Adidas locks in Kings League as global partner until 2028

Creator-led football’s rapid global expansion has secured its most substantial commercial endorsement yet. Adidas has renewed its technical partnership with Kings League through June 2028, committing the German sportswear giant to a property that has grown from a Spanish streaming experiment into a seven-region operation in just over three years.

The extended agreement, confirmed Feb. 24, positions Adidas as Official Technical Partner across all Kings League and women’s Queens League competitions – in Spain, Mexico, Brazil, Italy, France, Germany, and the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region – as well as two annual global tournaments: the Kings World Cup Nations and the Kings World Cup Clubs.

adidas supplies kit, match balls, and other technical equipment to all Kings League teams, players, and staff, with product design deliberately matched to the league’s disruptive visual identity.

From early bet to multi-year commitment

When adidas first signed with Kings League in 2023, the property was essentially a single-market streaming concept founded by Spanish content creators including Gerard Piqué, operating out of Spain. The renewal now encompasses a far larger commercial footprint, with the league reporting more than 36 million social media followers, 26 billion impressions, and over 1 billion engagements since launching in November 2022. More than 80 percent of its audience falls under 34 years old – a demographic that has proven persistently difficult for traditional football formats to retain.

The Kings World Cup Nations Brazil 2026, held Jan. 3–17 in São Paulo, offered an early proof point for the renewed partnership. The tournament featured 20 national teams and drew more than 40,000 spectators to its final at Allianz Parque – a stadium ordinarily associated with top-flight club football.

Why adidas is doubling down on the format

The partnership sits within a broader strategic shift at adidas toward formats that operate outside traditional broadcast structures. Sam Handy, General Manager at adidas Football, said the league had “given young and diverse audiences a new way to engage with football,” describing its community-building model across streaming and live events as evidence of “an enormous appetite for innovative new formats.”

Djamel Agaoua, Chief Executive Officer of Kings League, framed the renewal as infrastructure for continued global scaling: “adidas is more than a technical partner – they are a strategic collaborator in how we build a modern, creator-led sports ecosystem.”

That positioning matters beyond the partnership itself. Creator-led sports properties – including Kings League, but also emerging formats in basketball, American football, and combat sports – are increasingly attracting sponsorship from major sportswear brands that have historically concentrated spend on established leagues and federations. adidas’s multi-year commitment validates the commercial model at a time when broadcasters and brands are still calibrating how much audience value these formats actually deliver relative to conventional rights deals.

What the deal covers – and what it doesn’t

The agreement is a technical partnership, not a title or naming sponsorship. adidas supplies apparel and equipment; it does not own commercial inventory around broadcasts or gate revenue. That distinction matters for how value is assessed: the brand gains identity association and youth-audience exposure, while Kings League gains the credibility and supply consistency of a Tier 1 sportswear partner across all regions simultaneously.

The inclusion of the Queens League in the renewal is notable. Women’s creator-led competition remains commercially underexplored, and the explicit multi-region commitment provides a structural baseline for Kings to develop the property further with a confirmed kit supplier already in place.