• After sustained pressure from the global Boycott PUMA campaign, PUMA announced it will end its sponsorship of the Israel Football Association (IFA) on Dec 31, 2024.
• Struggling to find a replacement, the IFA secured a contract with the smaller Italian brand Erreà, starting January 2024.
The global Boycott PUMA campaign has officially confirmed that PUMA will terminate its sponsorship agreement with the Israel Football Association (IFA) on December 31, 2024.
Since 2018, the German sportswear giant has been the target of an effective and sustained international boycott campaign initiated by 215 Palestinian sports teams, urging the company to sever ties with the IFA. The IFA, which incorporates teams based in illegal Israeli settlements on stolen Palestinian land into its official leagues, has not only perpetuated their inclusion but actively advocated for their maintenance in collaboration with the Israeli government.
Over the course of this five-year campaign, groups worldwide engaged in relentless activism, organising numerous global days of action and staging protests in PUMA offices and retail outlets. Athletes, sports teams, artists, and retailers severed partnerships with PUMA, while stores removed its products from their shelves. As PUMA sought to defend its association with what Amnesty International and numerous human rights organisations have classified as an apartheid regime, activists intensified their efforts. They inundated PUMA’s inbox, disrupted its phone lines, and dominated its online platforms, relentlessly exposing what they termed its hypocrisy and false justifications.
The Boycott PUMA campaign inflicted significant reputational damage, tarnishing the company’s most valuable asset—its brand image—by associating it with Israel’s decades-long apartheid policies. PUMA’s public image suffered further blows as Israel continues to pound Gaza and escalate its ongoing genocide in Gaza, which has murdered over 43,000 Palestinians, including hundreds of footballers.
In the months between the outbreak of Israel’s relentless genocide of 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza and December 2023, media reports highlighted mounting public pressure on PUMA. High-profile figures and fan bases called on celebrities like NCT 127 and Rihanna to end their collaborations with the company. Major retailers such as O’Neills, Ireland’s largest sportswear chain, removed PUMA products from their stores, and Irish sports teams urged their members and supporters to join the boycott.
In an unusual move, PUMA leaked to the Financial Times in December 2023 that it would not renew its sponsorship of the IFA when the contract expired in December 2024. Announcing the decision not to renew a partnership—a full year in advance—is highly atypical in the industry, highlighting the insurmountable pressure PUMA faced. This premature disclosure serves as a testament to the effectiveness of the global Boycott PUMA campaign, which forced the brand to disentangle itself from ties to Israel’s apartheid regime.
The Boycott PUMA campaign has expressed gratitude to the countless groups worldwide that worked tirelessly to compel PUMA to end its complicity in both Israel’s apartheid policies and its genocide in Gaza.
The IFA’s latest annual report reveals that the much smaller Italian sportswear company Erreà will become its new sponsor starting January 1, 2024. The terms of this deal reflect the IFA’s struggles to secure a credible replacement sponsor. The Erreà agreement includes a 40% reduction in sponsorship fees, dropping from approximately €100,000 per year under PUMA to €60,000 per year. Furthermore, the contract was only finalised in August 2024, underscoring the challenges the IFA faced in finding a suitable replacement.
