A senior executive reshuffle at Adidas will alter the brand’s leadership in Spain and Greece as well as in football. Jimmy Weigl, the company’s international football manager, will move to Madrid from the beginning of next year to become managing director of Adidas Iberia, supervising the brand’s business in Spain and Portugal. At Adidas since his trainee years, Weigl strongly contributed to the takeoff of the Predator football boot in the second half of the ‘nineties. As head of the football and rugby unit since February 1999, he rose to prominence by organizing the resounding and multi-faceted campaigns of the Three Stripes around the 2004 European championships and this year’s football World Cup.
Weigl is succeeding Alain Brouhard, who spent less than two years at the helm of Adidas Iberia but improved its position against Nike, the market leader by a relatively small margin. The Frenchman has been appointed from the beginning of next year as joint managing director of Adidas Hellas, which is an equal joint venture between Adidas AG and Conalvia SA, a company controlled by the Antoniades brothers. Brouhard will share the management of Adidas Hellas, the Greek market leader, with the current managing director, Alexander Antoniades.
The move is largely motivated by the personal situation of Brouhard, whose wife is Greek and residing in Athens with their two children. However, it will conveniently beef up the management structure of Adidas in the Southeast of Europe, at a time when Bulgaria and Romania are preparing to enter the European Union. Along with his role at Adidas Hellas, Brouhard will be studying further opportunities in the region. Under the current management structure at Adidas, Greece remains a stand-alone country, while Romania and Bulgaria are part of Zone Middle, along with Turkey and Cyprus. Zone Middle is supervised from Istanbul by Haluk Ozmutlu. It belongs to Adidas’ wider Area Emerging Markets, which is in turn supervised by Osman Ayaz from Dubai.
Markus Baumann will follow in Weigl’s footsteps to take over his position at the head of Adidas’ football business from the beginning of November. Just like Weigl, Baumann earned his stripes through a long career with the company, covering a string of sports from football to tennis and running. However, he briefly strayed to Nike before returning to Adidas in 2003 to work alongside Weigl. He will report to Rolf Reinschmidt, senior vice president of global product marketing.
