Hi everyone, and welcome back to SportsVerse, my twice-weekly newsletter that tells stories you can’t find anywhere else about the intersection of sports, fashion, business, and culture.
It’s a good time to be Adidas right now.
Healthy sales growth. Yeezy is a distant memory. Adidas-sponsored athlete Ousmane Dembélé won the Balon d’Or. The Adidas-sponsored World Cup 2026 is fast approaching. The brand is growing its reach in the booming world of Formula 1 apparel and inking new team partnerships. There has already been a profitable reunion with Liverpool FC. Adidas is still churning out great marketing moments for the award-winning AE 1 sneaker, and is readying for the launch of its successor.
The list goes on. The brand is skipping from win to win. Just like an athlete in a rich vein of form, everything seems to be going right chez Adidas.
The news that Bad Bunny got the call-up for the 2026 Super Bowl halftime show performance in February is yet another example of Adidas reaping the rewards for its sharp eye and studious groundwork in recent years.
The Puerto Rican sensation, undoubtedly the most globally popular and culturally relevant music artist out there right now, has become an increasingly vital and coveted cog in Adidas’ marketing function over the past few years. These days, it helps for sportswear brands to be equally adept at scouting up-and-coming cultural talents to sign as ambassadors as they are at identifying promising young athletes for their sports categories.
Adidas Is Serious About Investing in Formula 1
Initially thought of as a useful figurehead to promote Adidas products to the Latin America market, Bad Bunny’s popularity has soared in recent years and he has taken on global importance for the brand, having helped to promote sneakers such as the Samba, Gazelle, SL 72, Adizero SL 72 and many more. He has taken on a key role in the promotion of Adidas’ Formula 1 efforts, specifically the brand’s partnership with the Mercedes F1 team.
Adidas has also intelligently used Bad Bunny’s wildly successful Puerto Rico residency as the perfect stage to launch country-exclusive sneakers such as the Gazelle “El Yunque” and “Santurce” colorways, which it has since made available globally due to popular demand.
As if the stars couldn’t have aligned any better already, Bad Bunny’s debut signature shoe with Adidas — the BadBo 1.0 — is set to hit the market in spring 2026. Now, Adidas has its star collaborator performing the Super Bowl halftime show (the biggest sports-culture-fashion fusion stage out there) just months before his signature shoe is ready to go to retail. I have no doubt the brand will move hell and earth to ensure the moment doubles up as the big reveal moment for the BadBo 1.0s.
The best part of it all is that Adidas will benefit from the most lucrative free marketing opportunity in all of sports. If the brand wanted to take out a mere 30-second ad during the Super Bowl — like its peers Nike and On did this year — it would cost the brand between $7 million and $8 million. Please let that sink in. I think we often normalise these kinds of figures in our line of business, but that’s an obscene amount of money for any company to pay for a 30-second commercial that may not be remembered by the next week.
Instead, Adidas — without paying a single dime for the pleasure — might get to have its products on display for far longer than thirty seconds during the most viewed part of any Super Bowl, the halftime show. This year’s halftime show by Kendrick Lamar (the most-watched ever in Super Bowl history) attracted over 133.5 million viewers. When it’s Bad Bunny’s turn next year, those figures will be amplified by his 50 million Instagram followers and the countless numbers of fan accounts that will recycle content from his performance over and over again.
We’ve seen before how valuable a marketing moment it can be for sneaker brands to show up on the Super Bowl halftime stage. Back in 2023, I wrote about the surprise appearance of Salomon sneakers in Rihanna’s memorable all-red halftime show ensemble and how it was indicative of the once-nerdy brand’s ascent to the height of popular culture and would further cement its credentials as a bona fide performance-fashion crossover success story, turbocharging sales for the long run (spoiler alert: I was right).
Ultimately, there’s no guarantee that Bad Bunny will wear Adidas sneakers for his halftime show appearance next year. After all, in the teaser announcement video posted on Sunday, he was wearing a simple pair of flip flops rather than sneakers.
But Adidas will be working overtime to ensure that Benito will have the famous Three Stripes logo on his feet when he steps out onto the world’s biggest stage at Super Bowl LX in February next year.
That’s all for today, friends. Thanks for coming along for the ride.
See you next time,
DYM