Three months before the men’s football Euro, which is being held in Germany from June 14 to July 14, the turnaround had the effect of a thunderclap. The German Football Federation (DFB) announced, on the evening of Thursday March 21, its intention to change sports equipment manufacturers. It is the American Nike, and no longer the German Adidas, which will equip the players of the Mannschaft from 2027 until 2034. This is a major break in the history of the Herzogenaurach group, in Bavaria, as in that of German football.
For more than seventy years, the brand with the three stripes has continuously equipped Mannschaft players. Their destinies are closely linked: during the 1954 World Cup final, nicknamed across the Rhine the “miracle of Berne”, the German players won, wearing shoes with screwed studs designed by Rudi Dassler, the founder of Adidas. Since then, the success of the German team, four times world champions, has merged with that of the Bavarian group. Adidas is today the second largest sports equipment manufacturer in the world… behind Nike, almost twice as big as it, with 40 billion euros in turnover.
The affair confirms that, in today’s world of football, history and patriotism carry little weight compared to the gigantic financial stakes. According to daily information Handelsblatt, Nike proposed a payment of at least 100 million euros per season, i.e. a contract worth 800 million euros over the period 2027-2034, to equip all the national teams: the women’s team, the junior team and the men’s team. This would represent at least double what Adidas has been paying so far. The sports federation did not comment on the figures, only stating that the partnership “would allow him to lead a broad development of football in Germany in the decade to come”. Financially weakened by the aftermath of the fiasco of its partnership with the scandalous rapper Kanye West and his Yeezy brand, Adidas obviously did not want to follow the American’s offer.
“Game ball between multinationals”
In a country where football is, alongside industry, one of the main vehicles of national pride, the turnaround provoked emotional reactions in political circles. In Munich, the president of the Bavaria region, the very conservative Markus Söder, described “regrettable and incomprehensible” the end of the Adidas-DFB partnership: “German football is popular culture in its purest form, not a game between multinationals. »
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