Why Adidas’s bet on a Lionesses vs Spain rivalry paid off

Adidas’s bet on the Women’s Euros rivalry between England’s Alessia Russo and Spain’s Aitana Bonmatí paid off yesterday (27 July) as the two stars met in the tournament’s final.

The campaign framed the two players as rivals with an edge, the latest expression of Adidas’s ‘You Got This’ brand platform launched in 2024. Looking ahead to this year’s summer of sports, the marketing team pondered how best to tap into the brand platform and connect with fans, explains vice-president of brand activation for Europe, Roy Gardner. 

The Euros was the clear choice and “another opportunity to build the brand point of view”.  

As Gardner explains, Adidas’s Euros campaign wasn’t about isolating the women’s game as a one-off event, but was seen as a key part of a wider brand strategy to tap into culture and grow the brand.  

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The start of 2025 marked the “second chapter” of You Got This. Stage two is called the ‘Plus one effect’ internally, says Gardner. This year the campaign has focused on “the pivotal role” your plus one – coach, fellow teammate, family member, friend – plays, the idea being you are inspired to “give that positivity to someone”. 

The Euros was an opportunity to utilise the brand platform, while putting a “nice tweak” on it, he adds. The Russo versus Bonmatí campaign was the first level of the campaign, but beneath it were localised campaigns across Europe with more players. 

The film, ‘Great Rivals Make Great Motivation,’ also includes players Jule Brand, Kadidiatou Diani, Lia Wälti and Stina Blackstenius.

Adidas wanted to use the “positivity of rivalry” to show how it drives players to achieve their best, the idea being to inspiring a young audience and create desire for the Adidas brand.

“It all fits in this umbrella of building that brand point of view, because we’re trying to obviously connect fundamentally with a very broad audience, but still a core youth audience, especially girls,” says Gardner.

Brand reset

Adidas has recently been in turnaround mode under the leadership of CEO Bjørn Gulden. He joined in 2023 as the sportswear giant grappled with declining sales, the fallout from its terminated Yeezy partnership with Kanye West and the impact of an overreliance on performance channels. 

The brand has since upped its marketing investment, with spend rising by 14% in the first three months of 2025. The 2025 Euros campaign coincides with a push by Adidas to strengthen its brand.

“We certainly invested a lot more this tournament than we did in the previous tournament,” says Gardner.  

He explains “very straightforwardly”, the business is in a “better financial position” meaning it can invest more in all campaigns and capitalise on “how much more profile” the women’s game has.

“The women’s game has obviously massively expanded in popularity and it’s a positive flywheel,” he adds. “So, we’re able to prioritise it more, invest more.”  

From Adidas’s point of view, it works with a range of footballers, federations and teams already.

“That’s just getting a lot more formalised and more of a priority,” says Gardner. 

“I think if you then zoom it out into, what are we trying to do from a brand point of view? Well, quite frankly, we need to make sure we grow the brand with both men and women equally, you know, and we’ve had tremendous success, tremendous traction,” he adds.  

From a fashion perspective, Gardner points to the popularity of Adidas trainers from Sambas to Gazelles, adding these trends “probably had a female bias to start with”.

“For us, it’s just about recognising the connection that we need to make with both genders and be very neutral to that approach. To go actually, we just need to come across as a brand for all in that context. And we certainly don’t want to come across as overly male and I think that could have been a risk, if [we don’t] then recognise where there’s significant opportunities, particularly to profile women’s sport,” he explains. 

A W for Adidas

While measuring the success of a campaign for a women’s tournament versus a men’s may mean Adidas pays some attention to how different age or gender demographics engage, the overall metrics are “broadly the same”, says Gardner. 

Indeed, while some may assume the Women’s Euros campaign would skew female in audience, this isn’t exactly the case.  

“Actually, when we look at the stats behind support of the women’s game, it doesn’t skew massively one way or the other. Quite frankly, it’s much more balanced than people think it is,” he states. 

Metrics stay “pretty consistent” during the campaign and as the Euros activity ladders up to the wider You Got This platform, it has a set of broader KPIs around measurement and brand performance.  

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“Trying to do this more microscopic than that might be a bit of a fool’s errand,” says Gardner.

Since launching You Got This last year, the talent featured in campaigns has been “pretty gender balanced”, which is a conscious choice.

“The population’s 50/50, so why wouldn’t we present it 50/50,” says Gardner. 

Without being able to give too much away, he describes the Euros campaign as a “W for Adidas”.  

Across social media, the brand is seeing “record levels of engagement”. When it initially posted the campaign film on Instagram, there was a “positive response” to how Adidas was telling the story.  

“We presented it, in our view, as a story of athletes [and] by the way, they happen to be women, as opposed to ‘It’s a story of women’s football,’” Gardner explains.  

Adidas has had a “very dominant position” in terms of share of voice and brand buzz “both up to and during the campaign”, he claims. Adidas is set to take more market share from Nike this year, according to GlobalData stats released today (28 July). Adidas is expected to rise to 1.9% share of the apparel category, while Nike will drop three percentage points to 2.6%.  

In terms of sales, the business has seen “strong growth” across boots and jerseys. Overall, its Euros campaign has helped Adidas drive “culture and commerce”. While Gardner sees this as a “pretty good result all around”, he insists its still early days for Adidas in terms of dissecting the campaign.  

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The tournament was a “big opportunity” for the brand, as well as the wider world of women’s sport, he adds.  

“It’s really about seeing it as part of this bigger picture. Landing the brand point of view, establishing who we are and what we stand for as a brand, connecting with the youth audience, building their desire for the brand and hopefully inspiring them about our message in sport,” explains Gardner.  

Overall, the campaign was a “huge effort” across the whole of Europe, he adds, rather than a isolated piece of activity.  

And on Russo and Bonmatí, meeting in yesterday’s final?  

“You hope and you pray, and then when it comes to the result you go: ‘Oh, good, great. Well, now we have as our two focal heroes. They’re in the final. And both of them played great. One of them scored a brilliant goal,’” says Gardner.  

“Sometimes you also need to be lucky as well and that also helps.”