A marketing victory for Nike is a business win for Adidas
The contest of the sportswear giants heats up
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.
This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline "Three stripes and you are out"
Business March 30th 2024
- Have McKinsey and its consulting rivals got too big?
- Making accounting sexy again
- A marketing victory for Nike is a business win for Adidas
- The pros and cons of corporate uniforms
- Regulators are forcing big tech to rethink its AI strategy
- Dave Calhoun bows out as chief executive of Boeing
- Meet the digital David taking on the Google Goliath
More from Business
Can Home Depot’s “amazing era” return?
Americans are yet to recover their enthusiasm for renovations
App stores are hugely lucrative—and under attack
Governments want to curb their power
For Gen-Z job-seekers, TikTok is the new LinkedIn
Companies had better start scrolling