A German sports apparel company that sponsors the Israel Football Association, which includes teams representing illegal settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory. The company announced it will end this sponsorship at the end of 2024.
Puma SE, headquartered in Germany, is the third-largest sportswear manufacturer in the world and the primary sponsor of the Israel Football Association (IFA). After a 5-year public campaign targeting the company, it announced that it would terminate this sponsorship agreement at the end of 2024. The decision was made back in 2022, according to Puma, but was only announced publicly in December 2023, during Israel's unprecedented attacks against the Gaza Strip, which have killed Palestinian civilians at historic pace.
Puma started sponsoring the IFA in 2018 after Adidas dropped its sponsorship. The original sponsorship agreement was for four years. It was extended in 2022 until mid-2024 and again in September 2023 until the end of 2024. The contract is held by Puma's exclusive Israeli licensee, Al Srad Ltd, part of the Irani Corporation, which owns the rights to dozens of other brands in Israel. Puma's previous Israeli licensee was Delta Galil.
The Israel Football Association includes six Israeli football clubs whose official home fields are located in illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, as documented by Human Rights Watch in 2016. These areas are off-limits to the local Palestinian community living under military occupation and, in some cases, the fields were built on privately owned Palestinian land.
In a 2021 internal memo, Puma acknowledged that its business partners and presenters have been pressuring it on this issue, and attempted to distance itself from Israel's illegal settlement enterprise while making false claims about sponsoring the Palestinian Football Association as well.