Everyone remembers when Adidas dropped Kanye.
Almost nobody noticed
when they started winning without him until suddenly they were everywhere again.
This is FC Explains.
At every stop on Oasis’ 2025 world tour.
Something interesting was happening before the band even took the stage.
Fans were already dressed head to toe in Adidas tracksuits, Sambas, everything.
It wasn't a coincidence.
It was actually the point.
Adidas didn't just sponsor the tour.
They made themselves part of the culture, the nostalgia, the whole moment.
Champagne Supernova in the sky
Then, after a series of collaboration designs, Bad
Bunny launched his own signature shoe at the Super Bowl halftime show this year,.
So how did Adidas get here?
After losing one of the most lucrative partnerships in brand history.
How did they end up more culturally relevant than ever?
In January 2023,
Bjorn Guldan started as CEO and after a period of reorganization,
the brand leaned into its heritage in sneakers and sports,
pairing iconic products with smart partnerships
that put Adidas back at the center of culture.
Here's why it worked.
Adidas didn't have to manufacture that connection.
Oasis fans have been showing up in the three stripes since the Gallagher
brothers adopted them as their de facto uniform back in the 90s.
The brand was already woven into the identity of that fan base.
Adidas just made it official and built a business around it.
Oasis Live 25 pop up shops opened in two cities around the world.
The brand didn’t go looking for Oasis because it seemed like a smart marketing move.
The connection was already there.
The collaboration just gave it a commercial form.
Which brings us to Bad Bunny.
His Adidas partnership began during his concert residency in Puerto Rico.
He worked with the brand to produce custom Sambas celebrating the island's culture.
He wore his first signature shoe, the Bad Bo 1.0, in a new white colorway
during the Super Bowl halftime show this year.
Adidas didn't just put Bad Bunny's name on an existing shoe.
This time they worked with him to build a signature.
That's a different level of creative investment that signals
how seriously they're taking these partnerships.
And the result is a product that his audience genuinely wants
because it genuinely reflects him.
This isn't a brand chasing streetwear hype.
It's a brand that believes its athletic heritage is worth
something in luxury spaces, and that the right creative partner
can prove it.
To understand how it happened, I spoke to Alasdhair
Willis, who joined Adidas in 2022, as chief creative officer.
His connection to the brand
goes back to 2005, when he helped develop Adidas by Stella McCartney.
He previously worked as creative director of British fashion brand Hunter,
known for his rubber boots worn everywhere from farms to festivals.
Willis told me
that a successful collaboration is more than just a licensing play.
The company looks for partners
who, in his words, have a genuine interest in the brand.
When that's the case, the authenticity and relevance
come through, and the brand naturally reaches new audiences.
He also told me the team regularly ask themselves
what athletes need right now to improve their performance.
That's the tension
Adidas has learned to hold streetwear credibility and sports DNA
working together, not against each other.
Willis told me that these two elements,
the two sides of the brand, absolutely go hand in hand.
The more the company engages
that DNA as a sports brand, the more its streetwear can build on that legacy.
Now Adidas is entering one of the most concentrated
periods of global sports visibility in its history.
The 2026 FIFA World Cup will be hosted across the United States, Canada
and Mexico, the largest World Cup ever in terms of both teams and audience.
A ton of the tournament's top national teams will be wearing Adidas kits.
And the 2028 Olympic Games will be another high profile time to shine.
It's a chance to put its athletic heritage
front and center in front of a global audience, in one of the most fashion
conscious cities on the planet.
Adidas will likely approach both moments
the way they approached everything else recently,
not just as sponsorship opportunities, but as cultural ones.
There's one more collaboration worth highlighting.
And in some ways, it's the most revealing about where Adidas strategy is
Grace Wales Bonner is the Hermes menswear creative director
and the first black woman to lead a major luxury fashion house.
She's also been in Adidas fan since growing up in London.
For years, her Adidas collaborations have been high
fashion riffs on classic silhouettes, and they sell out consistently.
in 2025, she went further with the Corinthia Low,
a wholly original shoe silhouette not built on any existing Adidas template.
The collection also included soccer jerseys and glossy
red and purple plush velour tracksuits and knit track tops.
High fashion and athletic heritage in the same package.
What makes the Wales Bonner partnership interesting is what it says about who
Adidas wants to
Before we get to
the big collaborations, we need to talk about the samba
The samba was created in 1950 as a soccer shoe built for playing on
hard, icy services when fields were otherwise unplayable in the winter.
2022 brought us the summer of samba by 2024.
It was inescapable.
What's interesting is that Adidas didn't engineer this in the traditional sense.
They didn't flood the market or push a massive campaign.
They kept supply tight, let the cultural momentum build,
and used it as a foundation for collaborations.
Adidas didn't need to invent the next big thing.
They already had