On the final day, it was two teams with adidas kits facing up against each other while 18 of the 28 players on the pitch wore boots with three stripes on them. Despite all that, it was a Nike player, one that had been with the brand since signing professional terms at age 16, that won the tournament with a deft piece of control and slick finish.
adidas and Nike win big at World Cup
On the sport’s biggest stage, it was as much a battle of the world’s best national teams as it was between the brands.
Laurence Griffiths
Nike sponsored ten teams in the tournament, the most of all the manufacturers, while adidas had nine teams. The two brands combined to outfit a huge 59% of the tournament with Puma, Burrda, Lotto, Joma, Uhlsport, and Marathon picking up the rest. It was two adidas squads that competed in the final while two Nike sides played in the third place match.
53% of the players in the tournament suited up in Nike boots with the Nike Mercurial (both Superfly IV and Vapor X) and Tiempo V being the favorites among the players while the adidas F50 Adizero was a close third. adidas players won the Golden Ball (Lionel Messi), the Golden Boot (James Rodriguez), and the Golden Glove (Manuel Neuer) as well as ranking up the most assists in the tournament (Juan Cuadrado) and making up eight of 11 spots in the FIFA Team of the Tournament.
The adidas Adizero F50 was the tournament's highest-scoring boot with 48 goals while the Nike Mercurial series scored 36. Four of the tournament's top five goalscorers wore the F50 (James Rodriguez, Thomas Mueller, Lionel Messi, and Robin van Persie) while the fifth did it in the Nike Hypervenom. Speaking of the Hypervenom, it was the boot that broke Ronaldo's World Cup goalscoring record on the feet of Miroslav Klose, as he nipped in and finished from close range, as he has been known to do, to bring his total over four tournaments to 16 goals.
This World Cup was the most social to date and the statistics showed that to an incredible extent. Nike’s three World Cup ads (Risk Everything, Winner Stays, and The Last Game) racked up a total of 397 million views online while 23 million people engaged with Nike’s content on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. adidas was not a slouch in this department either, gathering over 38 million views on YouTube for their published videos and growing the @brazuca twitter account to nearly 3.5 million followers (at the time of writing). Additionally, adidas had the most used brand hashtag of the tournament on Twitter with #allin.
All in all, it was an incredible tournament in just about every regard. Both adidas and Nike have incredible holds on the market and it will be very interesting to see how this translates to the club season for 2014/15, the Women’s World Cup, and the many international tournaments that will ultimately build up to World Cup 2018.
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