Why sportswear giants Adidas, Puma dumped Nigeria — Pinnick

Former Nigeria Football Federation president, Amaju Pinnick, has revealed why sportswear giants Adidas and Puma severed commercial relationships with Nigerian football, alleging that an incident involving three Nigerians led to the latter blacklisting the country.

Pinnick disclosed this in the latest episode of “The Pinnick Tapes” (Remastered): NFF Scandals EXposed, published on Sunday Oliseh’s YouTube channel, Global Football Insights With Oliseh on Friday.

Speaking about the challenges he faced in attracting sponsors after assuming office as NFF president, Pinnick said Adidas had indicated its intention to leave shortly after he took over.

He said he was surprised by the decision and travelled to Zurich to meet the company’s president in an attempt to persuade the sportswear giant to reconsider.

“I was utterly flabbergasted when I got the letter from Adidas. A few weeks or a few months into my being NFF president, they were leaving.

“I flew to Zurich to see the president because they had a relationship with Adidas,” Pinnick said.

Pinnick said efforts to convince Adidas to remain were unsuccessful, adding that he later discovered that several issues had influenced the company’s decision.

He, however, declined to disclose some of the details, saying he did not want to indict anyone publicly.

“It was later I found out so many things that were…that I cannot come out in the media to say. I don’t like indicting people. I don’t like speaking. But I went deep. But I knew you were not coming,” he said.

The former NFF boss said the sponsorship crisis became more apparent when other major companies were also leaving or indicating plans to leave Nigerian football.

“When we came on, Globacom was leaving, Adidas had left, General Insurance had left, Guinness—they wrote us that they were leaving,” he said.

Pinnick said he subsequently sought to establish a relationship with Puma but initially encountered resistance from the company’s top executive.

He said he was introduced to the Puma boss during the 2015 Africa Cup of Nations in Equatorial Guinea, but the executive initially refused to speak with him after learning that he was Nigerian.

“I was introduced to the head of Puma. The head of Puma meant he understood that I was a Nigerian, not even as president of anything at that point. He didn’t want to talk to me,” Pinnick recalled.

According to him, the executive eventually agreed to meet him and recounted an alleged incident involving three Nigerians who had visited his home on Christmas Day.

Pinnick said the men allegedly told the executive that they could abandon an existing Adidas contract, but had demands of their own.

“He told me a story about how three Nigerians came to his house on a Christmas Day to tell him, ‘We can jettison the contract we have with Adidas, but this is what we wanted.’

“And from there on, he made up his mind never ever to have anything to do with Nigeria. He blacklisted Nigeria,” Pinnick said.

Pinnick did not identify the three Nigerians or disclose the nature of the demands he said they made.

He said the experience nevertheless strengthened his resolve to secure another major international kit sponsor for the Super Eagles.

“But that was when I made up my mind that Adidas gone, Puma gone, we will definitely get the best,” he said.

Pinnick said he travelled to the United States and the Netherlands as part of efforts to secure a new kit deal and eventually succeeded in attracting Nike.

“And that’s where I went to my room and I prayed and I said, ‘God, give us Nike.’

“It was a tough call, but eventually we got Nike,” he said.

The former NFF president also rejected claims that his administration presided over a continuous loss of sponsors, arguing that he instead increased the federation’s commercial revenue.

“When I was president of NFF, no sponsors left me. I brought in sponsors. I went from zero to almost 80% of self-funding,” Pinnick said.

He added that the figures could be verified in the NFF’s audited accounts prepared by PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Pinnick’s comments came during a wide-ranging interview with former Super Eagles coach, Sunday Oliseh, which also focused on Nigeria’s failure to qualify for the 2022 and 2026 World Cups, unpaid coaches and players, political interference and the structural problems confronting Nigerian football.

The former NFF president said the federation’s sponsorship difficulties predated his administration, insisting that he inherited a system in which major commercial partners were already withdrawing from Nigerian football.

He maintained that his administration responded by aggressively pursuing new sponsors and moving the federation towards greater private-sector funding.