Chinese-owned kit makers dress 27% of World Cup squads, redrawing sportswear’s supply map

A month before kick-off in the United States, Canada and Mexico, the most-watched kit in global football is not a European luxury label. It is Puma — the German brand now majority-owned by Anta Sports, the Chinese sportswear group that completed the takeover in 2019 — paired with fellow China-based supplier Kelme. Together, the two Chinese-controlled manufacturers will dress roughly 27% of squads at the 2026 World Cup, according to Nikkei Asia reporting published 12 June 2026 at 17:01 UTC. The figure is the clearest data point yet in a quiet consolidation of football’s textile supply chain by Chinese capital.

The story is less about shirts and more about industrial depth. Anta has spent seven years building the kind of vertically integrated apparel base that European brands once assumed belonged to them. The question for the next World Cup cycle is whether that base can hold, and what it means for kit suppliers still headquartered in Bavaria, Manchester and the American Midwest.

A figure that would have looked strange a decade ago

Twenty-seven percent of World Cup squads is not a niche share. It is a quarter of the broadcast-friendly apparel real estate on football’s biggest stage, including several seeded national teams whose jerseys are produced, dyed and embroidered inside Chinese manufacturing clusters. The 12 June Nikkei Asia tally is the first time the share has been quantified in a single Western-facing wire report.

The numbers reflect two distinct corporate paths. Puma remains a global brand — it still signs marquee players and runs flagship stores from Herzogenaurach to Tokyo. What changed in 2019 is its ownership: Anta, the Fujian-headquartered sportswear group, paid roughly €2.6 billion for a majority stake, giving it access to Puma’s distribution, design language and licensing muscle. Kelme, the Spanish heritage label, was acquired by Chinese investors in 2023 and has since rebuilt its product lines through a China-based manufacturing network, a route that allows it to undercut European rivals on price while keeping the brand’s archive aesthetic intact.

The combined effect is that two of the most recognisable badges in football now sit inside a Chinese-controlled production base. Western sportswear coverage has been slow to register this; the kit-supply beat tends to be read as a marketing story rather than an industrial one.

The Western counter-narrative: branding versus ownership

The standard Western framing treats Puma as German, full stop. Puma’s press materials continue to emphasise its German heritage, its Bundesliga partnerships and its European design studios. None of that is false, and the company continues to pay German taxes on European-distributed revenue. The point is that ownership and operating geography have diverged from the brand story on the shirt.

The same gap exists for Kelme, which was a Spanish mid-tier brand with a strong 1990s identity before the 2023 Chinese acquisition. Sponsorship of national federations is typically negotiated on a multi-year cycle, and several of the squads that will wear Kelme in 2026 signed their deals before the ownership change. That is a small but important caveat: the kit on the pitch is the result of contracts signed in a different ownership era.

It is also worth noting that the supply chain is more globalised than the headline implies. A Puma jersey sold in São Paulo or Lagos was almost certainly cut and sewn in a factory outside Fujian, but the same factory routinely produces jerseys for Nike, Adidas and Under Armour under separate contracts. Chinese manufacturing is the substrate of the entire global sportswear industry; the question is who owns the brand on top of it.

Structural frame: industrial policy in tracksuits

Beijing’s industrial policy has spent fifteen years building exactly the kind of upstream capability — synthetic yarn, performance fabrics, dye-house clusters, embroidery lines — that Anta and Kelme’s parents now control. The 27% figure should be read alongside the same pattern visible in solar cells, EV batteries and shipbuilding: a sector in which Western brands once sat on the high-margin layer of the value chain, while Chinese firms built the production depth below them, has finally produced a Chinese firm willing to bid for the high-margin layer too.

Anta’s playbook — buy a global brand, keep the design and marketing autonomy, plug it into a domestic supply base — is structurally similar to the approach taken in consumer electronics and white goods. It is also, notably, a model that has so far avoided the political backlash that has followed Chinese acquisitions in semiconductors and telecoms. There is no CFIUS-style review of a sportswear deal, and federation procurement officers care about price-per-unit and lead time, not equity structures.

That is the structural point the kit story illustrates: in low-political-salience consumer categories, the consolidation of global market share by Chinese capital can happen with remarkably little Western attention.

Stakes for the next cycle

If the 27% share holds or grows into the 2030 tournament, three things follow. First, the federation sponsorship market — historically a captive channel for European brands — becomes genuinely contestable, which is good news for smaller federations on tight budgets and bad news for Adidas and Nike’s marketing divisions. Second, Anta and any successor Chinese acquirers gain a soft-power asset that is hard to quantify but easy to see on television: a national team walking out in a jersey stitched in a Chinese factory, with the brand’s Chinese parent in the credits.

Third, the Western brands face a choice they have so far avoided. They can continue to treat Chinese manufacturing as a cost line and accept the gradual loss of the brand layer, or they can re-shore the textile production they offshored in the 2000s — an expensive and slow process. So far, the visible answer is to do neither, and to hope that brand heritage alone holds the line.

The honest caveat: the 27% figure is a snapshot of kit supply, not a measure of revenue or sponsorship value. The dollar split between Puma/Kelme and the European incumbents on World Cup-linked contracts is not in the public record, and federation-by-federation kit deals vary widely in commercial weight. A more granular accounting, ideally from a primary-source audit of federation sponsorship filings, would sharpen the picture considerably.

Desk note: Monexus treated this as an industrial-policy story that happens to be wearing a football kit, rather than a marketing story about a tournament. The Nikkei Asia figure is the load-bearing fact; everything else is context the Western wires had not yet connected.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://t.me/nikkeiasia
• https://t.me/NikkeiAsia
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puma_(brand)
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anta_Sports