Michael Scott · 8 June 2026
Nike vs adidas vs Puma: Who Wins World Cup Kit Search in 2026
Strip the retailers out of World Cup kit search and the manufacturer race is far tighter than the swoosh suggests. Nike holds 42% of manufacturer visibility to adidas’s 39%, with Puma on 19%. The two giants rank first for nine qualified nations each. Here is who owns which shirt, and why it comes down to the page, not the badge.
In our wider look at who wins World Cup kit search, the manufacturers turned out to be far more evenly matched than the old wisdom suggests. Strip out the big retailers and look only at the brands stitching their logo onto the shirts, and the share of organic search visibility splits three ways, with two of them all but level.
The manufacturer bracket
Nike takes 42% of manufacturer visibility across the qualified nation-kit terms, adidas 39%, and Puma 19%. Everyone else, Castore, New Balance, Umbro, barely registers. More telling still is the top-spot count: Nike and adidas each rank first for nine nations, with Puma claiming three. This is not the runaway lead the swoosh's reputation would imply; it is a genuine two-horse race.
Nike owns a broad spread of the biggest-volume nations: Brazil and France in search, plus host-nation USA and a clutch of European and Asian sides. adidas answers with Argentina, Germany, Spain and Japan, plus host-nation Mexico, the second-largest CONCACAF term in the set. Puma's three clean wins, Portugal, Morocco and Ghana, are narrow but valuable, sitting on terms that pull thousands of searches a month between them.
Our take: being the official kit supplier gets a brand into the race, but it does not win it. All three make excellent shirts; the difference in search comes from the pages. Where Nike and adidas pull level is on the fundamentals, clean URLs, fast load times and content that survives long past launch week, which is exactly what Google rewards. The brands losing ground are usually the ones whose kit pages are built to look good for a fortnight and then go stale.
What it means before kick-off
If you are a kit manufacturer or a licensed partner, the lesson is that your shirt selling out has very little to do with whether your page ranks. The teams where you are strongest in search are the ones where you have invested in a proper, lasting landing page, not just a launch campaign. If you want help building national-team pages that rank through the whole tournament, get in touch.
Part of our World Cup kit search series. See the full league table in who wins World Cup kit search. Figures from Semrush's UK database, June 2026, covering nations qualified for the 2026 World Cup.