As the official supplier of the Fifa World Cup and the Spanish football team, which beat the Nike-clad Dutch team in the final on Sunday, Adidas was probably the overall winner among the sports brands competing for leadership in the football market, although Andrés Iniesta scored the winning goal for Spain in Nike’s CTR360 Elite series boots.
To celebrate the victory of the Spanish team, Adidas has started producing a new version of the Spanish jersey with a star in the emblem. Since the start of the tournament, the company has shipped an additional 100,000 shirts to Spanish retailers, building up to a total of nearly 1 million units.
Nike says that it had more of its own boots on the pitch in South Africa than any other brand. They were worn by eight members of the Spanish team and by 47 percent of the players who started each game, versus 32 percent for Adidas.
Adidas, which sponsored a few more teams than Nike throughout the tournament, points out that 41 goals were scored with its F50 adiZero boots, more than double its next competitor. A Nike official didn’t have the same mathematics: 62 goals scored with Nike boots and 61 with Adidas boots excluding two own goals scored with Adidas boots.
Nike says its football revenues grew by 39 percent in April-May-June from the comparable period a year ago. Company officials are budgeting full-year revenues of $1.7 billion in football for the Nike brand, pretty close to Adidas’ projection of €1.5 billion sales. The addition of about $200 million in sales by Umbro will tip over the balance.
Last Friday, Herbert Hainer, chief executive of the Adidas Group, said Adidas will over-achieve its ambitious goals in football this year with sales of more than 6.5 million replica jerseys and over 20 million footballs, with more than 13 million featuring the design of the controversial official match ball of the World Cup, the Jabulani.
Meanwhile, a study by NM Incite has found that Adidas was mentioned online more than any other company during the World Cup, with a 25.1 percent share. Nike’s share was 19.4 percent. Nike started out ahead, being mentioned in 30.2 percent of the message studied from May 7 to June 6, partly boosted by its “Write the Future” ad campaign featuring football stars Cristiano Ronaldo and Wayne Rooney, and other athletes including Kobe Bryant and Roger Federer.
However, Adidas claimed the top spot once the tournament started, not least as people talked about the controversial Jabulani ball used in the World Cup. Nike says its digital campaign collected 35 million views on Youtube and reached out to 9.2 million fans of Nike Football sites on various social networks. Nike also reports that its T90 tracer ball is going to be used in the English, Spanish and Italian league championships from the next season.
Regardless of the competition between the two giants, the clear winner of the tournament was the Spanish sporting goods market. Sport Panel, which estimates that the market fell by 7 percent last year, says the Spanish victory could help the market recover by up to 7.2 percent this year, while raising general sports participation by 3 percentage points over the next three years.
Economists feel that the battered Spanish economy as a whole will see its GDP improve by an extra 0.7 percent because of the World Cup victory, stimulating consumption more than any governmental measures.
