Life’s Game: the Home of adidas Football

The 2024 UEFA European Championship is well underway and as you make plans for the semi-finals and finals, you might be looking for more invigorating environs to experience the fever of the game away from the unreliable streams of your computer or the pixelated screen of the kiosk on the corner.

If so, look no further than the Home of adidas Football, which, although an official part of the EURO24 Fan Zone in Berlin, offers much more than just public viewing screens and concession stands—don’t worry, those are there too.

What is the Home of adidas Football? It’s the brand’s new approach to bring adidas shoes and clothes to the creative community in Berlin where they can experience the world of football. Typically, a space like this will take the easy route and unite the brand’s goods to a major sporting event in the most obvious way possible, plugging product with logos of the championship printed on them. But the German sportswear corporation—whose name is, apocryphally, an acronym for All Day I Dream About Soccer—has instead explored the multifaceted culture of a game that is played and watched and adored the globe over. Offering attendees the opportunity to customize their cleats or kicks with heat pressing, laser printing, and custom patches or to get a tattoo of, for instance, for instance, their favorite player’s number, adidas has emphasized the importance of fandom as a way to connect people.

This is a crucial aspect of the game and one that is instructive—as fandom is a prototype to social networks and their nearly forgotten promise to bring people together. Fans talk about the great and heartbreaking games they’ve witnessed, share knowledge about statistics and forgotten players, and co-create communities where participants are linked by passion. History also plays an important role in fandom, which is celebrated in the EURO Exhibition, a vintage bus where immersive screens are full of historic moments and the 75 years of adidas’ football innovation. Together, these unite into what philosopher Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht calls the ritual of intensity.

Soccer is much more than fandom though. Another name for the sport on the giant pitch is “the beautiful game.” In What We Think About When We Think About Soccer, the philosopher Simon Critchley has suggested that “the essence of football is a gesture at the service of beauty.” To this end, the Home of adidas Football has set up a beauty parlor, where a barber will give you a cut or trim your beard and a stylist will braid your hair or help you with your weave. You can also get a new grill from a dental stone artist, and these little gems are there to link soccer to street culture, a link that is by no means arbitrary. As the legendary player and coach Johan Cruyff once said, “footballers from the street are more important than trained coaches.”

In other words, the streets are what make the game what it is—beautiful. Adidas leaned into the importance of the streets at the Home of adidas Football on Wednesday, July 3, 2024, when the German rapper RIN performed on a stage in front of the German Reichstag. During the concert, RIN noted the oddness of rapping with such a historical political landmark behind him, but then soccer is politics too.

The politics of football can be viewed on the macro-level by investigating the ways that nations have used sporting events as a political vehicle, and this has often been done by dictators like Benito Mussolini and Jorge Rafael Videla. This usage is controversial, but the politics of soccer is much more fascinating and enriching on the micro-level, since, as political scientists and sports psychologists have suggested, soccer is an analogy for life where we can parse our complex relationships into clear movements. It’s a game where we can learn the importance of trust and experience the rush of achieving a shared goal.

This is why the Home of adidas Football also features a football pitch and a container with a Playstation for FIFA sessions, where attendees can work on their headers, thumb mashing, and soft skills. Similarly, the Home of adidas Football also includes a miniature F50 electric racetrack, where you can battle your friends with miniature cars. This might be somewhat surprising as racing seems to have little to do with the game or the major sporting event that is being celebrated. But if soccer is life and racing belongs to the world, then why shouldn’t it be included?

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