Business | Three stripes and you are out

A marketing victory for Nike is a business win for Adidas

The contest of the sportswear giants heats up

A jersey of Germany’s national team in an official store. — Photograph: Getty Images

Mar 27th 2024|BERLIN

The choice to replace Adidas with Nike as the supplier of kit for the German football team from 2027 to 2034 was a purely commercial decision by the German Football Federation (DFB). Germans’ reaction to the ending of a 77-year-old all-German partnership was, by contrast, highly emotional. Commerce is destroying a piece of Heimat, lamented Karl Lauterbach, the health minister, using the German word that evokes the idea of home, belonging and place. Robert Habeck, the economy minister, said that he would have hoped for a bit more “local patriotism”. Markus Söder, Bavaria’s straight-shooting premier, declared it simply “wrong, a pity and incomprehensible”.

This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “Three stripes and you are out”