Who will win the World Cup? No, not Spain, Brazil or England but the teams in South Africa aiming for financial victory. Nike, Adidas and Puma go head to head in South Africa this summer in a bid to become the sporting brand world champions.

If the North Korean football federation has anything like a marketing manager, he must be either hopelessly disorganised, or a very gutsy negotiator. Just a few days before the start of the World Cup, it was still unclear what shirts the North Koreans would be wearing for the tournament. Even Erke, the Chinese brand that outfitted the team last year, admitted that it didn’t know what was going on.

This dithering contrasts sharply with the slick marketing plans drawn up by other football teams and brands, which regard the World Cup as the ultimate opportunity to shine. In the last decades the event has turned into a marketing orgy, with the largest sports brands throwing hundreds of millions of marketing dollars at football fans.

The Italians had barely finished cleaning up the streets of Rome after their celebrations four years ago when sports marketing men started raiding South Africa. “We’ve been preparing for this for the last four years, and we’ve got all angles covered,” said Gavin Cowley, marketing director for Adidas, and the German brand’s project leader for the World Cup in South Africa. “Only the approach will be a little different this time, since the event is taking place in a developing country”.

For the public, the onslaught started last December with the introduction of the controversial Jabulani ball by Adidas in Cape Town. Then came hyped-up launches of each brand’s football boots, like the extravaganza thrown by Nike at the old Battersea Power Station in London for its latest version of the Mercurial in March. If you thought a football jersey was just an ugly nylon shirt, you must have missed more glitzy bashes for kit presentations. But the marketing feast will start in earnest in the next days, when all eyes will turn to South African football pitches.

Adidas will be outfitting twelve teams, including the South Africans and several heavy-weights like Argentina and Germany. The three stripes are already making a killing with South African football shirts, since the government attempted to whip up support for the team by declaring Football Friday and encouraging people to wear yellow shirts on the last day of the week.

Nike has set aside an unprecedented budget for the upcoming edition, as part of its bid to catch up with Adidas in the international football business. It will be worn by nine teams in South Africa, from Brazil to the Netherlands and Portugal. Its marketing blast includes an epic commercial of no less than three minutes, with guest stars like Cristiano Ronaldo.

As for Puma, it is almost playing a home game. It has been investing in African teams for many years, long before this became the smart thing to do. Cameroon, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Algeria will all be sporting the wildcat, along with Italy, Switzerland and Uruguay.

There are another three brands on the pitch, with one team each: Joma outfitting Honduras, Brooks on the shoulders of the Chileans, and Umbro still worn by the England team. And then there’s the North Korean unknown.

It’s only in the last few years that marketing around the World Cup has turned into such a hullabaloo, as the rivalry between Adidas and Nike intensified in the football business. But the sports companies have long been using the event as an opportunity to display their brands and to deploy their marketing tricks.

 

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Read more hier: PUMA vs. NIKE vs. ADIDAS

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