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Adidas Made the Same Bet Twice

How Adidas pulled off with Yamal the same play that worked with Messi twenty years earlier

SOCCER

8/16/20263 min read

Growing up, Lamine was sponsored by Nike, and off the pitch he was almost always wearing Air Force 1s. Neymar was his idol, and he's always had a soft spot for the Hypervenoms the Brazilian made iconic, which came out right around when Yamal was a kid just starting out at Barça. He's said more than once he'd love to lace them up for a match or training someday, as a nod to the guy he looked up to.

Like a lot of other academy kids, Nike had sponsored him since he was young, the same way they'd done years earlier with another La Masia kid who turned out to have some promise: Lionel Messi. And right in the middle of his breakout, at sixteen and already playing for the first team, Yamal left for Adidas.

Why he left just as he was peaking

His own words explain it better than any analysis could: "I saw there was a spot for me at Adidas that didn't exist at Nike. To be clear, at Nike there's Kylian Mbappé and Vinícius Júnior, and I was only 15 at the time." It wasn't a two-horse race, either. By the time his Nike deal ran out, he had four offers on the table: Nike itself wanting to re-sign him, plus Adidas, Puma, and New Balance, all chasing a sixteen-year-old.

What Nike loses every time it runs a campaign

For Nike, keeping Yamal would have been the perfect setup. It's a lot easier to build a campaign around your club's biggest young star wearing your brand head to toe than to split the jersey from the boots. This exact thing already happened to them with Messi: back in 2006, Nike had an entire World Cup campaign ready to go with him as one of the main faces, photoshoot and all. Once he signed with Adidas, they had to scrap the whole thing overnight. Nike is dealing with the same problem with Yamal today. Every time they drop a new Barça jersey, they can't put the club's biggest icon in the ad, because they don't own his image rights for that.

The numbers, and why they kept climbing

Adidas closed the deal in February 2024: a ten-year contract worth somewhere around €32-34 million, roughly €3-4 million a year. But that number didn't stay frozen. The contract includes performance-based review clauses, and it's already been bumped up more than once, first after his breakout Euro 2024, and again after a year that saw him finish runner-up for the Ballon d'Or and win the World Cup with Spain. The better he plays on the field, the more he makes off it.

And to really grasp the scale of what Adidas is building here, you have to look at the other end of the spectrum. Messi's deal with the brand is reportedly worth up to a billion dollars over his lifetime, and one Wall Street analyst estimated that his 2023 move to Inter Miami alone added around $10 billion in market value to Adidas, ten times the size of his entire contract. Locking in Yamal now, while he's still a teenager, is the cheapest way to try to pull off that same trick twenty years down the line.

The same play that already worked once

Two decades earlier, that same Messi, also a Nike-sponsored teenager at the time, made the jump to Adidas as a young prospect with nothing won yet. The brand is running the exact same play now with another Barça academy product, two generations later.

What already connected them, long before any contract

There's a real photo that resurfaces on social media every so often: a twenty-year-old Messi, still at Barça, took part in a shoot for UNICEF and the club's calendar where he's pictured bathing a five-month-old Yamal. Neither of them had any idea back then what that connection would come to mean.

Fast forward to July 2026. Right after the World Cup final, with Spain crowned champions and Argentina eliminated, Yamal steps away from Spain's celebration for a moment to find Messi in the middle of the loss. All he says is, "I'm sorry." Messi tells him to keep going his own way, that the future belongs to his generation. Yamal would later say those words meant as much to him as the gold medal around his neck.

What each side got out of it

Today Yamal fronts Adidas's F50 boot line and appears alongside Messi, Beckham, Zidane, Bellingham, and Chalamet in the brand's 2026 World Cup campaign. He's said it himself: it's the best decision he's ever made. And Adidas, for its part, finally has what it's been chasing for two decades, ever since Messi started nearing the end of his career: the baby from that photo is now the one set to inherit his place at the brand they both chose, twenty years apart, for exactly the same reason.