Nike, adidas, PUMA: three brands, three theories at World Cup 2026

At the 2026 World Cup, three brands are outfitting 37 of the 48 competing national teams: adidas with 14, Nike with 12, PUMA with 11. The kit count is the surface story. The deeper one, and the one that matters commercially, is that all three have arrived at the same tournament with fundamentally different answers to the same question: what does it mean to win a World Cup off the pitch?

This summer is not just a contest of budgets. It is a structural experiment in brand strategy, playing out across campaigns, product ecosystems and retail activations that will shape competitive positioning well beyond July 19. Understanding how each brand is competing, and why the strategies diverge, is the intelligence that counts.

The scoreboard before kickoff

We start with the numbers. It is our job, even if we prefer the human stories.

adidas supplies 14 federations, including Argentina, Germany, Spain, Mexico and Japan, and holds advantages no campaign budget can replicate: it is the Official Match Ball provider for the FIFA World Cup 2026 and has maintained an official FIFA partnership for decades. Every “Trionda” ball touched in North America this summer carries three stripes. The Wall Street Journal has reported adidas expects the tournament to generate approximately €250 million in product revenue. The figure is not officially confirmed. But the ambition is.

Nike outfits 12 teams. That is fewer than adidas, but the roster is weighted toward global visibility. Brazil, France, England, the United States and the Netherlands are “Nike” federations. In a tournament where viewership is driven by marquee nations rather than breadth of participation, Nike’s 12 may generate more commercial attention than adidas’ 14. Team performance will matter, too.

PUMA supplies 11 federations across four continents: its largest kit portfolio at a World Cup since 2006. The most significant dimension of that roster is geographic: five of the 11 partner nations are African – Ghana, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Morocco and Egypt – giving PUMA a wider presence on the continent than any other manufacturer at this tournament. It is a long-term strategic choice, reflecting the clearest challenger logic adopted by PUMA: a market bet on underdeveloped football economies with growing global fan bases.

Nostalgia, balls and balloons: adidas turns FIFA’s match ball into spectacle

adidas entered the summer of football on May 7 with Backyard Legends, a five-minute film whose cast stretches from the Ballon d’Or cabinet to Hollywood: Lionel Messi, Lamine Yamal,Jude Bellingham, Trinity Rodman, alongside legends Zinedine Zidane, David Beckham and Alessandro Del Piero, de-aged to their playing-era selves. Academy Award-nominated actor Timothée Chalamet anchors the narrative. Puerto Rican artist Bad Bunny appears.

The cultural register is unmistakably 1990s: urban pitches, analog aesthetics, and the crossover of hip-hop, graffiti and sportswear that cemented streetwear as a cultural force in that decade. The timing is deliberate: the World Cup returns to North American soil for the first time since 1994, and Backyard Legends is designed to tap the nostalgia that tournament carries for a generation of supporters who grew up watching it.

What distinguishes adidas’ campaign strategy from Nike’s is that the film does not need to sustain the commercial load on its own. adidas has the official match ball. It has 14 federation kits. It has the FIFA partnership. These guarantee product presence and revenue pipeline regardless of whether Backyard Legends generates six weeks of cultural attention or peaks and fades after the first fortnight. The campaign is a premium placed on top of an already secured structural position.

adidas has reinforced that position with a secondary activation unlikely to be replicated by either rival: a giant hot air balloon shaped like the official Trionda match ball – itself equipped with AI-connected tracking technology – launched over Mexico ahead of the tournament. Turning the official product into outdoor spectacle is a type of activation uniquely enabled by its role as official match ball partner”

Nike: from hero film to content universe

Nike’s campaign arrived in two movements. The first, on May 21, was anti-spectacular: a series of Polaroid photographs, lo-fi in format and viral in intent, featuring dozens of athletes, artists and cultural figures. No narrative, no film, just faces and autographs designed to generate speculation rather than satisfaction.

The second, on June 4, was Rip the Script: a six-minute film set inside a Hollywood mega-studio, centered on the premise that instinct beats instruction. The cast runs to thirty-plus names: Cristiano Ronaldo, Kylian Mbappé, Erling Haaland, Vini Jr., LeBron James, Kim Kardashian, Travis Scott, Eric Cantona, Ronaldinho, Ted Lasso, Channing Tatum.

But Rip the Script is not Nike’s campaign. It is Nike’s entry point.

Nike has moved beyond and deprioritized the traditional hero-film model. What the brand calls the “Universe of Nike Football” is a distributed rollout across a 12-week window: product launches, cultural collaborations, community activations, and serialized content storylines designed to generate recurring presence through the full tournament cycle. The Polaroid series was the teaser. Rip the Script seems a “hero film” but it is not: it is the gateway to enter this long window crossing the line between ATL, BTL, online and offline.

The Kim Kardashian “soccer mom” subplot, the layers of Easter eggs referencing three decades of Nike Football mythology, and the collaborations with Jacquemus, Palace and PATTA: all of these are designed to keep Nike in the feed long after a single blockbuster film would have peaked and faded.

Nike VP of Brand Management Helena Thornton articulated the logic directly: “We made this film to meet football communities exactly where they are, not just on a screen, but in their world and deeply ingrained into their subcultures. We didn’t want to follow the traditional marketing playbook.”

The retail activation layer is equally ambitious. The House of Merc at 21 Mercer in New York. Estadio Niky’s in Los Angeles. The Roof At Vanta in Dallas. More than 5,000 retail locations globally refreshed to carry the football universe through the tournament: an integrated commercial architecture in which the film is the entry and the product ecosystem delivers economic exit.

This strategy is also inseparable from Nike’s broader corporate reset. CEO Elliott Hill, who returned to the company in October 2024, has restructured operations around a “Sport Offense” model, organizing Nike, Jordan Brand and Converse around individual sports rather than product categories. Football has been identified as a priority growth engine. The World Cup is its catalyst.

A personal note of the editor is warranted here.

Twenty years of working with audiovisual media leaves a particular kind of residue. Hiring and training videographers, writing storyboards, and above all sitting in screening rooms watching other people’s work – one minute, two minutes, six, sometimes longer – trains the eye in ways that are hard to articulate and impossible to switch off. After watching Rip the Script, two things stayed with me.

The first: it is one of the most scripted pieces of film I can remember encountering in recent months of covering sporting goods and sport brand activations here at SGIE. Every frame is placed. Every cameo is choreographed. Every beat arrives exactly where the production plan said it would. A film that declares itself a rebellion against the director’s instructions is, in execution, the most directed thing in the room.

The second: technical perfectionism, taken far enough, moves away from emotion rather than toward it. Whether is was their choice was deliberate - play the film cool, to let spectacle substitute for feeling - I cannot say with certainty. What I can say is that it lands as under-emotional. Not cold, exactly. But sealed. The kind of film you watch completely and remember partially. The kind of thing I always tried to avoid, when dealing with video commissioning at Red Bull Media House.

That gap between craft and feeling is worth naming. Nike has built something technically formidable, but it does not touch the hearts.

End of the personal note.

PUMA: the challenger’s third way

PUMA has not released (yet) a blockbuster campaign film for this World Cup cycle.

The World Cup kit launch in March was delivered not through a press conference or cinematic production, but through a street football tournament in Brooklyn, with cultural trucks carrying food, music and national identity into community spaces. For new PUMA CEO Arthur Hoeld, a former adidas executive who took over last year, navigating the brand’s first major tournament under new ownership, the coherence of the 11-federation kit portfolio and the community-first activation approach will be read by the market as an early signal of whether PUMA’s turnaround is real.

PUMA’s African federation concentration is a market development strategy in regions where adidas and Nike have historically underinvested, and where a strong tournament run by a single federation can generate disproportionate commercial energy. The Morocco precedent is instructive: at Qatar 2022, the Atlas Lions’ run to the semi-finals produced a wave of kit demand and brand visibility across North and West Africa that extended well beyond the tournament window. PUMA is positioned to benefit from a similar dynamic in 2026 if any of its five African federations perform.

It is also worth noting what PUMA is not trying to do. It is not competing with Nike for cultural conversation. It is not competing with adidas for official legitimacy. It is building depth in the spaces neither giant has fully claimed, at a cost structure neither giant would accept. That is what a challenger strategy looks like when it is working correctly.

What we’ll be watching

The debate over which brand made the better advertisement will run until July 19. We at SGIE will not take part in it.

We will follow the coming weeks with these questions on our notebooks.

# What demand will the brands actually drive – not only for expensive shirt replicas, but across their full football product portfolios? Will the campaigns win new customers in new regions, or consolidate existing ones?

# How will PUMA perform as the old-new challenger, and how will the brand build on its Africa strategy if – or when – one of its five federations delivers a tournament run worth talking about?

# At the brand level: will Rip the Script move Nike meaningfully toward the performance credibility reconnection that Elliott Hill’s “Sport Offense” requires? Will Backyard Legends convert emotional warmth and creative praise into product revenue at the scale adidas has projected?

# And perhaps the question that matters most to our audience: how will non-US retailers – and European retailers in particular – be able to convert this “heated rivalry” into sales? How will their own activations, which we have been documenting, sync with and leverage the brand moments that football delivers like almost no other event in sport?

Those are the questions we’ll be asking.

The verdict on the better advertisement can wait.

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