The third brand, mid-reset
Puma is the perennial third of the big three sportswear brands behind Nike and Adidas, with a strong football kit and boot portfolio — Manchester City, AC Milan, Borussia Dortmund and a wide national-team roster. In 2025 it entered a brutal reset: sales fell, EBIT collapsed, and a new chief executive, Adidas veteran Arthur Hoeld, took over in July 2025 after Arne Freundt's exit.
Football is named one of four protected core categories through the restructuring, even as the company cuts roughly a fifth of its corporate workforce and pivots toward direct-to-consumer. With the balance sheet under pressure, the 2026 World Cup year gives the category outsized internal importance, but Hoeld has signalled the business is unlikely to return to healthy growth before 2027.
Finances, leadership, and the football book
How the business actually functions
Puma is fixing the balance sheet and brand momentum at once, which limits its appetite for aggressive new football-rights spending in the 2026 cycle — expect renewals over land-grabs. Football is being used as a stability anchor while the problem area, sports-fashion and lifestyle, is restructured, and the World Cup year raises the category's internal stakes.
The direct-to-consumer pivot reshapes how kit value is captured: margin on replica jerseys sold direct matters more than ever to a company under EBIT pressure. Specific values for the Manchester City, Milan and Dortmund deals were not verifiable in current public sources, so the crown-jewel City contract horizon in particular remains opaque.
Direction in 2026
The posture is a transition year inside a multi-year restructuring, with football protected as a core category and recovery targeted for 2027. The open questions are whether the cash crunch threatens any marquee renewal — City is the prize and its contract horizon is unclear publicly — what Hoeld's specific football-marketing budget stance is versus his predecessor's, and whether Puma chases World Cup national-team upgrades or holds the line on cost.
- Puma Q3 2025 results; CEO-appointment release
- WWD, FashionNetwork, Retail Dive (restructuring)
- Club and Puma kit releases (portfolio)
- Note: specific club-deal values not verifiable in public sources