"You couldn't have scripted it better." That's Adidas CEO Bjørn Gulden, speaking from New York the day before attending a World Cup final where his company sponsors both teams, both superstars, and the match ball. Spain vs. Argentina in New Jersey, and the three stripes are literally everywhere you look.
Messi in Adidas. Lamine Yamal in Adidas. The ball? Adidas. It's a marketing clean sweep that no amount of budget could guarantee — you need the football gods to cooperate, and this time they did.
The numbers are real
Four times as many jerseys sold compared to Qatar 2022. Twice as many balls. Event-related sales expected to top $1.7 billion. These aren't vanity metrics — they reflect genuine commercial momentum in a market Adidas has long struggled to crack.
Because here's the problem Gulden is still sitting with: Adidas pulled in around $5.5 billion in North American sales last fiscal year. Nike did $20.5 billion. Same continent, same sport shops, wildly different outcomes. A perfect World Cup final doesn't close that gap by itself.
Gulden is direct about the deficit. "In the U.S., our competitor has been much, much, much stronger than us," he said. "The plan is to be more American." That means American executives now running the North America division, renewed distribution pushes into Dick's Sporting Goods and regional chains like Academy Sports — reversing a pullback that had cost the brand real shelf presence — and signing athletes who actually resonate stateside, from Minnesota Timberwolves star Anthony Edwards to first-round Raiders pick Fernando Mendoza.
Beyond the pitch
The World Cup wave may not even be Adidas's biggest 2025 story. In April, Sabastian Sawe and Yomif Kejelcha both broke the two-hour marathon barrier at the London Marathon wearing the Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3 — a 97-gram, carbon-plated, $500 shoe that signals Adidas is serious about performance credibility again. Running has historically been inconsistent territory for the brand. Breaking the sub-two barrier twice in one morning changes the conversation.
Gulden is under no illusions about the timeline. He says catching Nike in North America will take many years. Nike, for its part, is dealing with its own distribution headaches and sluggish China numbers, so the gap is at least stoppable — but Adidas has a long way to run.
"We can't tell the American consumer what they want," Gulden said. "We need to listen and we need to live in the culture." That's the right instinct. Whether the execution follows is a different question entirely.
