Kylian Mbappé Leaves Nike to Sign With the Running Brand On

On will start making soccer shoes and has signed Kylian Mbappé to front the move, taking the forward away from Nike after roughly two decades and carrying a company built on running shoes into a sport it has never sold a product in.

Neither side gave a figure for the contract. Reuters reported that Mbappé is being paid partly in cash and partly in shares in On, which makes him an owner of the company rather than only an endorser, and that the first shoes are due in 2027. “We are proud of what we achieved together on and off the pitch,” Nike said in a statement. Goal, citing reports in France, said the Nike contract ran out on July 31 and was not renewed, closing a run of 12 signature shoes. Distance runners have been walking away from Nike too, if for smaller money, and Selemon Barega left for Li-Ning days before his marathon debut.

On was founded in Zurich in 2010 to sell one running shoe, and the business behind Friday’s announcement is a considerably larger thing. Second-quarter net sales came to CHF 850.3 million ($1.03 billion), up 13.5 percent year over year, with net income of CHF 105.0 million ($127 million) against a loss of CHF 40.9 million ($50 million) in the same quarter last year. The company expects to finish 2026 somewhere between CHF 3.47 billion and CHF 3.56 billion ($4.2 billion to $4.3 billion). That money is now paying for a move into soccer, where Adidas, Nike and Puma have been signing players for decades.

Hellen Obiri raced the first shoe On built with LightSpray, an upper a robot makes by spraying 1.5 kilometers of filament onto the midsole in one continuous piece. On now puts that at about three minutes a shoe, and the finished upper at 30 grams at its lightest. It stayed a limited-run curiosity for two years, turning up in the Cloudboom Strike 2 and on the custom pair Obiri wore to second place at the 2026 London Marathon. Only this year did On open a second robot factory, near Busan, South Korea, with 32 machines in it against the four in Zurich, and put the technology into the Cloudmonster 3 Hyper, a $280 trainer that reached North American stores on March 5. On’s soccer announcement names LightSpray as the basis for the shoes.

Nike did not renew Roger Federer in 2018. His apparel went to Uniqlo, and the year after that he put a reported $50 million into On for about 3 percent of the company, a figure Goal repeated this week. Tennis followed him there, and so did OAC Sprint, the professional sprint team On set up in Los Angeles with the 2028 Olympics in mind, which sits alongside the distance squads in Boulder, St. Moritz and Melbourne that carry Obiri, Yared Nuguse and George Mills.

Thierry Henry, who has been working on the soccer project since late 2025, was named director of football. Sydney Schertenleib, the Swiss international at FC Barcelona who joined On in December 2025 as a training and lifestyle ambassador, moves across to soccer and will test product for the women’s game.

“I can honestly say, I’ve never felt the ball like I have in the product the team is working on,” she said in the announcement.