If you look at marketing in general, you need as a company as adidas to have certain global, I would say, assets that makes it a global brand. So Real Madrid, Manchester United, Bayern Munich, the German Federation, the Italian Federation and stuff is the basis to even be a soccer brand. And then you have the Messi and the Salah and whoever you address, individual stars, and you can always survive by reducing them short term. But the question is what happened in long term if you do it? Then I wouldn’t be in a situation to criticize what adi has done because I think adi always kept the visibility in sports. To a degree, maybe that if I should criticize something, they have gone out of too many smaller sports lately to be efficient and are losing a little bit of this difference to Nike by being in the smaller sports, which we will go back into again.
And again, I really have the feeling that we need to be adi visible across almost all sports, also those who are not commercially very important because they don’t cost a lot. The creativity that we then have in design of making a wrestling shoe or a ski boot or whatever will have a positive impact on the creativity in the brand in general, and that’s why you don’t need to measure it only on the business, but actually measure it more on a creative spirit in the company. And that’s what adi always used to be good. So if there’s one thing to criticize, I do think that during COVID and the last years, it streamlined too much, so we lost a little bit of that edge which we’re trying to find back again. The good thing is that we have the people, we have the competence and that we can start to invest again.
The bad thing is that we can’t get back again quickly enough in some of the sports because it takes time to sign federations and it takes time to get product on the people’s feet, on uniforms again, so we will take a little bit longer time than I would like. But I hope when we get to the next Olympics after Paris, we will be wider again because in Paris, in my opinion, we will be too narrow. On the other hand, you asked about how big were these franchises. And this is a tricky question because certain franchises could be up to 20 million pairs. And then the amount that they bring compared to is D2C or is it wholesale, right? €100 shoe and 20 million pairs. You do the math, that’s a €200 million business. If you do it — no, that’s a — 20 million times €100 is €2 billion.
If you do half of it or all of it in wholesale, it’s then only €1 billion, right? So it’s again, the split in the channels is as much worth as the pairage. And we have, compared to Nike, a lot more franchises. If you really look at Nike, you will see they have 5, 6 franchises, which I’m sure is doing more pairs but they kept them alive over a longer time, we have gone in and out of them. So if you just look now, Samba, Gazelle, Campus, if we then add for example, Superstar and Stan Smith to it, we would have 5 court big franchises. And of course, it’s — the question is, can you have 5 big ones at 1 time or do you then have to play 1 down and 1 up and manage them properly? And I think this is where we have not been as good as what our friends at Nike has been.
