Nike to spend more than adidas on shirt deals this World Cup
07/06/2010
The research firm has told the New York Times that Umbro’s deal with the England national football team is the most lucrative in international football with an annual value of EUR 34 million. It argued that this, along with Nike’s own deal with Brazil, worth EUR 22 million a year, will help Nike in the exposure war with its biggest rivals, adidas and Puma, at the FIFA World Cup in South Africa, which begins on June 11.
Twelve of the 32 teams in the tournament—including high-profile countries such as Spain, Germany, France and Argentina—will wear adidas shirts, and adidas is an official sponsor of the event. For these reasons, Sport+Markt executive director, Hartmut Zastrow, told the newspaper that adidas was defending its position well and was still “slightly ahead”. However, he said Nike was “pushing aggressively” into football and would continue to do so.
For this World Cup, Nike will kit out ten teams. By the time the next one comes around in 2014, when Brazil will be the host nation, it will have added France to its roster on a seven-year deal worth more than EUR 40 million a year.
In total for the whole of this year, Nike and Umbro (which it still runs as a separate brand) will spend EUR 104 million on international football teams, more than adidas’s EUR 85 million, Sport + Markt said. These figures eclipse the EUR 30 million Puma is spending, with four of the six African nations taking part and reigning champions Italy its highest profile teams.
But the World Cup is big business for all the sports brands involved. Spanish company Joma is the kit supplier to only one team, Honduras. Nevertheless, The New York Times said Joma anticipated an increase in sales of Honduras shirts of around 40% this year in Honduras itself and of 15% in the US, which has a large Honduran population.
Italian brand Legea said it had paid a little less than EUR 4 million for the rights to kit out North Vietnam. Although the Asian country is unlikely to go far in the tournament, matches against Brazil, Côte d’Ivoire and Portugal will attract large television audiences around the world and will help Legea grow, the company said.
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