Nike Ran Out of U.S. Soccer Jerseys at the Worst Possible Time
The sportswear company restocked the team jerseys this week, well after the U.S. was eliminated from the World Cup
Nike NKE 4.21%increase; up pointing triangle ran low on U.S. soccer jerseys at the worst possible time. Now they are restocked, too late to capitalize on the team’s run through the World Cup.
Many versions of the U.S. men’s soccer jerseys sold out two weeks into the tournament, after the team dominated Paraguay and Australia in its first two games, a sign that team sponsor Nike vastly underestimated demand for the product.
The world’s largest sportswear company scrambled to get more on stores’ shelves, but they arrived too late. Nike restocked the kits this week, more than a week after the team’s unceremonious elimination from the tournament by Belgium—initially with a 17% markdown. The discount had disappeared from the company’s website by Thursday.
The empty shelves are the latest stumble as Nike is attempting a turnaround under Chief Executive Elliott Hill, who rejoined the company nearly two years ago. Shares are down 75% from their all-time high and the company is working to recover from a disastrous pivot to direct-to-consumer sales. Revenue fell 10% in fiscal 2025, and Nike projects sales will decline by low- to mid-single digits from March through the end of November. Smaller rivals like On and Amer Sports have been eating into categories like running that Nike has long dominated. China sales have dropped significantly as well. Nike has cut over 2,100 jobs this year.
Ahead of the tournament, Nike declared soccer a priority, launching a star-studded World Cup campaign featuring the likes of LeBron James, Kim Kardashian, Channing Tatum and its cast of soccer stars. The company debuted a new cooling technology called Aero-FIT across all of its federation kits. On its March earnings call, Hill called soccer “the next sport to fully transform” under its turnaround strategy and said it would use the World Cup to “catalyze the football marketplace for quarters to come.”
Then the tournament started, and the company started to run out of its top-tier World Cup product: authentic game jerseys.
The shortages weren’t limited to the American team. Nike sold out of jerseys for at least four of its 16 sponsored federations. Some Brazil kits ran dry during the group stage too. Authentic French jerseys sold out before the knockout round.
Norway’s home kit—red, with the blue cross of the Norwegian flag—has been unavailable on Nike’s website as well as at Dick’s Sporting Goods, on Fanatics and at JD Sports for weeks, driven by the team’s unlikely run and the global celebrity of striker Erling Haaland. The $175 jersey now fetches over $300 on the popular resale site Goat.
“They left a lot of money on the table by not being able to maintain inventory during the World Cup,” said Neil Schwartz, president of Sports Business Research Network. “When you meet the moment, you can get full value for your product and therefore amazing margins. Nike missed that.”
“Major sporting events generate extraordinary demand, and our goal is to serve athletes and fans while avoiding unnecessary oversupply,” said a Nike spokeswoman. “We feel very good about how we delivered during World Cup 2026.”
The sales of team jerseys were more than double the 2022 World Cup, according to Nike.
Michael Farris, a father in Charlotte, N.C., spent the last week of June searching for an official U.S. jersey for his son’s birthday, checking Nike’s website, Academy Sports and two Dick’s Sporting Goods locations. Ultimately, Farris bought a replica shirt from a resale site, marked up 20% to $120. His wife, drawn to soccer for the first time by Norway’s run and “Erling Haaland’s locks of golden hair,” requested an official Haaland kit. Farris couldn’t find that either.
Nike’s spokeswoman called Haaland and Norway’s popularity “an unexpected breakout” and said the team “captured the imagination of fans around the world, driving exceptionally strong demand for the Norway jersey.”
The numbers tell a story of demand that overwhelmed supply. By the start of the tournament, Nike said it had already sold 2.5 times the number of kits compared with the same period ahead of the 2022 World Cup. Within the first two weeks of the competition, 28% of Nike’s World Cup merchandise had sold out, versus 7% for Adidas, according to data from LSEG and Centric Market Intelligence.
Nike offered 803 products across 18 teams at an average price of $125. Adidas offered 608 across 27 teams at $95. Nike burned through its inventory four times faster than its rival, a sign of strong demand, but also of a company that had too little product to meet that demand.
Schwartz said Nike could have tracked social-media traffic and hotel bookings in host cities in the weeks before the tournament to gauge demand more precisely.
“There is data they could have used,” he said. “This is a company that believes it lives by data and analytics. It seems like they missed out on an opportunity.”
Simeon Siegel, a retail analyst at Guggenheim Securities, said the shortages reflect the broader reality of Nike’s position. Such missed opportunities—moments where Nike could have had strong full-price sell-through—are a byproduct of a company still putting out fires across the organization, he said.
“But if you have to make one mistake, better to have too few kits and leave people wanting more, than leave product flooding the market and people feeling like the brand doesn’t stand for anything special,” Siegel said.
Amid the shortage of authentic jerseys, Nike said it scaled up its production of a “Supporter” jersey, a $60 polyester tee shirt with a similar design as the official jersey.
Nike has run into this conundrum before. During the Winter Olympics in February, jerseys for the U.S. men’s hockey team sold out early in the games. The shortage proved costly when the team upset Canada in overtime to win gold—and Nike had nothing to sell. In 2018, the Nigeria World Cup kit sold out in hours and wasn’t restocked for months. In 2019, the U.S. women’s soccer team won the World Cup wearing what Nike called its bestselling soccer jersey ever, but fans couldn’t buy the updated championship kit for weeks.
Adidas CEO Bjørn Gulden said his three bestselling federations—Mexico, Argentina and Germany—have each moved more than three million units. The company also experienced shortages for authentic Mexico jerseys, as well as unlikely fan favorites such as Curaçao and Japan. In April, Adidas executives said the company took around 250 million euros in bookings, the equivalent of about $286 million, for World Cup products in the first quarter and expected the same in the current quarter.
Sunday’s World Cup final will be played between Spain and Argentina—both Adidas teams. England, Nike’s last remaining hope in the tournament, lost to Argentina in Wednesday’s semifinal. On Adidas’s website, authentic match jerseys for both finalists are available in full-size runs, home and away, including Messi editions.