AC Milan and Adidas announce the extension of partnership

Adidas and Italian Serie A giants AC Milan have extended their contract until 2023 with the new agreement to extend the partnership started in 1998, a very rare achievement in the football world.

Since 1998 the club based in via Turati enriched its palmares with 11 trophies: 3 Italian Championships, 1 Italian Cup, 2 Italian Supercups, 2 UEFA Champions Leagues, 2 UEFA European Supercups and 1 FIFA Club World Cup. This impressive list is completed by the Golden ball and the FIFA World Player award won by Kakà, always under the sign of the three stripes.

One of the most relevant news about the contract concerns the implementation of further synergies on the digital communication platforms, reinforcing the relationship between adidas and AC Milan on and off the pitch.

The agreement has been announced by Adriano Galliani, AC Milan Vicar Vice President and Managing Director AC Milan, Jean-Michel Granier, Managing Director adidas Italy, and Herbert Hainer, CEO adidas Group. Kakà and De Sciglio, both adidas athletes, represented the team at the press conference.

“During these first 16 years I have always appreciated the AC Milan attitude and commitment to reach great victories on the pitch but also to consolidate AC Milan as a global brand, becoming the most winning club in the world but also one of the most beloved teams worldwide,” said Herbert Hainer, CEO adidas Group. “I am very happy to see the three stripes associated for the next 10 years to an asset with which we celebrated great victories.”

“I am proud to have signed the extension of the partnership with AC Milan,” said Jean-Michel Granier Managing Director adidas Italy. “We work side by side with AC Milan implementing several activities always with great results, that’s why it has been natural to renew the contract four years before the expiring date. An agreement that will allow us to celebrate 25 years together and to write new amazing pages in football history.”

“Today, we lay the foundations for writing new pages of this relationship that gave us great satisfactions. We will reach 25 years together because starting from 1998 we shared values, strategies, will to excel, innovative spirit and many victories. The three stripes brand was with us in all the great dates, on and off the pitch,” said Adriano Galliani, Vicar Vice President and AC Milan MD. “With adidas we wrote the history of sports sponsoring and we created a successful working model: our red and black stripes and the adidas stripes are united not only on the jersey. We started from a classical sponsorship to develop more synergies and to create a stronger partnership: Milan and adidas are perfect partners ready for the future challenges”.

The partnership between adidas and AC Milan has always been innovative: more than a simple sponsorship, always working towards innovation both in the products designed for the club and in their will to grow together, through all the projects developed during the years.

The AC Milan football schools, the adidas Milan Junior Camp, the master license agreement, the collaboration between adidas Innovation team and Milan lab, and the innovative communication campaigns to launch the jerseys: “Uniti dalla maglia” in 2007, the red and black jersey on the Emirates A380 landed in Malpensa in 2010, the Blog Conference in 2011 and the successful hashtag #weareacmilan launched in 2013.

The last result of the intensive collaboration between the two brands is the miCoach Elite System. Presented last February in Milanello, it’s an innovative data-tracking system developed starting in 2010 with MilanLab cooperation, that provide coaches, trainers and players with real-time performance metrics including heart rate, speed, acceleration, distance, field position and, for the first time, power. On that occasion adidas and AC Milan also announced an agreement to develop new products and technologies in football.