolong the news cycle and consumer attention spans in the lead up to the tournament
Brands Invest Big in Kit Launches
As analysed on SportsVerse last week, Nike revealed the big news that its Jordan brand was the new partner to the Brazilian football federation, and that the Jumpman logo will debut on the international stage on the country’s away jersey. Nike has since revealed the “away” kit designs for its other partner federations.
Meanwhile, Adidas hosted a huge event over the weekend in Los Angeles, just one day after revealing away kit designs for all 25 of its partner federations, 13 of which are qualified for the World Cup.
The German sportswear giant flew in an endless list of media, athletes, celebrities, content creators and a bunch of vehicles for its takeover of the Lower Grand Tunnel in Downtown LA. The kit launch took the form of a street party, featuring performances from Kaytranada and Baby Keem, and playing host to the likes of Kendall Jenner, Damson Idris, Asap Nast, Anderson Paak and several others.
And to be clear, this event, which must have comfortably cost in the region of the hundreds of thousands, was to help launch and celebrate just the away kits designed by the brand. (The home kits were unveiled back in November.) Meanwhile, Adidas had already splashed out on a multi-day takeover of Brooklyn’s Domino Sugar Factory back in October to walk media and key partners through the brand’s upcoming World Cup kits. Not to mention the Brooklyn Bridge Park event to launch the World Cup ball featuring Zidane, Kaka, Xavi and several others.
Nike also hosted a splashy event in New York last week to promote the launch of the Air Jordan x Brazil football federation partnership and accompanying away jersey.
Puma wasn’t about to be left out. It organised a major event of its own last week in New York’s Domino Square, where it revealed kits for partner federations Ghana, Egypt, Morocco, Austria, Switzerland, Portugal, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Czech Republic, Paraguay, and New Zealand. The brand flew in athletes, media and creators and special performers from around the world and had food trucks on site representing every nation.
What’s at Stake for Nike, Adidas and Puma?
Each brand has different reasons as to why they need to come out on top when all is said and done this summer, which I will quickly summarise:
Adidas is the World Cup’s official sponsor, meaning it sits in pole position to dominate from a marketing POV, with its logo and brand set to be plastered across our screens throughout the tournament. It sees the World Cup as a critical chance to get one over its long-standing rival Nike (in its own backyard), and has leaned heavily into the popularity of football-fashion, producing over 3,000 fresh SKUs which will go on sale in connection to the World Cup, as well as reintroducing its Trefoil logo (more closely associated to sports fashion and its Originals line than the usual Three Stripes) to its federations away jerseys.
Nike will see the World Cup as a chance to show the industry that it still can create memorable products and moments, that it still holds relationships with elite teams and athletes. The brand will not want to be outdone by Adidas on home soil.
Puma has struggled greatly as a business over the past few years. The brand will be hoping that the World Cup will help it to generate some heat and energy around its football category, one of the areas in which it still can generate excitement by offering a different perspective to its larger rivals, thanks to its relationships with African powerhouse federations like Egypt, Senegal, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Morocco.
Whether some or all of these brands see a suitable ROI following the World Cup remains to be seen. But jersey sales are far from the only metric that the likes of Nike, Adidas and Puma will judge the success of their kit launches against. For them, it’s all about dominating the conversation (both on and off the pitch) from start to finish. That’s a battle that begins several months to a year before a ball is even kicked.
That’s all for today, friends. Thanks for coming along for the ride.
See you soon,
DYM
Great piece and very insightful as a non-football fan who usually misses these brand moves. But also as a F1 fan with huge interest in it's commercial landscape, it's interesting to see what adidas in particular are doing with the World Cup and what they might take over with them to F1 with Mercedes & Audi.
Smart of the brands to parcel out the launches of the home and away jerseys separately