A marketing victory for Nike is a business win for Adidas
The choice to replace Adidas with Nike as the supplier of kit for the German football team from 2027 to 2034 was a purely commercial decision by the German Football Federation (DFB). Germans’ reaction to the ending of a 77-year-old all-German partnership was, by contrast, highly emotional. Commerce is destroying a piece of Heimat, lamented Karl Lauterbach, the health minister, using the German word that evokes the idea of home, belonging and place.
Robert Habeck, the economy minister, said that he would have hoped for a bit more “local patriotism". Markus Söder, Bavaria’s straight-shooting premier, declared it simply “wrong, a pity and incomprehensible". Bernd Neuendorfer, head of the dFB, was “aghast" at the outcry.
In his view, the decision was a no-brainer. The DFB is in financial dire straits and he received an offer from the American company that was far higher than the one from Adidas, so he accepted it. According to reports in the German press, Nike offered €100m ($108m) to kit out the Nationalmannschaft, twice as much as its German rival.
For the world’s biggest maker of sportswear, with an annual operating profit of $6bn, it is pocket change. For Adidas, the distant number two, which eked out just €268m from operations in 2023, matching Nike would have burnt a hole in its pocket. Bjorn Gulden, who took over as chief executive of Adidas at the start of 2023, chose finance over football—his earlier career as a professional player notwithstanding.
Under the no-nonsense Norwegian’s leadership, Adidas seems to be at last on the path to recovery. Its share price has risen by around 40% over the past 12 months. Its operating profit may pale in comparison with Nike’s, but it came as a pleasant surprise to analysts, who
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