About Umbro
Umbro is a globally recognised football and sports brand with a heritage stretching back to 1924.
From football boots and kits to training wear, rugby, futsal and lifestyle-led collaborations, the double diamond has become part of sporting culture across generations, teams and markets.
The brand operates internationally, with products, campaigns and content needing to work across multiple countries, languages and commercial contexts while still feeling unmistakably Umbro.
For a brand with that level of heritage and global reach, the website needed to do more than publish content. It needed to support consistent storytelling across international markets.
The challenge
Umbro's previous WordPress setup had become difficult to manage at global scale.
Countries and regions were effectively managing their own content strategies independently, which created inconsistency across brand presentation, content quality, campaign rollouts, product storytelling, publishing workflows, governance and localisation.
The challenge was not simply to migrate from WordPress to Umbraco.
Umbro needed a global digital platform and content operating model that could give the central brand team greater control while still supporting local market needs.
Content needed to be created centrally, governed properly and deployed globally, giving international teams a more consistent foundation for campaigns, product launches and brand storytelling.
The platform also needed to support the realities of a global commerce model, including multi-region publishing, locale-specific storefront journeys and translation workflows for markets with different language and layout requirements.
Our approach
Absurd worked with Umbro as a platform development partner, helping the brand move from a fragmented publishing model to a more scalable global Umbraco platform.
We began by understanding how content was being created, managed and published across countries and regions.
This included mapping existing workflows, identifying governance issues and understanding where regional autonomy was helping local relevance, but also creating inconsistency for the global brand.
The new platform was designed around reusable content components, centralised content creation and clearer publishing governance.
Instead of every country owning its own content strategy independently, Umbro gained the ability to create, manage and deploy content centrally across global markets.
Umbraco provided the CMS foundation for that operating model, giving the central team more flexibility, better maintainability and a clearer route for managing campaigns at scale across multiple regions.
Multi-region
publishing model
Locale-led
storefront routing
RTL
translation support
Content governance
A key part of the work was defining how the platform should support global publishing, not just how pages should be managed.
Umbro needed content structures that could maintain brand consistency while allowing markets to adapt content for local audiences.
We created a platform model that supported centrally governed content, reusable campaign patterns, product storytelling and more consistent publishing processes.
This reduced duplication and gave Umbro clearer control over how content moved from central creation to international deployment.
Regional publishing
Umbraco allowed Umbro to manage multi-region publishing from a central platform, giving teams a structured way to create global content, adapt it for local markets and maintain stronger governance across regional versions of the site.
We also used IP detection to help direct customers to the most appropriate locale storefront, connecting people with the right regional commerce journey instead of forcing a single global route to purchase.
For translation, we used Translation Manager to support more reliable localisation workflows across languages and markets. This included Arabic, where right-to-left content needed to be handled properly so translated pages could remain usable, consistent and commercially useful.
Results
The new platform gave Umbro a more scalable foundation for managing global digital content.
Brand presentation became more consistent across markets, while centralised workflows made it easier to manage campaign rollouts, product stories, regional publishing and editorial activity.
The move away from a fragmented WordPress setup improved governance, reduced duplication and gave internal teams a clearer way to maintain and evolve the global website across multiple languages, regions and storefront journeys.
Most importantly, the work gave Umbro a platform that supported how the brand needed to operate: centrally governed, internationally relevant and flexible enough to support future digital activity.
The challenge wasn't moving content from one CMS to another. It was creating a global operating model for how Umbro shows up online.
Outcomes
Umbro gained a modern Umbraco platform with stronger content control, clearer governance and more consistent global storytelling.
The project created a scalable foundation for future brand campaigns, product launches, international content delivery and regional commerce experiences.
The result was a global digital platform that gave Umbro greater control over its brand, content, campaigns and customer journeys across international markets.
