Stripes vs Swoosh

Adidas may be the official sponsor at Germany 2006, but Nike won’t give in without a fight. The beautiful game could turn ugly, observers said.

Adidas is milking its official sponsorship of the World Cup in its own country like no sponsor before. “Our three-stripes logo will be everywhere,” said chief executive Herbert Hainer. “For two years we have had more than 100 people in a separate building working on the World Cup ... We have set ourselves aggressive targets.”

There are financial targets — the original one (one billion in football sales this year) will be surpassed easily, with 1.2 billion the latest estimate. But the real goal is clear: Get Nike, especially on what should be Adidas’s home turf of European football.

The squabbling sportswear rivals can’t even agree on who’s number one at the moment.

“I do not believe they are number one; this would be completely wrong,” said Hainer.

“Everyone debates the market share. I prefer to focus on what the consumer thinks and our momentum, coming from $40 million (football sales in 1994) to $1.5 billion, speaks for itself,” retorts Charles Denson, president of Nike.

On some measures, Nike’s sponsorship of European football giants such as Arsenal and Barcelona, the finalists in the Champions’ League (official event sponsor: Adidas) has seen the US outfit pip its rival in Europe. But the real question is how Nike’s “Swoosh” logo has managed to get so visible in soccer, given that it only began to show real interest in football at the 1994 World Cup in the US. And even then it was a little cautious.

“At the time it did take a lot of extra persuasion because, as you know, football wasn’t a big sport in America. But once we made the decision and the commitment, starting in 1994, it’s been a very good ride and we’re extremely excited about the World Cup,” said Denson.

So get ready for a carefully honed all-out marketing battle — the most costly in football history, with Adidas spending around ?120 million and Nike about half that.

Nike’s star-strewn advertising campaign, Joga Bonito (“play beautifully” in Portuguese), has captured imaginations. Twelve million people have seen “Ping Pong,” its edgy Internet “viral ad” in which a digitally enhanced Ronaldinho plays a version of squash with the crossbar and the stands at Barcelona’s training ground. Nike has also signed a marketing deal with Google to promote a fansite called joga.com, and a three-a-side football tournament.

Adidas is doing the same.

It has built temporary stadiums for the fans near the Reichstag in Berlin and at its headquarters in Herzogenaurach for the Argentina national team’s training sessions. But Hainer still wants a crackdown on the “ambush” marketing tactics — designed to drag attention away from Adidas’s status as official sponsor — that he feels are likely.

“Fifa is making efforts to control it. In 1998 it was bad, less so in Japan and Korea. Can you eliminate it 100 percent? I don’t think so, but it will definitely be less than in the past,” he said.

Nike’s design team has also made considerable efforts to make each national team shirt distinctive to that country, from the print of the jersey to the graphic-design values of the player’s number. It seems like a conscious effort to distinguish the brand from Adidas and its reliance on its three stripes, which Nike and a group of other manufacturers managed to get banned at the Olympics and in tennis, because it gave the German brand unfair prominence.

But much of Nike’s good work could yet be undone by the disaster of Wayne Rooney’s boots. He was meant to be Nike’s superstar ambassador in Germany. Instead, rather unfairly, his new Nikes have been linked in the public mind to the foot injury that could sideline him from football’s greatest stage.

There have been upheavals within Nike’s boardroom too. Founder and chairman Phil Knight sacked his chief executive after a year. In came a new top team of long-term Nike insiders — Mark Parker as CEO and Denson as president. Many saw that as a response to Adidas’ aggressive push into the US by gobbling up Reebok, the number three sportswear company in the world.

‘We are strong in Europe and Asia, but were at a disadvantage in US, where (Nike) is ahead. (Reebok) helps us a lot,” said Hainer.

Hainer admits that the two companies are “fighting like sports teams.” His big hope is that hosting the World Cup in his company’s home country will propel Adidas like it did Nike in 1994.