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Adidas’s current global slogan is “You Got This,” introduced in February 2024. Its most famous tagline, though, is still “Impossible Is Nothing,” which first ran in 2004 and returned for an encore in 2021. Neither is the company’s oldest identity line — that distinction belongs to a mark, not a phrase, worn since 1949.
Adidas ran on that unspoken identity, three stripes and a name, for half a century before it wrote an actual slogan. Then, chasing Nike’s cultural momentum, it burned through five taglines in twenty years, discarding each once the culture moved on. For the full company story behind the taglines—the 1920 laundry-room start, the 1948 brothers’ split, and the Yeezy era—see our Adidas history timeline.
What follows is a dated walk through the Adidas slogans that mattered, the campaigns behind them, and the athletes who got paid to say the lines out loud.
LIST OF ADIDAS SLOGANS
| Slogan | Years | Campaign note |
|---|---|---|
| The Brand with the Three Stripes | 1949–present | Core identity, not a phrase |
| Impossible Is Nothing | 2004–2010 | TBWA, altered Ali footage |
| adidas is all in | 2011–2015 | Biggest campaign to date |
| Here to Create | 2016–2018 | Creator-platform pivot |
| Impossible Is Nothing (relaunch) | 2021–2023 | Own the Game strategy |
| You Got This | 2024–present | Performance-pressure focus |
For how Adidas stacks up against the field, see our broader roundup of shoe slogans across the industry.
THE BRAND WITH THE THREE STRIPES
Adidas began in 1949, when Adi Dassler registered a company under a name fused from his own nickname and surname: Adi plus Dassler. He had just split from his brother Rudolf, who had founded rival Puma a year earlier in the same small Bavarian town, Herzogenaurach. The earliest ads ran in German, aimed at local sporting-goods shops, not a global market.
The three stripes came later, and cheaply. Dassler bought the design from Finnish brand Karhu in 1952 for a sum worth roughly €1,600 today and, legend says, two bottles of whiskey. A former Karhu brand manager has said no paperwork confirms the whiskey; only the cash sale is documented. The trefoil, the three-leaf mark still on Originals gear, arrived in 1972.
If you’re asking what Adidas’s old slogan was, the honest answer for decades is that there wasn’t one. Call it a tagline, a motto, or a catchphrase — the company didn’t bother with any of them until 2004. The stripes and the name did the talking.
THE “ALL DAY I DREAM ABOUT SPORTS” MYTH
Adidas does not stand for All Day I Dream About Sports. That backronym is internet folklore, not fact. The company’s name was registered on August 18, 1949, built from Adi Dassler’s own nickname, years before anyone attached a slogan-shaped meaning to the letters.
The backronym appears to have spread much later, retrofitted onto a name that never needed decoding. It survives because it sounds plausible and fits neatly on a t-shirt, not because it is true.
MY ADIDAS
Run-DMC turned Adidas into a slogan the company never wrote. At a 1986 concert at Madison Square Garden, the group asked the crowd to hold up their sneakers during “My Adidas,” and roughly 40,000 fans complied. An Adidas executive was reportedly in the audience and saw a marketing opportunity no agency had planned.
The two sides signed an endorsement deal reported at $1.6 million, the first sneaker endorsement for non-athletes on record, according to Guinness World Records. No campaign brief produced it. A rap song did. For years afterward, “My Adidas” functioned as an unofficial adidas catchphrase, proof the brand’s biggest tagline moment came from outside its own marketing department.
IMPOSSIBLE IS NOTHING
Impossible Is Nothing launched in February 2004, built by agency TBWA around digitally altered footage of Muhammad Ali. The campaign ran in 93 countries with 22 athlete ambassadors, including David Beckham, Haile Gebrselassie, and Tracy McGrady. It became the tagline most people still associate with Adidas, outliving two later attempts to replace it.
Ali never said the line. Quote Investigator traced the manifesto behind the ad to TBWA copywriter Aimee Lehto, and the tagline itself to creative director Boyd Coyner, in research confirmed in 2017. The opening line of that manifesto, “Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men,” came from Lehto’s ad copy, not from Ali’s mouth. A persistent claim online traces the words to a 1974 Ali interview. There is no such interview. It was advertising, dressed up as legend.
ADIDAS IS ALL IN
adidas is all in launched March 16, 2011, described by the company as its biggest marketing campaign to date. It was the first campaign to unite Sport Performance, Originals, and Sport Style under one message. Agency Sid Lee and director Romain Gavras built the film around Justice’s “Civilization,” casting Lionel Messi, David Beckham, Derrick Rose, Katy Perry, and B.o.B.
The scale, not the line, was the point: Adidas called it the largest campaign in company history, though no audited budget figure has ever been published. By the 2014 World Cup, the line had sharpened into “all in or nothing.” The company owned Reebok throughout this stretch, folding its rival’s marketing into the same corporate playbook until the 2021 sale. “adidas is all in” read like a mission statement more than a tagline, and it aged that way: memorable as a moment, forgettable as a phrase.
HERE TO CREATE
Here to Create arrived around 2016 as a broader platform, not just a slogan, meant to reposition Adidas as a creative-culture brand rather than a pure performance one. The “Calling All Creators” chapter, built with agency 72andSunny, launched in December 2017 and gathered Messi, Pharrell Williams, David Beckham, and James Harden at one table for its centerpiece film.
The pitch: sport and creativity were the same instinct. It lasted roughly two years before the company pivoted back toward its most durable line.
IMPOSSIBLE IS NOTHING, AGAIN
Impossible Is Nothing returned in spring 2021, folded into a broader “Own the Game” strategy. The relaunch fronted Beyoncé, Mohamed Salah, Paul Pogba, Siya Kolisi, and Messi across 20 documentary-style films released in more than 50 countries, drawing more than a billion social views according to the company’s own annual report.
The era’s loudest headlines came from partnerships, not slogans. Yeezy, the Kanye West line, reportedly generated close to $1.5 billion a year at its peak before the company terminated the partnership in October 2022. Ivy Park, the Beyoncé-linked label, wound down in 2023. Both were business stories the tagline never quite absorbed.
WHAT IS THE ADIDAS SLOGAN TODAY?
You Got This is the current adidas tagline, launched February 9, 2024, the brand’s first new global slogan in roughly twenty years. It marks a pivot: away from elite-achievement hype and toward the pressure ordinary athletes feel just showing up.
A 2023 Adidas study of 17,038 respondents across nine countries found that one in five everyday athletes aged 16 to 30 believe they are not good at sport, while elite athletes reportedly face up to 93 distinct pressures across a career. The launch film starred Patrick Mahomes, Messi, Anthony Edwards, and Jude Bellingham. A 2024 Olympics chapter followed, then a 2025 chapter aimed at sideline pressure, reporting that four in five amateur athletes deal with unhelpful sideline behavior from parents and coaches.
As of mid-2026, “You Got This” is still the line on the wall. Whether it lasts twenty years like its predecessor, or two like Here to Create, is the only real question left about adidas slogans.
