We sat down with our colleagues, from different backgrounds and with different relationships with football to review the biggest World Cup campaigns.
What started as a creative review turned into something more interesting: a genuine argument about what a World Cup ad even means.
The question nobody asks out loud
Every four years, the marketing industry generates an enormous volume of commentary about World Cup advertising. Which spot was most viewed? Which celebrity cast was the most expensive? Which brand won the pre-tournament conversation? What almost nobody asks is the question my colleague put directly in the middle of our room: “What’s the definition of a World Cup ad? Is it just the ads you watch while you’re watching the World Cup?”
It sounds reductive but it was actually the most important question in the room.
Because the answer splits in two directions, and those two directions explain almost everything about the campaigns brands are making right now and why the gap between the best and the rest has never felt wider.
What we settled on is this; A World Cup ad is either a piece of communication that leverages the cultural moment of the tournament to create fame for a brand or it’s just a well-made ad that happens to run during a major sporting event. The distinction sounds academic until you put Adidas’s “Backyard Legends” next to Coca-Cola’s “Uncanned Emotions” next to Brahma’s “Tá Liberado Acreditar.” Then it becomes the only thing you’re arguing about.
Adidas: the bravest ad, and an uncomfortable question
“Backyard Legends” has, by most measurable standards, been the advertising story of this World Cup so far. Within days of release, it had racked up more than 4.7 million TikTok views, 2.9 million YouTube views, and over 56 million Instagram views and with a social media rallying cry of “Nike is so cooked” spreading in its wake.
The film runs for five minutes with Timothée Chalamet playing a street hustler trying to assemble a team for a win-or-go-home matchup on a blacktop between apartment buildings. Messi, Zidane, Beckham, Bellingham, Lamine Yamal, Trinity Rodman pass through. No one mentions the FIFA World Cup. No scoreline appears. There’s no moment where anyone holds up a trophy.
Florian Alt, Adidas’s VP of global brand communications, said the company wanted to capture the grassroots spirit of football that “isn’t defined by the stage, the crowd, or the cameras.” The film is a conscious expansion outward, not football talking to football fans, but football culture reaching beyond its own borders.
In our session, someone landed on exactly the right frame: “Part of their brief probably was ‘let’s create something so strong that we didn’t even need the rights.'”
That insight gets at something important. Adidas has spent years making football relevant inside streetwear culture. Predators on people who’ve never kicked a ball, Sambas on every corner of every city. “Backyard Legends” is the continuation of that outward expansion, not a chapter in a World Cup playbook. And remarkably, for a Tier 1 FIFA partner that has spent an enormous sum on those rights, the film never says “FIFA World Cup” once.
It takes significant institutional courage for a CMO to walk into that room and say: we have the rights, and we’re not going to use them. Not here. We’ll use them where no one else can even enter; in the fan zones, the official match balls, the kit launches, the stadium presence, but in our hero film, we’re going to make something that doesn’t need a tournament to justify its existence.
The film earned its viral moment, but the question it left some of us:
“Does this get me excited about the World Cup? Because for me, it doesn’t give me that feeling that the World Cup is around the corner.”
Coca-Cola: why the second film is the one that matters
Coca-Cola released two films this cycle. The first “Bubbling Up,” with its street celebrations and pre-tournament frenzy was met, in our room, with particular disdain. *”If you replaced this with Ramadan, it would have been the same thing.”* It is a seasonal placeholder in expensive clothing.
The second film, “Uncanned Emotions,” is an entirely different proposition. It is one of the most quietly clever pieces of World Cup communication in years.
The premise: every emotion of a football match, anticipation, fury, a red card, a free kick, the hush before a penalty, expressed entirely through a can of Coca-Cola. No players. No kit. No stadium footage. Just a can, reacting. And underneath it, the unmistakable voice of Peter Drury, whose commentary has become the voice of football emotion for an entire generation of fans.
The insight is tight. Coca-Cola is one of only a handful of brands on earth that can legally say “FIFA World Cup” in an advertising context. Adidas, which also could have, chose not to. Coca-Cola could have leaned on that right heavily. Instead, they replaced every feeling you get from watching a match with a single product. The product *becomes* the tournament.
“There’s no fake bull in this ad,” someone said in our session. Coca-Cola is not pretending to love football; instead, they are using the emotional grammar of football to sell you on the idea that their product belongs in your hand while you feel it.
It is, by the narrow definition, a perfect World Cup ad: a brand famous for something universal, borrowing the emotional architecture of the biggest event in sport, placing its product at the centre without breaking the spell.
Pepsi: a great idea that ran out of room
Pepsi’s “Football Nation” campaign builds a world with its own laws: every decision goes to VAR, Salah is the king of skill, speeding is measured in “unilateral skill.” David Beckham rules with impeccable authority. Gordon Ramsay screams at the border. It is stuffed with genuine insight and the best nugget (for me) is the soundtrack.
The campaign also extends beyond the film into a browser extension built around the football-versus-soccer argument, and a Reddit activation designed to push the debate into spaces where fans already gather. The campaign extensions make the film more coherent; it’s the entry point to a participatory world, not the whole of it.
But the film itself tries to do the work of ten ads simultaneously. The VAR insight is sharp. Salah’s penalty rule is genuinely funny. The song is a real find. And then there are thirty more things, all arriving at once, and the room stops being able to follow. “They had too much budget. You have to use all the money. You have no choice.”
The rule structure is a clever device for compressing multiple insights into a single format. But it requires surgical restraint to work, and “Football Nation” chose volume instead. What might have been a defining campaign gets remembered as a busy one.
Brahma: the ad that wasn’t made for you, and why that’s the point
Brahma’s “Tá Liberado Acreditar” opened our session with the strongest disagreement. Half the room found it formulaic: the crumpled newspaper, the old goals, the samba, the product. Check, check, check. “It felt like an ad made twenty years ago.”
The other half understood immediately what it was doing.
The film was made for a specific, urgent purpose. The sentiment in Brazil ahead of this World Cup has been unusually low, with research cited at the time of the campaign’s launch showing 76 per cent of Brazilians did not believe their team would win. For a generation of Brazilians who grew up watching the most feared national team in football history, that is a profound rupture.
Brahma’s campaign is not trying to win a creativity award. It is trying to do one specific thing: remind Brazilians of the moments that made them believe, and inject enough hope that they’ll watch. And the beer brand is, in the best possible sense, just the vehicle.
Someone in our room put it with real precision: “The beer brand is just the sponsor of the message of hope for this great nation during this great tournament.”
That framing is actually a useful lens for the whole category. The most effective World Cup ads don’t try to be about the brand. They find something the audience already feels and banks on that. Just like Coca-Cola.
Nike: the brand that doesn’t need the tournament
Nike holds no FIFA rights. They cannot say “World Cup” in an advertisement. But for endless tournaments, this is the environment they strive in. But things haven’t been that great for Nike and on top of everything, they have lost significant athlete relationships over the past four years. But they may be producing the most coherent and ambitious sports marketing campaign of 2026.
Rather than anchor its strategy around a defining cinematic hero film that typically launches its tournament campaigns, Nike has deployed what it calls a “Universe of Football”: a distributed content platform built around a rolling sequence of activations, product launches, and collaborations across a 12-week window.
The opening was 42 autographed Polaroid photographs dropped across social channels on May 21, featuring everyone from Cristiano Ronaldo and Kylian Mbappé to Kim Kardashian, LeBron James, Travis Scott, and BLACKPINK’s Lisa. The caption: “Time to go off script.”
“We’re not dropping a big hero ad and moving on,” Nike said explicitly. “We’re building an entirely new world of football, one that fans can enter, shape, and experience across culture, community, and innovation.”
Underneath the content universe sits a product platform that no other brand could replicate: kit collaborations with Drake’s NOCTA for Canada, G-DRAGON’s Peaceminusone for South Korea, Patta for the Netherlands, Slawn for Nigeria, Virgil Abloh Archives for the United States. Each part of an X2 collection designed through national identity, not imposed global narrative.
Then the hero film, “Rip The Script,” dropped, first through a trailer, and then the full film with activations popping up across the globe inviting people to watch.
Its premise is the campaign’s own meta-commentary: a director on set trying to keep famous people following instructions, failing completely as the whole thing descends into beautiful chaos. The film is the product of the strategy, not just its advertisement.
Nike’s context matters here. The football talent exodus from the Nike over the past years; Neymar, Kane, Saka, Sterling, Grealish, reads like a deliberate dismantling of everything the brand had built in football. A conventional hero film from a brand in that position would look desperate.
Going off script was not just a creative strategy. It was the only credible strategic option available.
The question the industry should be asking
We came back to the same problem repeatedly throughout our session: the World Cup, for most of its history, created a specific kind of advertising moment. You were watching football on cable, in a shisha bar, at home and between the action, a brand had your attention. That context shaped everything: the format, the scale, the ambition.
That context is fragmenting. Telemundo, which holds exclusive US Spanish-language broadcast rights, has sold 90 per cent of its World Cup advertising inventory, double the spend compared to 2022, with companies including Anheuser-Busch, Coca-Cola, Toyota, and McDonald’s buying spots. The broadcast moment still exists. But an entire generation of football fans will encounter World Cup advertising first on their phones, then on Instagram, then clipped and shared through social feeds, and only occasionally in the context of an actual match.
One of our team said something that I can’t stop thinking about: “The only time I ever see TV ads is when I’m watching football.” That’s the insight the best brands are working with. The World Cup may be the last event that recreates the Super Bowl advertising moment in global terms, a context where an audience is genuinely captive, genuinely emotional, and genuinely open to being moved by a brand.
Brands that understand this context and write for it e.g. Coca-Cola’s “Uncanned Emotions,” and Brahma’s hope campaign, do categorically different work to brands making content for YouTube and social first.
They’re not competing in the same game.
So what makes a Great World Cup ad?
After everything we watched and argued about, we landed somewhere surprisingly simple.
A Great World Cup ad injects you with something. Not necessarily football fever (though that works) but a feeling you recognise. A truth about the sport, the moment, or the culture around it that makes you feel seen. Brahma did it for Brazilians through hope. Coca-Cola did it for everyone through pure emotion. Nike is attempting it across the entire season through cultural belonging and Adidas did it through story, even if the World Cup itself barely showed up.
The ads that failed (and there were several) did so for the same reason: they assembled the ingredients without understanding the recipe. Players, kits, a stadium, a famous song, a celebrity. They checked every box and felt like nothing.
What separates the best from the rest isn’t budget, talent, or even creative ambition. It’s specificity and knowing exactly who you’re talking to, what they already feel, and where your brand earns the right to stand inside that feeling.
The bigger the stage, the more tempting it is to talk to everyone. The campaigns that will be remembered from the 2026 FIFA World Cup are the ones that resisted that temptation.
By Hisham Lahouasnia, Executive Director, Freedom Studio.
