adidas X Sports Direct
Discover how Design4Retail engineered the fan experience to build a high-performance retail shell for adidas’s interactive skill zone in Sports Direct.
ADIDAS FOOTBALL SKILL ZONE
Designing an industrial arena that gamified product trial for adidas football.
When Sports Direct unveiled its largest and most ambitious project to date, the 65,000sq ft Liverpool flagship, a £25M+ investment creating a totally new flagship retail identity, it was a seismic event in UK retail.
As a trusted, long-standing partner, D4R was there to support adidas’s massive presence, assisting with launch activations, window displays, and the delivery of this high-impact, temporary in-store experiential activation.
idea
The brief from adidas was timely and ambitious: to leverage their No. 1 status in global football, the return of the Liverpool FC partnership, and the excitement around the 2026 World Cup. The objective was to utilise a new, dedicated activation and launch zone within the new Liverpool Sports Direct flagship to demonstrate, beyond doubt, that adidas is the undisputed leader in football. Crucially, the concept had to incorporate interactive consumer engagement elements to increase dwell time and offer product trial opportunities for footwear, footballs and drive in-store purchases of adidas products.
Insight & strategy
We set out to build the “ADIDAS FOOTBALL SKILL ZONE.” Our strategy prioritised a bulletproof, high-performance physical build capable of hosting intense, high-tempo gameplay. We focused purely on the retail environment, working closely with an external digital company ‘IUF‘ that provided the gamification technical hardware.
The aesthetic embraces a raw, industrial, caged design that perfectly aligns with the retailer’s look and feel. We built the structure from tough corrugated metal sheeting and robust metal caging to create the necessary high-security housing for the interactive agility drill tech. The arena floor features realistic black AstroTurf so consumers can get an authentic product test. The whole zone seamlessly integrates large digital screens for instant data capture and leaderboard display, ensuring maximum buzz and easy flexibility for future campaign refreshes.
realisation
The activation achieved immediate and demonstrable success, validating its effectiveness in meeting the core brief objectives. It successfully drove consumer footfall and engagement, firmly establishing adidas as the number one brand within the Sports Direct football category.
results
Within the first three days of the store opening, the activation recorded exceptional engagement data: a Total of 620 games or interactions played, translating to an engagement frequency of one game played every 3.19 minutes during opening hours. This high level of immediate engagement validates the design’s ability to increase dwell time and initiate product trial opportunities.
Further data capturing the direct correlation between activation use and product sales is underway, and the success of this pilot confirms the potential for deployment to other strategic destination stores after its initial one-year contract in Liverpool.
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