This is a different topic, a more personal one, and breaking my programmed absence explicitly, because the narrative became so uncontrollable that I couldn’t avoid it anymore, and I feel it’s time to address it.

I’ve already touched on this point many times over the last week because it’s hard to reflect on it. As a Marketing professional, it’s impossible to avoid looking at the big elephant in the room: how supposed opinions stated as fact are helping shape what, for many people, is shifting towards the obvious. An anti-Argentina campaign is spreading worldwide, including social media, mainstream outlets, and online forums.

From attacking players because of their thugness (but Marco Materazzi’s provocation to Zidane in 2006, and Bellingham hitting Barco with his hand is not thugness but “fairness”), to the overwhelming claims of a racist nation that made the comedian Eric Andre enter a journey of unmeasured hate about the country, in where he even included AI-generated videos of a supposed “black South America”, that contains a flag I never seen before. Confirmed 100% that it’s not part of the main countries that form South America, and almost 95% sure that does not include Central American countries either.

AI’s job is also shaping the narrative that Infantino claimed that Argentina was his favorite (with several platforms citing it as fact), based on an AI-generated edit of the Netherlands vs. Morocco match.

Another layer lies in with the fact that a morally superior Spain team won, which I don’t really want to lean into, really, since I believe that they were superior in quality and really deserved it, although the comparison between a republic and monarchy that killed the native Americans during the colonisation of the continent is a blatant argument to expose when comparing both. More on this here:

I want to make it clear: There’s room for discussion and improvement. But the tendency is growing tighter and more and more closed.

Now, I’ll kick off with a very illustrative example of this shift towards intolerance and close mindedness.

In 2015, I went to Central Europe for my first trip on the continent, meeting wonderful people. One of those was an English guy from Wolverhampton, who, crazy enough, we confused for an Argentinean.

We became great friends because we also thought he was baiting us, saying he would come to Argentina in a year, which proved us wrong. After many years, he married a Mexican and moved to Mexico City.

But the point here is that in the first moments of our friendship, we tackled “the topic”. And let me be honest with you, it wasn’t a conflict at all. It was a space to share our thoughts on a topic, starting with the understanding that we are not going to agree on the position, but we can agree on other layers, such as the fact that not only Argentines but also English people died in that war.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot, remembering my time in London with him and his mates, who treated me wonderfully before I returned to Argentina after a year working in Australia in 2018, pre-COVID times.

What I feel has changed dramatically is the inability to debate, to open the floor to others' opinions or facts. Where positions of hate and, in some cases, plain xenophobia make an excuse for people to target others.

On the “echo chamber of thoughts”

An additional clarification, I’m not saying that some claims cannot be debated thoroughly, like the racist chants. Or the style of play, which, on a lighter note, I invite you to watch the Copa Sudamericana, which starts this week. Watch it and let me know your thoughts, please. It would be an interesting pre-read for further debate.

But there are two issues here that help shape the hate narrative: the first is exclusivity, and the second is the lack of fact-checking (like in the Eric Andre video). And it’s also problematic if you don’t cite official statistics or documents from Argentina. It’s not more true because you’re citing a book. What matters are the official sources, and because Argentinean history is ours, the sources are here.

Talking about perspective: this also happened during the WC:

I haven’t seen any writers pointing this out, on Substack or on mainstream media. None. No journalist pushed this forward, apart from the source and a few others, like Al Jazeera. This is clear proof that you too, reader or writer, fell into the narrative.

On being objects of fabricated narratives

It’s hard for people to admit that they are falling into a narrative that is fueled by social media and newspapers, and rightfully so. I’ve seen so many people that I respect (or used to) on Substack pushing any of these narratives. And of course, many of them are very educated and cultivated. So, of course, it’s hard to admit that it can happen to you, too.

But it did. It happens to you, it happens to me. Our blocking bar of acceptance and fact-check has fallen.

You can read this wonderful post about how the lack of reading is affecting critical thinking and some other aspects of the human mind: The End of Reading is Here.

As the article mentions:

Confirmation bias is not a less important topic that influences consumer trends and critical thinking:

I don’t want to escape the focus of the article, which is: how narratives and audience tendencies can influence how people are perceived and, later, positioned in the market.

The tendency toward entitlement and the buy-in to misinformation is nothing new, but, as I mentioned before, it’s affecting real people’s lives. For example, it can affect the lives of the people of Jujuy, which is also part of Argentina, and a great part of their community is of native descent. It can affect the communities of black descendants and black immigration, like the Senegalese and Cape Verdian, who live freely and happily in Argentina, and probably you won’t be aware of them. And, of course, it affects the lives of any other Argentine who is involved in this campaign.

On moving public opinion

But let’s take marketing. I’m now sharing this great article by (I asked her before sharing it because she, like me, shares the same profession, and her perspective touches on points like mine).

I found myself in the challenging task of summarizing the best ideas because the whole article is just perfect for me to explain much of my thoughts, so I’ll try my best. Thanks, Rosie, for your perspective:

The article tackles the cost of moving public opinion: how these campaigns start, how they spread, why they work on your brain, and why the next one will run much faster.

Stage one: the flip: how social media turned Messi (and, for many people, subsequently, Argentina).

Four years later, social media has somehow turned him into the villain.

Citing here: “the only thing that really changed was the distribution layer: the algorithms behind Instagram and TikTok, and whatever decided that Messi-as-villain edits perform better this cycle than Messi-as-legend edits did last time.”

The second stage is about how a campaign starts, and this is key to the discussion:

“they usually start with something real. a foul with the buildup cut out. a referee decision without the replay that explains it. a clip that’s technically accurate, but missing just enough context to tell a completely different story. then the algorithm takes over. Thousands of versions compete for attention, the ones that get the most engagement survive, and everything else disappears. after a while, the surviving clips stop feeling like isolated moments and start becoming talking points. eventually, they become “common knowledge”.

Additionally:

“one MIT study looked at around 126,000 claims shared by roughly 3 million people on twitter over an eleven-year period. Across every category they studied, false stories spread farther, faster, deeper, er and more broadly than true ones. On average, the truth took about six times longer to reach 1,500 people, while falsehoods were 70% more likely to be retweeted.”

Stage three: the paid layer, and it’s one of the most interesting, because it’s something that people are avoiding confronting: many of the claims that are being pointed out as organic fan content aren’t actually organic.

But the stage four is connecting this perfectly: the question about why this works on human behavior, and how

“psychologists call part of this the illusory truth effect, one of the most consistently replicated findings in psychology. Studies have shown that simply seeing a claim once makes people more likely to judge it as true later, even if it’s false. The effect can last for days, survives fact-check labels, and shows up even when the claim contradicts something people already know.”

Stage five: the control group is the perfect example of why narrative is so important: we have evidence of almost 2 decades of football (if we use Messi as the turning point), but the narrative still beats the evidence.

It’s interesting to shift back and forth between Argentina and Messi, because he’s been kind of an outsider to the official narrative. But now, as this post by The Athletic via NYT:

“Messi had an exchange of words with Marc Cucurella, and the Spaniard briefly appeared to cover his mouth. That is a red card offense if used to conceal insults during a confrontation, but Messi’s reaction, turning to raise his hand and request an intervention from the referee, brought to mind how a child might behave when seeking to tell tales to a teacher.”

Interestingly, the only two players affected by this new rule were South Americans.

The latest stage is the acceleration. And that’s what the World Cup did. From the first post of the Washington Post asking themselves, “Why are there no black players on the national team?”, mixing concepts of blackness with actual heritage and historical context, until now, what has changed is the magnification of the narrative shaped by these many forces.

But my worry is the same as Rosie’s:

“If the internet can reshape the reputation of arguably the most documented footballer in history, imagine what it can do in situations where there isn’t twenty years of footage for people to check. politics, wars, business, or people you’ve never even heard of. In those cases, the narrative often becomes the only version most people ever see. “

On storytelling management

People are attracted to strong storytelling from an early age. This is not new.

In fact, the renowned writer Kurt Vonnegut shared the shapes of storytelling. I don’t want to go deeper on this topic, but you can read it here:

The Storytelling Edge

The Simple Shapes of Great Stories, According to Kurt Vonnegut (And Science)

When I was 15, I fell in love with an 80-year-old man who lived in Midtown Manhattan. His name was Kurt…

Read more

2 years ago · 107 likes · 16 comments · Joe Lazer (FKA Lazauskas)

The interesting thing here, for today’s topic, is that he’s not only referring to stories of love and success, but also to stories of darkness and dread. We can feel attracted to histories of never-ending conflict, which, with the advent of social media and fake news, can feel stronger.

There’s one I want to cite here: “man in a hole”; there’s a person who can get enough of bad things happening. This is something that shaped stories like The Metamorphosis. And it’s something that people feel attracted to and cannot avoid.

As the Substack cited above mentions, this is also:

“the favored structure of viral founder stories — from Alibaba’s Jack Ma to Spanx’s Sarah Blakely. And it’s often used for evil.”

But there are two additional layers on this storytelling:

• the first one is the “buildup of the enemy figure”. Stories need a villain. It’s, in some cases, the most attractive aspect of movies and books. Some people are even more fans of villains than heroes, even if their narrative arc does not end in redemption.

Now we’re seeing a shift from villains to enemies. It’s not enough for us to see a pattern of issues and controversies. We need to isolate them and frame it as the responsibility of any issue (name racism, violence, xenophobia for both parties, which in the case of Argentina means “being a country of Nazis” at the same time “they support the state of Israel”).

Some people were making fun of the absurd of the situation with jokes like this:

• The second one, linked to the point above, is the bias influenciating disinformation. According to Ipsos, Internet users experience a high prevalence of disinformation on social media, with 68% indicating that disinformation is most widespread there.

What’s more worring is that only 48% of the surveyed by Ipsos have already reported online content related to disinformation (in the context of an election campaign), including 17% who have done so “often.” In detail, those aged 18-34 (55%) and people who describe themselves as “very interested” in politics (55%) are significantly more likely to have already reported this type of content.

But what happens when you are not informed enough?

On misinformation and avoidance of context

There are many cases in which not only fake news but also the extent of our exposure to the news can affect our perception.

Let’s take an example: many people cited the FBI investigation of the Argentine FA as the unveiling of a great scheme that everyone was hiding inside FIFA.

What’s wonderful about this is that I just talked about it on the Unofficial Partners podcast a month ago, about the figure of the president of the Argentine FA, Claudio Tapia. You are more than welcome to hear it and know that the Argentine government had been following Tapia because of an underlying conflict over club privatisation.

This article from Jan 2025 by explains it better:

Christopher’s Substack

A SAD state of affairs in Argentinian football 2024

La República Argentina is not only home to the current FIFA World Cup champions, but also to a footballing culture so rich in heritage, folklore and tradition that it draws the admiration of many globally. Buenos Aires, as the main hub of Argentinian football with over 40 clubs within an hour of the centre of the capital, remains a mecca for wide-eyed f…

Read more

a year ago · 8 likes · Christopher Hylland

Both the Arg government and the Arg IRS have been investigating Tapia since late 2025, as you can see in this article: La Politica Online.

The problem here isn’t only on the audience’s side; it’s also on the distributor’s. We Argentineans are not being emphatic enough about these things happening. Many people believed this was our problem (which I still think it is), but it raises an additional question about FIFA’s overall political position. Now, people have forgotten the Balogun incident, which completely changes the original frame of FIFA’s issues: it makes it an Argentina-exclusive one.

On loving the hated

I’ve seen many words about the figure of Donald Trump, but funnily enough, many of these people had taken home of his assets: the self-contained rhetoric. For example, framing the “facts” as absolutes, strongly enough that they don’t open the space to debate (Argentine president Milei follows the same pattern).

This is tied to shifting consumer habits, confirmation bias, and, as mentioned before, the lack of critical thinking.

This is not an article on debunking each troubling point that I read about Argentina. That is to no avail, and I’ve been proven the same over the last week.

This is not a post to cite each conflict that other nations have with blackness, violence, or players’ conduct. Attacking Argentina with fuel is what the audience is doing. I stepped up (which, as you can imagine, is hard to do) and, from the most objective perspective, understand not only why this is happening but also how the landscape shifted.

I’m pretty sure that I will have comments on the tone of “YOU ARGENTINEANS CAN ACCEPT WHAT YOU ARE” (in caps lock because it’s the tone nowadays) I can tell you perfectly what we are. But I will not do it on your terms. I will do so on the terms I defend: respect, honesty, and self-awareness.

What I can say is that we are a flawed country with many errors. In our country, there exists classism and manifestations of racism, like in many of our neighbours and in the countries where the media is teaching lessons of morality. We are under an embarrassing government (and this is on my very personal editorial) that is also contributing to this narrative.

But we are also a welcoming nation that has learned that otherness can be interesting, and we are also very argumentative: you can tell by being in Buenos Aires, where people are constantly talking and talking and talking, debating and debating. But since that’s our field, and the fields are closed for that purpose, the match is already lost. Hope it’s not the case.

This article has been written by me and proofread by Grammarly. No LLM has been involved in this article.

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One of the most famous moments in World Cup history is undeniably the Hand of God. The image of Diego Maradona out-jumping Peter Shilton to score with his hand in the 1986 quarterfinal has echoed around the world for decades.

There are countless stories about why he did it, or what his teammates and opponents thought. But what matters today is what the officials said.

For years, referee Ali Bin Nasser maintained that he had not seen the handball and had looked to his assistant for guidance. Decades later, assistant referee Bogdan Dochev reportedly admitted that he had seen Maradona use his hand—but also said that he had not intervened. The two officials spent the rest of their lives disagreeing over who had failed to communicate.

The Hand of God remains one of the foundational cases in football’s debate over human judgment, sensory limits, and fairness. But the conversation has long since shifted toward what was supposed to be the ultimate fix: technology.

We are now in an era where VAR, semi-automated offside, connected-ball sensors, referee body cameras, and public VAR explanations are real parts of the game—not material from a sports science-fiction show. The question is no longer whether technology can provide more information: it clearly can.

The visible layer: officiating technology

Unlike several other major sports, football was slow to incorporate technology into live officiating. The 1992 back-pass rule changed how teams used the goalkeeper and built from defence, but technology entered later, first to answer narrow factual questions.

At the 2014 World Cup, goal-line technology gave officials an automated answer to whether the whole ball had crossed the line. In 2026, optical tracking went further: VAR can now use it to determine whether the ball crossed the touchline during the attacking phase before a goal.

On June 3, FIFA announced two major additions. The advanced version of semi-automated offside technology made its World Cup debut after the earlier system was used at Qatar 2022. Clear positional offsides can now be sent directly to on-field officials, allowing a quicker flag. The limit remains human interpretation: the system can identify position, but not whether a player interfered with play.

Referee body cameras were also introduced for global audiences. Lenovo developed stabilisation software to reduce motion blur and improve the first-person footage. Unlike offside tracking, this is primarily a broadcast product.

It’s worth noting that referee cameras were framed as a broadcast innovation, giving fans the referee’s-eye view of contested contact. That framing undersells where the technology is heading. Body-worn footage does more than entertain: it humanizes officials by showing decisions in real time, but it also weaponises intimacy, so to speak. A missed touch or a hesitant glance can go viral within minutes, reshaping public judgment before any formal review. As leagues explore using this footage as disciplinary evidence, questions of privacy, for players and referees alike, become unavoidable. The camera does not just show the game; it puts the officiating itself on trial.

These systems deliver information unavailable to the naked eye. But they have not removed controversy. The argument has shifted from whether the referee saw an incident to whether technology was applied correctly and consistently.

And just as importantly: VAR does not eliminate subjectivity. Criticism has ranged from charges of over-reach to conspiracy theories that VAR is used to determine match outcomes.

That tension was visible in Egypt’s 3–2 round-of-16 defeat to Argentina. VAR disallowed an Egypt goal for a foul earlier in the attacking possession. Egypt also appealed for a penalty on Mohamed Salah, but FIFA Referee Committee Chairman Collina said the referee and VAR had assessed the contact and judged it normal football contact. He defended the disallowed goal by arguing that there is no fixed distance or time limit within the reviewable attacking phase.

A different controversy happened before that match, when the United States faced Bosnia and Herzegovina in a round-of-32 match. Folarin Balogun was sent off after VAR identified a challenge missed in real time, showing his boot making contact with Tarik Muharemovic’s ankle. The decision became politically amplified when Donald Trump questioned the referee’s integrity.

The connected ball as invisible infrastructure

If officiating technology is the visible layer of contested judgment, the ball is the layer working underneath it. The match ball has quietly migrated from equipment to instrument, embedded sensors turning it into an autonomous data source feeding officiating, broadcast graphics, and player analytics. That shift matters because it relocates authority from human sight and camera angles to instrumented measurement.

For refereeing, ball telemetry promises clearer determinations: speed, spin, and the exact moment a ball crosses a line, reducing reliance on interpolation from cameras and human judgment. But precision doesn’t equal neutrality. Sensor calibration, sampling rates, and environmental interference such as mud or impact forces, all shape the “truth” the system reports.

For broadcasters and fans, the ball becomes a storytelling device. Instant speed tags, spin vectors, and trajectory overlays create richer narratives and new expectations about what should be knowable in real time. That visibility can deepen engagement, but it also compresses tolerance for ambiguity: when a graphic shows a ball “100% over the line,” audiences expect officials to agree.

Commercial and competitive implications follow. Who owns the raw ball data? FIFA, manufacturers, broadcasters, or clubs determine who can build performance products, scouting models, or monetized viewer features. Access inequality risks creating new competitive edges and limiting independent verification of contentious calls.

Finally, embedding measurement into the object centralizes failure risk. A malfunctioning ball can silently distort the record of a match, and detection often happens only retrospectively.

AI as a broadcast product

After exploring AI’s chaotic side—like deepfaked commentators and betting ads—this section tracks a quieter shift: the moment AI stops supporting the broadcast and becomes the product.

Start with the players. All 1,248 athletes were 3D-scanned to generate digital avatars for the semi-automated offside system, replacing the old, featureless mannequins. FIFA’s Innovation Director, Johannes Holzmüller, was blunt about why this matters beyond officiating:

An officiating tool doubles as a broadcast upgrade. It’s telling which feature FIFA emphasizes in interviews.

Football AI Pro extends the same logic to team analysis, giving all 48 federations generative AI analysis, replacing FIFA’s static 60-page PDFs. Add Lenovo stabilized ref cams and 16 tracking cameras generating 150 million data points per match, and the picture is clear. These systems feed both VAR and media packages. Officiating tools are now shipped as broadcast content.

FIFA claims this drives transparency. But accountability and broadcast value are the same investment. If the footage must be credible, it must also be watchable. Once a system is built for both, the two goals become inseparable.

The England–Norway quarterfinal exposed this tension. Replays suggested a goal kick clipped a camera cable before Bellingham’s equalizer. FIFA relied entirely on the connected ball’s sensor: no “heartbeat” spike meant no contact. Norway and the audience disagreed. The technology produced a defensible reading, not agreement.

The tournament as a command center

The expanded World Cup is a complex live operation across three countries and 16 host cities. The technology story here is as much about logistics as it is about the pitch.

For the first time, according to FIFA officials, the organisation is operating a dedicated Technology Command Center from its Miami headquarters. Teams monitor applications, networks, and cybersecurity, supported by stadium specialists. Its systems register 300–400 million attempted cyberattacks daily, coordinating directly with the FBI to manage the threat environment.

That technology centre sits alongside FIFA’s Tournament Operations Center in Miami, where Lenovo’s Intelligent Command Center provides a single live view of the tournament. Security, ticketing, and live camera feeds are monitored through one shared environment rather than fragmented systems. Lenovo’s digital venue representations also help FIFA interpret alerts and identify bottlenecks before they escalate.

The International Broadcast Centre in Dallas adds another layer. The 45,000-square-metre facility serves as the tournament’s broadcast hub. It anchors a technology estate that includes over 17,000 Lenovo and Motorola devices deployed across venues, supported by more than 200 engineers. At that point, the picture stops looking like a stadium tour and starts looking like a distributed control room with a pitch attached.

Is the World Cup a sporting event or a temporary smart-city? It runs on the same logic: integrated systems and centralized live data. It is a compressed, tri-national laboratory for other industries.

Fans see stadium screens and referee cameras. They don’t see command centers neutralizing security alerts or gate bottlenecks. Most of that infrastructure becomes noticeable only when something fails, and becomes the center of attention.

Fan experience and commercial design

If the command center is where FIFA manages the tournament from behind the scenes, fan experience is where that management becomes visible, repackaged as convenience. Digital ticketing, wayfinding apps, queue management, cashless payments, and personalized content combine to sculpt the visitor journey into a data-generating service. That orchestration improves flow: shorter lines, faster concessions, tailored offers. It also converts everyday friction into monetisable signals. Every tap, turn, and delay becomes fodder for dynamic pricing, targeted sponsorships, and operational optimisation.

The practical benefit is real. Fewer missed minutes of play, safer crowds, smoother logistics across stadiums and host cities. The commercial payoff, though, is concentrated. Whoever controls the identity layer (ticketing and payments) and the integration layer (the stadium app or concierge) can sell audience segments to advertisers, refine premium experiences for high-value fans, and license insights to clubs and brands.

That concentration raises competitive and ethical questions. Do federations outsource core fan relationships to tech vendors and payment platforms, or retain ownership of behavioral data? When a host-city AI concierge steers fans toward partner venues, is the purpose service or conversion? Privacy and consent frameworks are often an afterthought during event rollouts, yet the data aggregated during a single tournament builds profiles valuable long after the final whistle. Reliance on digital systems also introduces exclusion risk: cash-reliant or offline visitors may face a downgraded experience, turning seamless design into a source of inequity.

Team analytics and competitive equity

AI-assisted analytics can genuinely democratise insight. Standardised tracking feeds and shared post-match tools give every federation, regardless of budget, access to the same raw material: player loads, pressing patterns, expected-goals models. For teams that previously relied on a single analyst with a spreadsheet, that’s a real upgrade.

But a shared baseline is not a shared advantage. What separates federations now is not access to data but capacity to interpret it. Wealthier teams hire dedicated data scientists, build proprietary models on top of FIFA’s public feeds, and run extensive private training camps where bespoke hardware such as GPS vests, biometric sensors, custom simulation tools generate insight no rival federation can see. Coaching staff size compounds the gap: a team with three analysts translates data into tactics faster than one with none.

The trust problem: explainability as product

Every layer of World Cup technology, from officiating, the ball, broadcast AI, the command center, fan-facing systems, to team analytics, follows the same pattern. Each promises more precision, more information, more control. None of them, on their own, produce more trust. And in some cases, it actually resulted in less trust than the game had to begin with.

The Hand of God opens the piece on a failure of communication, not sensing. Two officials who each saw part of the truth and never reconciled it. Every section since has restated that same gap in a modern form: semi-automated offside is precise but still needs a human to judge intent; the ball can measure exactly where it crossed a line but fans still need to be convinced; ref cams generate emotional truth that competes with procedural truth; command centers make decisions no fan ever sees; fan-data systems trade convenience for consent most visitors never read; shared analytics infrastructure looks like equity but hides where the real advantage still lives.

FIFA is building a completely closed commercial loop. Every sub-product is connected and entirely controlled, allowing them to manage both integrity and revenue. But FIFA isn’t just building systems that decide things, it’s building systems that have to justify themselves, in real time, to an audience that doesn’t trust the decision just because it’s technically correct. The real product being built across all seven sections isn’t accuracy. It’s legitimacy. And legitimacy has to be designed and communicated, not just computed.

If FIFA’s infrastructure succeeds at manufacturing trust, the model spreads. Other leagues will build the same closed loop: control the offside call, the broadcast frame, the fan data, the analytics feed. If it fails, it exposes something deeper: that legitimacy can’t be engineered, only earned. Either way, the next decade of sports governance will be defined by which outcome FIFA’s 2026 tournament proved possible.

What do you think? Let’s discuss below.

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When I started my Business of the World Cup series, the first piece kicked off with this text:

“That tournament gave me Striker. Four years later, France 98 gave me Footix. At five, and then at nine, I wasn’t thinking about licensing deals or FIFA’s commercial strategy — I was just completely, irrationally obsessed.”

It’s hard to deny that one of my strongest connections to World Cup imagery is the mascots, and while I touched on them briefly in that piece as one part of how the tournament evolved as a product, they deserve their own dedicated treatment, breaking down how their commercial power has evolved across different eras and the strategy driving them today.

A quick note on scope before diving in: this is a wide-angle pass built around seven mascots and sixty years, tracking one argument about how their commercial function changed. A fuller picture of what mascots have done to the World Cup would need to bring in the ones left out here — Footix, La’eeb, Goleo, Zakumi, and others each carry their own version of this story. That’s a piece I’d like to do at some point, but for now, tell me if there’s appetite for it and I’ll take it on next.

The 1966 formula

Much of the World Cup’s commercial apparatus changes from one cycle to the next: hosts, active tournament identities, and the terms under which broadcast and sponsorship rights are sold. The mascot is the one piece of host-specific branding built to keep functioning as a character after the event ends.

The baseline was set in 1966, almost entirely by accident. World Cup Willie was never meant to be a system — the grinning lion in a Union Jack shirt, drawn by illustrator Reg Hoye, became one anyway. He appeared across an unusually wide range of merchandise, with contemporary estimates placing the programme’s retail value at roughly £4 million, inspired his own pop song, and helped establish a model that soon reached other major sporting events, with Munich introducing Waldi the dachshund as the first official Summer Olympic mascot six years later.

But Willie carried more historical and identity weight rather than describing the political landscape of the time. Because the lion represented a broadly legible version of Britishness, what 1966 didn’t settle was how that formula would hold up once a government had a story it actually needed the mascot to tell.

1978 vs. 1982: When identity becomes a political asset

Argentina answered that question first, under the darkest conditions. When the 1976 coup installed a military junta, the regime didn’t invent a propaganda figure, it inherited a character that had originated in a 1972 Argentina’s FA design competition and was later selected and reworked for the tournament, putting an existing piece of folk imagery to political use. The gaucho is a deeply historical Argentine symbol, but here it was doing political labor its designers never intended.

Gauchito’s smile fronted a tournament built to project order and unity while repression continued off-camera. That was the whole of its political function: showcasing Argentine identity while portraying harmless imagery to the world, when reality was tragically the opposite.

Spain ran the same mechanism four years later under the opposite conditions. Naranjito, an anthropomorphic orange, was built specifically to avoid the bull, the flamenco dancer, and the familiar national shorthand that had been repeatedly used during the Franco era — a country building a new image. He went on to become durable Spanish pop culture, still tied today to the country’s democratic transition, not because he produced it but because he gave its optimism a form that could be licensed and remembered.

1994: the pivot

The break from that dependency arrived in 1994, and it remains the clearest indication that the mascot’s commercial function was changing. The United States did not commission a character whose value depended on a detailed piece of national folklore — it let the public choose Striker, a cartoon dog designed by Warner Bros., dressed him in red, white, and blue, and gave him the most immediate form of American identification available.

FIFA’s own retrospective describes the logic in almost exactly those terms: dogs were among the country’s most popular pets, and the colors supplied the national connection on top of that.

Striker carried regional identity, but only in compressed form. He required no knowledge of a historical figure, a local tradition, or a political transition to understand what he was — the audience only needed to recognize a friendly cartoon animal, a football uniform, and three national colours, which was enough to make the character readable before anyone had to understand the host.

2026: the formula at scale

The 2026 mascots run that same playbook at full industrial scale. Maple, Zayu, and Clutch are still national portraits — a moose, a jaguar, a bald eagle, each carrying a distinct national personality — but the infrastructure around them is what actually changed.

FIFA Heroes, developed by ENVER and unveiled by FIFA with Solace in October 2025, is a five-a-side arcade game in which Maple, Zayu, and Clutch have their own abilities and special moves alongside other FIFA mascots, football figures, and licensed entertainment characters.

What the formula actually manufactures

Each era sits at a different point on the same trade-off.

• Willie stood out for converting an immediately recognizable national symbol into an unusually large merchandise programme.

• Gauchito and Naranjito carried real national weight, but their lasting meaning remained concentrated in the countries and historical moments that produced them.

• Striker compressed that specificity into a cartoon character that required almost no cultural translation: a popular domestic animal, a football shirt and ball, and the national colours.

• The 2026 mascots attempt to preserve national differentiation while operating inside a system built for portability. Maple, Zayu, and Clutch represent three distinct host countries, but FIFA Heroes gives them abilities, roles, and a commercial environment shared with mascots and characters from other properties.

That doesn’t make every mascot a permanent annuity (plenty will still spend their afterlife in childhood bedrooms and on resale listings, tied to nostalgia in many cases), but FIFA no longer has to leave them there. It now owns the infrastructure to pull any of them back out the moment they’re useful again.

The mascot began as a souvenir of the host. It’s become, instead, the part of the host that FIFA gets to keep.

What do you think? Let’s discuss below.

Carla | Off-Ball Logic

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Every Sunday during the World Cup window, I’ve been sharing reading recommendations via Notes — pieces from across Substack that were worth your time if you follow the business, strategy, and culture of the game.

This post collects all of them in one place: A library, not a recap.

Dip in wherever your angle is.

💻 Strategy & Business

The commercial architecture of this tournament is unlike anything that came before it. These pieces build the full picture.

➡️ “How FIFA Makes Money” by — The receipts behind everything: revenue, TV broadcasting, hospitality, ticketing, sponsorship, licensing, prize money. And FIFA is, on paper, a non-profit. Infantino’s “104 Super Bowls in a month” framing tells you everything about how this World Cup is being sold internally.

How They Make Money

⚽️ How FIFA Makes Money

Welcome to the Free edition of How They Make Money…

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a month ago · 123 likes · 4 comments · App Economy Insights

➡️ Inside the marketing machine powering the World Cup by — The commercial architecture of 2026: the revenue cycle, Panini stickers, TikTok deals, YouTube partnerships. Read it alongside any pre-commercial-era World Cup history and the scale of what was built across 100 years becomes visible in a way neither piece achieves alone.

Planet Soccer

Inside the marketing machine powering the World Cup

By the time the first whistle blows at the World Cup in June, the soccer tournament will already have scored its biggest victory — commercially…

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3 months ago · 4 likes · 2 comments · Clemente Lisi

➡️ The $250 Million Fox Can Make From World Cup Hydration Breaks by & — A clinical look at how a three-minute water break became the most lucrative inventory Fox has to sell, and the deeper question underneath it: how much interruption can be sold before the thing being sold stops being football.

Boardroom Ball

The $250 Million Fox Can Make From World Cup Hydration Breaks

On 11 June, a few minutes after Raúl Jiménez put Mexico 2-0 up against South Africa in the opening match of the World Cup, the referee Wilton Sampaio called a hydration break, and the United States broadcaster Fox cut away to advertisements. By the time it cut back, the players had returned, Sampaio had held South Africa's kickoff for around forty secon…

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a month ago · 7 likes · 5 comments · Boardroom Ball and Tom Hyland

➡️ 5 Ways Brands Can Capitalise on the 2026 FIFA World Cup by — A challenger brand playbook for this summer. Official global sponsorships start at £52–76M and are sold out anyway. The argument that the most creative activations happen outside FIFA’s official programme is the one worth sitting with.

The Playmaker Clubhouse

5 Ways Brands Can Capitalise On The 2026 FIFA World Cup

This summer hosts the FIFA World Cup, and it’s set to be the largest commercial tournament in history. With total revenues projected to reach $10.9 billion - a 56% increase compared to Qatar 2022 - and sponsorship revenues alone expected to exceed $2.8 billion, the commercial stakes have never been higher…

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3 months ago · 17 likes · 1 comment · Playmaker Creative Club

➡️ How Challenger Brands Can Compete at the World Cup by — The most interesting marketing piece from the build-up. The argument: mainstream is a positioning trap, and the brands best placed to win aren’t the ones spending the most.

The Space Between The Game

How Challenger Brands Can Compete at the World Cup

The World Cup is nearly upon us…

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2 months ago · 9 likes · 7 comments · Jay Shemenski

➡️ The World Cup Nobody Can Afford by — $10,990 for a Category 1 final ticket. $2.3M on resale. FIFA taking 30% of every secondary transaction on a platform it owns. The structural argument at the end — that pricing out real fans erodes the very thing FIFA is monetising — is the one worth sitting with.

This Is Football

The World Cup Nobody Can Afford

Pep Guardiola doesn’t usually moralise about ticketing. He’s a football manager. His public register sits closer to tactical philosophy than consumer politics…

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3 months ago · 14 likes · 3 comments · This Is Football

➡️ The World Cup That Priced Out the World by — When confronted with $2.3M final tickets listed on FIFA’s own marketplace, Infantino joked he’d personally deliver a hot dog. This piece documents the pricing architecture behind the joke — the 30% resale cut, the $32K Front Category 1 seats, the USA opening match struggling to sell out. The supply side of the same argument told from the demand side.

Sportsclusive

The World Cup That Priced Out the World

Gianni Infantino has a joke for you. When confronted with the fact that four tickets for the 2026 World Cup Final were listed on FIFA’s own official marketplace for $2.3 million each, the FIFA President didn’t offer a policy change or an apology. He laughed. He promised that for anyone willing to pay $2 million for a seat, he would personally deliver th…

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2 months ago · 14 likes · 2 comments · Sportsclusive

➡️ The World Cup at Any Cost? by — The full picture of everything happening around this tournament: tickets, transit, politics. The most comprehensive pre-tournament context piece out there.

The Football Notebook

The World Cup At Any Cost?

On June 11th when the opening whistle blows between Mexico and South Africa in Mexico City, the talking will stop and the football will start. This is the way of any World Cup. But before we get there, there are some questions worth asking about the tournament itself…

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2 months ago · 11 likes · Jason Clewes

➡️ Does Hosting the World Cup Actually Help You Win? by — A data-driven analysis of whether host nations outperform their historical average on the pitch, using World Cup data from 1930 to 2022. Timely, given everything we know about who’s actually outperforming — and who’s not — in 2026.

The Numbers Game

Does Hosting the World Cup Actually Help You Win?

While watching the 2026 World Cup I’ve been impressed so far by the host nations' performances. Both the USA and Mexico have won their opening two group stage games - quite convincingly at that - and Canada showed some quality against Qatar in their Matchday 2 fixture after a tricky opening game against Bosnia and Herzegovina. This made me wonder, how w…

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a month ago · 36 likes · 18 comments · Dan Fleming

➡️ The Post World Cup Opportunity Most Brands Will Miss by — Brands spend months planning tournament activity and stop the moment the work goes live, leaving the entire post-tournament warm audience untouched. The window after the final is when audience relationships either compound or evaporate — and most brands aren’t thinking about it yet.

Vivrant Sports Intel & Inspiration

The post World Cup opportunity most brands will miss

Weeks, months and even years goes into planning the World Cup activity we’ve seen from brands in the lead up to the tournament. Once the work goes live, most brands stop there and miss out on the big post-World Cup growth opportunity…

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a month ago · 3 likes · Warren Dell

🌍 The Global Game

The expansion to 48 teams made this the most geographically diverse World Cup in history. These pieces follow the implications.

➡️ India Is About to Miss the World Cup And Nobody Seems to Care by — The 2026 World Cup media rights were unsold in India two months before kick-off. FIFA dropped the price 65% and still found no takers. Goes deeper than the broadcast story — this is what institutional governance failure looks like from the inside.

10 Bits Sports

India Is About to Miss the World Cup And Nobody Seems to Care

Haven’t subscribed yet? Join our community of sports enthusiasts eager to broaden their understanding of global sports. Whether you’re a student, professional, or business owner, our newsletter provides invaluable insights into the sports industry…

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3 months ago · 16 likes · 4 comments · Vipul Londhe

➡️ The Continent That Exports Its Best and Prays They Come Home by — Africa’s record ten teams at this tournament as a lens into the global talent economy: a continent that produces extraordinary footballers but lacks the system to keep them.

Pattern of Play

The Continent That Exports Its Best and Prays They Come Home

Something historic is happening this summer. For the first time in football history, ten African nations will compete at a single World Cup. The tournament’s expansion to 48 teams has delivered Africa its biggest-ever allocation — nine automatic berths, along with DR Congo’s breathtaking late qualification through the intercontinental play-offs, where they edged Jamaica 1-0 in extra-time…

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2 months ago · 21 likes · 19 comments · Kwame Twumasi-Ankrah

➡️ From Grassroots to the World Cup by — A World Cup squad built entirely from players who came through non-traditional pathways, and how different continents develop talent in completely different ways.

Sportsvrse

From Grassroots to the World Cup: The Journeys Behind the Game’s Biggest Stage

The World Cup is steadily approaching us, and in the build-up to what proves to be another exciting and unpredictable competition, I'd like to explore the stories of international players from the 48 nations heading to this year’s tournament, particularly their roots in grassroots or non-league football…

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2 months ago · 3 likes · Ekow Owusu-Boakye

➡️ Is this the year football (soccer) has its breakout moment in America? by and ) — The cultural argument for why the legacy question matters more than the tournament itself — and why the answer has to start at grassroots level.

Open Dialogue

Is this the year football (soccer) has its breakout moment in America?

2026 will be the biggest year of all time for ‘soccer’. In a month, The World Cup will kick off on North American soil, with Canada, Mexico and the United States playing tri-host to a record-breaking 104 matches…

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2 months ago · 12 likes · 8 comments · Explorers Club and Harry Salmons

➡️ What If This World Cup Is the Last of Its Kind? by — The question worth sitting with: maybe this isn’t just the next World Cup, but the last version of the old one, before football has to ask harder questions about who it’s actually built for.

The Last Game

What If This World Cup Is the Last of Its Kind?

It’s June 2026…

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2 months ago · 14 likes · 4 comments · Andy Cahill

📍 The Host Nation Lens

Hosting a 48-team World Cup across three countries is a commercial and cultural experiment at scale. These pieces track it.

➡️ What to Know About the USMNT if You’re Trying to Root for Them by & — An inviting, sharp guide to this squad for anyone looking for a reason to care beyond Pulisic.

Soccer Freaks

What to Know About the USMNT if You’re Trying to Root for Them

While we won’t be centering the USMNT in our Men’s World Cup experience or coverage, that doesn’t mean we won’t be watching, we don’t have players we’re rooting for, or that we don’t support you doing whatever feels right to you. Many of us have been following these players and this team for years or even decades, and there are definitely bright spots o…

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a month ago · 14 likes · 3 comments · elizabeth villa and Charlotte Beach

➡️ USMNT vs Germany Analysis by — A 2-1 defeat that revealed the defensive vulnerabilities Pochettino needs to fix before it counts. Clear-eyed tactical breakdown of a team with real flank quality and a backline with real questions.

➡️ How Far Can Mexico Go This Summer? by — Ochoa at 40, Jiménez and Lozano up front, quarter-final ceiling. Host nation advantage is real, and this piece makes the honest case for how far it goes.

This Is Leeds United

How Far Can Mexico Go This Summer?

Let’s Talk Football…

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2 months ago · 8 likes · 2 comments · Let's Talk Football

📊 Tactics & Analysis

The 48-team field brought squads, managers, and tactical setups that most fans had never had reason to study before. These pieces do the homework.

➡️ Getting to Know Your World Cup Managers by — Tracing the lines of footballing continuity from the 1930s to now through the World Cup pedigree of this tournament’s managers. A different kind of pre-tournament read.

Football Nerd

Getting to know your world cup managers

Every four years with the World Cup looming, I find myself wondering who were coaches of the participating nations that possess previous World Cup experience either as players or managers…

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a month ago · 11 likes · Football Nerd

➡️ World Cup Preview: Uruguay Edition by — The most honest Uruguay preview you’ll read. Bielsa’s critics are louder than ever, Darwin Núñez hasn’t played 90 minutes since February, and they’re the only team going into the tournament without a warm-up game.

The Copa Club’s Substack

World Cup Preview: Uruguay Edition

Back in 2023, Uruguay were flying…

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2 months ago · 6 likes · 2 comments · The Copa Club

➡️ Who Are the Women’s World Cup All-Time Top Goalscorers? by — From Michelle Akers’ ten-goal 1991 tournament to Marta’s record-breaking 17 — the scoring list tells the story of the women’s game’s growth over three decades. With the Women’s World Cup in 2027, worth reading now.

She Can Kick It

Who are the Women’s World Cup all-time top goalscorers?

Lionel Messi may now sit above Marta on the combined men’s and women’s World Cup scoring list…

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24 days ago · 15 likes · 2 comments · Clare McEwen

❤️ Memories & Culture

Every World Cup accumulates a layer of history alongside the official one. These pieces live there.

➡️ France 98 by — A childhood memory of the first World Cup that really meant something: PlayStation, Panini stickers, and Zidane. Warm and honest.

No-Nonsense Defending

France 98

There is a theory that the World Cup closest to your Tenth Birthday is often your favourite as you are at an age when you not only love football…

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2 months ago · 2 likes · 2 comments · James Gorse

➡️ The Peak of Calcio: When the USA Hosted by — Serie A in 1994: Milan winning the Scudetto, Batistuta scoring, and pay-TV arriving to change Italian football forever.

Goalazzo

The Peak of Calcio: When the USA Hosted the World Cup and Serie A Ruled the World

Hello and welcome to the Friday edition of Goalazzo! Today we kick off a new series of World Cup-themed long reads that will accompany us over the next six weeks, as football’s biggest extravaganza returns to the USA for the first time in 32 years…

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2 months ago · 10 likes · 4 comments · Goalazzo

➡️ The House That Believed by — Watching the Netherlands at the 2010 World Cup from his grandparents’ house. One of the best things I’ve read this month.

SportsYarn

The house that believed

A month from today, the Netherlands will play Japan in their opening game of the 2026 FIFA World Cup…

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2 months ago · 30 likes · 10 comments · Jesse Gerritsen

➡️ My Favourite World Cup Memories by — Five personal memories, from Trippier’s free kick in 2018 to Tshabalala’s opening goal at South Africa 2010.

Luxury Leagues and Looks

My Favourite World Cup Memories

The World Cup is quickly approaching, and personally I cannot wait. Summer days discussing football with your friends and enjoying your nation’s triumph or crying in defeat…

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2 months ago · 10 likes · James Hastilow

➡️ Eleven of the Best by — A personal World Cup XI, limited to tournaments actually watched (1994–2022).

Sam On Sport

Eleven Of The Best

Eleven Of The Best…

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2 months ago · 5 likes · 4 comments · Sam on Sport

📖 And From This Newsletter

➡️ If you’ve been following along with Off-Ball Logic during the tournament, the World Cup commercial history series is now finished — one era at a time, from 1930 to now. All parts are free to read.

That’s the full list. If something here sent you down a rabbit hole, or if there’s a piece you think should’ve been on it — drop it in the comments.

What are you reading?

Carla | Off-Ball Logic

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This week, the tournament is asking a question that goes well beyond the scoreline: what does it actually take to build a brand at a World Cup — and what happens when you don’t?

The Best Goalscorer Nobody Is Selling

The Athletic ran a profile on Kane this week, and the numbers are genuinely historic. Thirteen World Cup goals have moved him past Pelé in the all-time scoring charts and level with France’s Just Fontaine — with only Gerd Müller, Ronaldo, Klose, Mbappé, and Messi still ahead. He captains England, plays for Bayern Munich, and is by most measures one of the greatest strikers of his generation.

His brand equity and commercial relevance remain limited.

His 18.7 million Instagram followers are less than a half of Haaland’s audience and less than a sixth of Mbappé’s 132 million. McDonald’s, one of FIFA’s largest commercial partners, chose Son Heung-min and David Beckham to represent their World Cup campaign — Beckham, who retired in 2013 and never made it past a quarter-final. Kane’s boot deal is with Skechers.

His active partnerships — Oura Ring, Google Gemini, Eveready, Allianz — are solid but modest for a player at his level, especially considering his longer-term commercial bets are equity plays lacking the heavyweight impact seen from his peers.

The Kane case is a useful illustration of a gap the sports marketing world rarely addresses directly: on-pitch performance and commercial marketability are not the same currency, and they don’t automatically convert into each other. Haaland has built an aesthetic identity — the Nordic archetype, Gen-Z content, Social collabs — that exists independently of his goal record.

Kane hasn’t built that equivalent, nor does he seem to want to, opting instead to build a more business-focused, long-term brand equity.

The strategic takeaway isn’t just about sponsor expectations—it’s about how athletes choose to navigate modern fame. Do you surrender to current marketing forces to capture every ounce of immediate momentum, or do you step back and build a brand based strictly on your own vision, accepting the quiet periods that come with it?

FIFA’s Brand Bible (That Nobody Was Supposed to Read)

A document circulating on social media this week appears to be FIFA’s internal brand guidelines for the 2026 World Cup — and if it’s genuine, it’s one of the more revealing commercial artifacts of the tournament. It hasn’t appeared on any official FIFA channel, so the caveat stands: we’ll treat it as likely authentic, not yet confirmed.

What it shows is a full brand architecture built around the idea that every national team is a sub-brand operating inside FIFA’s larger system. The guidelines lay out a brand pyramid with “Newfound Awareness, Unprecedented Unity” at the top, and below it, three distinct visual identity systems — one for the host nations, one for established footballing powers, and one for emerging federations making their first or second appearance. The tagline “Soccer meets fútbol” does a lot of work in a small space: it’s FIFA acknowledging, in its own brand language, that this tournament has two audiences it needs to hold simultaneously.

From a PMM seat, the more interesting question isn’t whether the guidelines are real — it’s that they exist at all in this form. FIFA building a tiered identity system for 48 national teams is an attempt to manage brand equity at a scale no tournament has tried before.

The risk is that a system designed to make everything coherent ends up making everything look the same. Identity that comes from a style guide is not the same thing as identity that comes from a culture.

The Playlist Nobody Planned

FIFA came into this tournament with a structured music strategy. According to The Athletic, the organization categorized all stadium music into four official buckets: pre-match atmosphere, goal celebrations, team walk-outs, and general crowd engagement. Every track was cleared, approved, and assigned.

And then Wonderwall happened. And Country Roads. Neither was on any official list — both spread through the stands organically, picked up by fans and amplified until they became part of the tournament’s sonic identity whether FIFA planned for them or not. The goal horn variations by country, the chants that started in one stadium and migrated to another — none of it came from the approved playlist.

This is the structural tension in any top-down brand system applied to a live event: you can control the inputs, but you can’t control what lands. The moments defining the sonic memory of this World Cup are the ones that escaped the framework.

For brands investing in official music partnerships and cleared audio assets, that’s a useful reminder — the fan behavior you can’t brief for is often the one that does the most work.

Belgium Builds, Italy Watches

While most national federations treat squad announcements as administrative releases — a PDF, a press conference, a numbered list — Belgium has been doing something structurally different. Their announcement content for this tournament has been built around player-led creative: it relies on short-form imagery, individual framing, and deliberate aesthetic choices that carry through from the kit launch to the call-up reveal. The format itself is doing the brand work, entirely independent of results on the pitch.

Italy, meanwhile, is absent again. Three consecutive misses—even with 2026’s expanded 48-team format. The sporting failure is obvious, but the commercial one is staggering: three cycles without the Azzurri jersey in global retail or sponsor activations. The federations taking their place (like DR Congo and Bosnia) are now opening the commercial windows Italy abandoned.

The Belgium and Italy stories show the two extremes of football marketing. Belgium treats mandatory logistics (like a squad reveal) as premium content to maximize a guaranteed audience. Italy hasn’t even had a window to open in 12 years. You can’t build commercial equity in a tournament you’re not playing in, and you can’t reclaim it from the couch.

Four stories in, the identity pattern at this World Cup runs from individual to institutional:

• England’s greatest ever goalscorer proves that elite performance doesn’t have to mean total commercial saturation.

• FIFA built a tiered brand system for 48 teams, but it risks losing its identity.

• the official music strategy was outrun by two songs nobody approved.

• Belgium turned logistics into content while Italy watched its commercial window close for the third time running

The teams and players that understand their presence here is a limited window tend to do more with it. The ones that assume they’ll always be back tend to find out what it costs when they’re not.

What do you think — let’s discuss below.

Carla | Off-Ball Logic

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This week, the broadcast layer of the 2026 World Cup is doing a lot of the talking — and not all of it is going well.

The most-watched deal nobody bid on

The numbers coming out of the group stage are genuinely staggering. The USA–Paraguay opener averaged 27.5 million combined viewers across Fox, Tubi, Telemundo, and Peacock, per Nielsen Big Data + Panel — with the English-language broadcast alone accounting for 18 million impressions, a record for a men’s World Cup match in US history.

What makes this commercially interesting is where these rights came from. In February 2015, FIFA renewed Fox and Telemundo’s US broadcast rights for 2026 without putting them out to competitive bid — a compensation mechanism for rescheduling the 2022 World Cup from summer to winter, which created conflicts with major US professional sports leagues. Fox secured those rights for a reported $485 million, negotiated before the US was confirmed as co-host.

The deal that is now generating NFL-scale audiences wasn’t the product of a competitive media rights process — it was an administrative resolution.

The lesson that tends to get lost in the ratings conversation is that being in the right place at the right moment of FIFA’s internal calendar can be worth more than any media strategy.

When the broadcast becomes the product

Phil Hay, a British football journalist covering the tournament for The Athletic, published something this week that most broadcast executives would pay to read. He doesn’t speak Spanish. Fox’s feed at his apartment was freezing during the group stage, so he switched to Telemundo — and hasn’t switched back. He describes the experience as watching a theme-park ride in the dark, and specifically calls out commentator Ramses Sandoval’s call of Australian goalkeeper Patrick Beach as something that cannot be rivalled.

The commercial angle isn’t the anecdote — it’s what it reveals. Telemundo committed to 700 hours of World Cup programming, the most extensive Spanish-language presentation in US broadcast history, with on-site production at all 104 matches. By late 2025, it was already 90% sold out of advertising inventory, with double the advertiser spend versus 2022.

That commercial performance isn’t separable from the editorial one. The reason a monolingual English speaker is choosing Telemundo over the English-language alternative is the same reason brands wanted in early. The coverage became a destination, not just a delivery mechanism.

The audience that isn’t really there

While US broadcasters are breaking records, the picture gets messier if you zoom out. New Ipsos polling found that when matches fall into the 1–5am window, live viewership craters to just 22%, with nearly half the audience defaulting to morning highlights. The same study found that 59% of fans already admit they don’t actively pay attention to sponsor boards during regular viewing hours.

Combine those figures and a significant portion of the global sponsorship value proposition rests on an audience that is either asleep or catching a two-minute recap the next morning.

A broadcast deal is sold on reach — total addressable audience, potential eyeballs, global distribution. But reach and attention are not the same asset, and the fixture list is quietly eroding the second one in ways that no amount of on-site activation can fix. The brands paying global-reach premiums this summer are, in a meaningful number of markets, effectively sponsoring a highlights reel.

What a 48-team World Cup asks of broadcasters

On Thursday night, ABC7 Los Angeles reporter Abigail Velez was broadcasting live after the US clinched first place in Group D and learned its round-of-32 opponent would be Bosnia and Herzegovina. In an attempt at pre-match enthusiasm, she told viewers she couldn’t locate Bosnia on a map, didn’t know the first thing about the country, and didn’t want to. The clip went viral. Velez issued a public apology on Instagram the following day, acknowledging the comment was “thoughtless, insensitive, and inappropriate.”

Retweeting the original broadcast cited above.

Any personal opinions expressed are solely those of the author.

The incident reads as an individual gaffe, but what it actually exposes is an editorial infrastructure problem that the expansion to 48 teams has made unavoidable. Local broadcast affiliates covering a home-soil tournament are staffed and trained around a handful of familiar narratives — the USMNT, Mexico, the big European clubs. Bosnia and Herzegovina are appearing in the World Cup knockout stage for the first time ever, with a diaspora community large enough that a fan fest in Gwinnett County, Georgia was expected to draw over 275,000 attendees. The story was there but the editorial preparation wasn’t.

For media brands, this matters beyond one reporter’s bad night. A broadcast organization’s on-air talent is a brand expression — every live moment is an unscripted ad for the network’s credibility and cultural competence.

The question the Velez incident raises for every local affiliate and national broadcaster covering the remaining rounds is about whether the editorial guidelines, briefing processes, and cultural preparation protocols have kept pace with a tournament that now includes 48 nations — many of them reaching the knockout stage for the first time, many of them with large, visible, commercially valuable diaspora communities in US cities.

The World Cup got bigger and the homework load followed.

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That’s all for this week’s recap:

• Fox holds the deal that nobody had to compete for, and it’s delivering NFL-scale audiences anyway

• Telemundo built something worth watching on its own terms, and a non-Spanish speaker proved the point

• the global reach being sold to sponsors is real in the US and theoretical in most of Europe

• and a local affiliate showed what happens when a 48-team tournament meets a briefing process designed for four

The knockout stage begins today, and the broadcast stakes — commercial, editorial, and reputational — only get higher from here.

What do you think — let’s discuss below.

Carla | Off-Ball Logic

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The history of football is built on top-tier differentiators. They are the kind of intellectual property you recognize the moment you hear them. Jogo bonito reminds you of Brazil. Uruguay has the garra charrúa. The Clockwork Orange brings back the old days of Dutch glory. Germany had the machine. Spain had the tiki-taka. Each of these is indivisible from the country attached to it.

From a marketing perspective, these are the holy grails of brand equity. They are concepts that work entirely without any particular player attached to them. A sponsor can buy into it, a broadcaster can sell it, a fan in Tokyo or Mumbai recognizes it without having watched a single qualifying match. These are brands in the full corporate sense: coherent, scalable, transferable, and bigger than whoever happens to embody them at a given moment.

Then there’s the glaring outlier.

Argentina, the reigning champion, has three stars on its shirt and ninety-six years of World Cup history—and across all of it, never a true, exportable differentiator to put on the table. But the absence of that differentiator didn’t stop the AFA1 from building the most aggressively monetized national team brand in global football after Qatar 2022.

The Long Presence That Built No Foundation

To understand the AFA’s current commercial structure, you have to look at the historical failure to build an outstanding identity (and in its way, an IP).

Argentina’s close relationship with the World Cup begins at the very start of the tournament’s story. Reaching the 1930 final in Montevideo (a 4-2 loss to Uruguay) made the country a recurring fixture at the top of the international game: six finals, three titles, and a near-constant presence across almost a century of football.

But that presence rarely translated into a recognizable identity abroad, and the historical inconsistency between 1930 and 1978 is a direct reason why:

• The 1958 tournament in Sweden ended with a 6-1 loss to Czechoslovakia—el desastre de Suecia, an event still remembered as one of the heaviest systemic failure in the country’s sporting history.

• And we didn’t even qualify for 1970, ironically the exact tournament that cemented Brazil’s brand for the next fifty years.

Brazil’s trajectory was a masterclass in consistency. Three titles in four tournaments between 1958 and 1970, each one tied to the same recognizable rhythm and way of playing. They broadcasted this to a rapidly growing global television audience that learned to inextricably link the yellow shirt with a specific kind of footballing joy. By 1970, the CBF owned a concept that worked independently of any single player on the pitch.

More on this in this article:

And even when individuals were good enough to make the team remembered, from a marketing standpoint, they weren’t enough on their own.

Clashing Philosophies That Prevented Accumulation

Why did a framework never arrive? Because Argentine football spent five decades paralyzed by an ideological divide over its style of play.

• On one side: Menottismo, the philosophy César Luis Menotti brought to the 1978 World Cup. It was idealism, aesthetics, La Nuestra2—individual expression, short passing, the romantic belief that the product must be beautiful as well as effective.

• On the other side: Bilardismo, the framework Carlos Bilardo used to win in 1986. Ruthless pragmatism, obsessive defensive organization, and a willingness to compromise aesthetics for the bottom line3.

These two approaches were like competing forces that refused to blend into anything coherent. Menotti won with one, Bilardo won with the other, and the generation that came next had to pick a side in an ideological proxy conflict instead of inheriting a settled identity.

Marcelo Bielsa’s influence later pulled the tactical conversation toward positional play, culminating in Jorge Sampaoli’s 2018 campaign in Russia, where the system broke down completely. The team in Russia was so overloaded with tactical micro-management that it couldn’t execute the one thing Argentine players are historically raised to do: improvise.

La Scaloneta4: A Bespoke Mechanism

Lionel Scaloni—who took over in 2018 during one of the most turbulent chapters in Argentine football—bypassed the divide entirely by refusing to engage on either side’s terms.

His system—what tacticians are now calling “relationism”—is arguably the first true synthesis Argentine football has produced. Players aren’t assigned rigid, fixed zones the way modern European positional play demands. The structure emerges organically out of the relationships between specific players in tight spaces.

It relies on the spontaneous intelligence Argentine football has always produced in academies and street games (the potreros), the exact thing earlier, over-engineered systems kept trying to override.

And the philosophy feels bigger than that one mechanism. It is La Nuestra turned into a functional operating system: trust the player’s read of the space, let the chemistry set the shape, and build around what your assets can actually do.

Scaloni’s Argentina stopped claiming an identity, just played football that felt authentically Argentine, and accidentally captured the exact cultural alignment. But whether La Scaloneta is a foundational philosophy or simply a brilliant, functional era is the uncomfortable question Argentine football hasn’t been forced to answer yet.

Capitalizing on the Culture: The AFA’s Masterclass

The AFA, of course, didn’t wait for that answer before taking the product to market. Consequently, the commercial expansion after Qatar is unprecedented among national federations.

The anchor is Adidas. The relationship goes back to Argentina wearing Adidas at the 1974 World Cup, while the modern continuous partnership dates to 2001. In June 2024, AFA and Adidas extended the alliance through 2038, a deal that carries Argentina across the next four World Cup cycles.

The timing mattered. Three months earlier, the German federation had announced it would leave Adidas for Nike from 2027, ending a partnership of more than seven decades. The value of that Nike deal was not officially disclosed, but it was reported at around €100 million a year, roughly double the €50 million Adidas had been paying. In that context, retaining Argentina (the reigning world champions, and the national team of Lionel Messi, Adidas’s reported lifetime athlete) became strategically important. It makes Argentina one of the clearest flagships in Adidas’s international football portfolio.

Under that anchor, AFA built a sponsorship portfolio few federations could match. Its domestic base was anchored by major Argentine brands:

• YPF, the majority state-owned energy company, had a national-team agreement running through 2025

• Banco Nación joined as an official sponsor of the national teams in late 2022.

Those were the local pillars.

What changed after the 2022 World Cup was the international layer. By December 2024, SponsorUnited counted 64 active AFA sponsorship deals, 15 added year over year, spanning 21 countries. That put Argentina well ahead of Spain’s federation, with 45 deals, and Brazil’s, with 40.

Seventy percent of AFA’s sponsorship portfolio now comes from outside Argentina, a deliberate shift away from dependence on the domestic market. Asia alone accounts for 30 percent of the portfolio, a level of penetration that SponsorUnited says is surpassed only by Manchester United among football properties.

The strategy is not just logo placement. Xiaomi turned the Albiceleste identity into a special-edition Redmi phone for India. Cotti Coffee built fan experiences, exclusive products, prizes and activations around Argentina’s presence in China. In India, ITC brands like Bingo! and YiPPee! built campaigns around a fanbase that largely experiences the team from thousands of miles away.

The U.S. became the next layer. AFA announced its Miami move in July 2023 and later inaugurated offices in Wynwood, creating a working base for Copa América 2024 and the 2026 World Cup cycle. Around it, the federation has expanded academies, high-performance-center projects and commercial partnerships designed to deepen its American footprint.

In February 2026, Leandro Petersen, AFA’s Commercial and Marketing Director, returned to Harvard Business School to present the federation’s “AFA Global Brand Expansion” case for the second consecutive year. AFA says it became the only sports institution invited twice to present its management and international expansion model there.

The Man Inside the Machine

The risk inside AFA’s growth is that the portfolio looks unified, but the sponsors were not all buying the same value.

Some bought access to the reigning world champions. Some bought a foothold in AFA’s U.S. expansion, especially around Miami and the 2026 cycle. Some bought the broader Argentina brand: the shirt, the fanbase, the culture. And many, directly or indirectly, bought into the commercial gravity of Lionel Messi5.

They may sit inside the same commercial package, but they do not run on the same timeline. World-champion status is tied to a tournament cycle. The U.S. opportunity peaks around 2026. The Scaloni era depends on a coach, a generation and a style that cannot be guaranteed forever. Messi is the most valuable layer in the bundle, but also the least replaceable.

AFA’s model works by making these layers feel indivisible. The gap between them becomes the real business risk once the post-2026 cycle begins.

The clearest measure of what AFA is actually selling came in November 2025, when Angola reportedly paid around $12 million to host Argentina for a single friendly tied to its 50th independence celebrations. AFA’s reported take was about $12 million gross, or closer to $7 million net after taxes. The match was reported as one of the most expensive international friendlies ever staged.

The catch was the condition attached to the fee. Reports said Messi had to play at least some minutes. That number was not paid for Argentine football in the abstract. It was paid for Messi in an Argentina shirt.

The pattern runs deeper:

• In 2019, Morocco reportedly agreed to pay around €1 million for a friendly if Messi played at least 70 minutes. When he did not feature, the fee reportedly fell to about €550,000.

• In 2026, Miami-based promoter VID Music Group sued Messi and AFA over a $7 million contract tied to Argentina friendlies against Venezuela and Puerto Rico, alleging that Messi’s participation was the central commercial driver of the deal.

• YPF, one of AFA’s key domestic partners, has also built major campaigns around Messi as the main image of its alliance with the national team.

The Bottom Line

The AFA has built something that may outlast Messi, but for now its commercial logic remains deeply shaped by him. What comes next is something Argentine football has rarely had to test at this scale. It has produced icons before, but rarely a system this coherent around one player, one era and one global commercial machine. AFA may already have a plan in the works. But the question remains valid.

That is the multi-million-dollar question beneath everything AFA has built. Whether the next generation inherits a sustainable way of playing, or only the memory of one. Whether the sponsors who bought into this moment are also buying a brand that can survive beyond it.

Brazil has been trying to solve a related problem from the opposite direction, and with far less stability. Since the end of the 2022 World Cup cycle, the CBF has moved through different managers, each one carrying a different answer to the same question: how to make Brazil feel like Brazil again without simply recreating the past. The results have been uneven. And they serve as a warning. The jogo bonito is such a historically powerful idea that any change moving too far from its aesthetic promise can read as a betrayal.

The jogo bonito outlasted Pelé. What comes after Messi is the thing Argentine football — and the massive commercial machine AFA built around him — still has to define.

What do you think? Let’s discuss below.

Carla | Off-Ball Logic

PS: I really wanted to expand on alternative ways the AFA could sustain its commercial success after Messi retires from the national team, but this analysis was already getting long enough! If you’re interested in an exploration like that, please leave a comment and let me know.

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This week the World Cup ran its first real test of artificial intelligence, and it showed up as two different stories at once — controversies over consent on one side, and brands quietly building AI into how the tournament actually runs on the other.

Whose Diego is it?

During this tournament’s hydration breaks, local ads in Argentina have been flooded with AI-made ads, from companies like Mostaza (fast-food) and Betano (betting apps). But the one that stood out for the wrong reasons was BetWarrior, current sponsor of Argentina’s national team, who has been running an ad built around an AI recreation of a young, 1986-era Maradona, voice and likeness intact, selling the betting platform straight to camera.

And with all things Diego, whose conditions of death are currently going through trial, the legal mechanism behind the ad matters as much as the technology. What has been confirmed off the record is that BetWarrior has received (and paid) authorization for the image to be used.

What has been said, but not confirmed by BetWarrior, is that a court ruling at the end of 2025 gave Maradona’s heirs definitive commercial control over his legacy (which has been confirmed in specific deals worldwide), and allegedly it was under that authority his heirs signed the deal.

I’ll flag my own bias here: in Argentina, Maradona isn’t a commercial estate the way a studio treats a dead actor’s likeness (which I also don’t agree fully) — he’s closer to national patrimony, which is part of why this landed harder here than it might have somewhere else. And it’s interesting to question if his family’s say is enough.

This Already Happened on Black Mirror, Right?

LATAM broadcaster DSports spent part of this week denouncing itself, in a sense—or rather, denouncing what AI had done to two of its own commentators in two separate matches. The network released a formal statement condemning a wave of manipulated clips, framing it not just as a one-off correction, but as a broader appeal to the public.

The first case involved Nicolás Haase. His real commentary during France–Senegal—a routine half-time sign-off—was spliced and replaced with a fabricated line using deliberately offensive terms. Chequeado’s1 analysis put the probability of the audio being AI-generated at 98%, but not before L’Équipe and Le Parisien had both run the clip as genuine and were forced to issue corrections.

The second case hit during the USA–Australia match, when the broadcast cut to singer Ciara in the crowd. Shortly after, a manipulated clip began circulating, attributing a racially offensive remark to commentator Leandro Zapponi that he never actually said. Zapponi posted the real broadcast audio and denied it publicly.

I was watching the USA–Australia match live when the Zapponi clip started circulating. My first reaction was a kind of curious shock: I had just heard the real broadcast, so I knew immediately the clip was fake. It’s a comfortable position to be in.

But the harder question is what happens to the millions of fans who aren’t watching live, who have no original audio for comparison, and whose only option is to believe whichever version reaches their timeline first — and what that means for a broadcaster’s authority once the fake version is consistently faster than the truth.

Finally, a Grounded AI Story

While broadcasters are fighting deepfakes and the Maradona estate is fighting over image rights, a much quieter version of the same technology was running underneath almost every match—solving actual broadcast problems instead of creating them.

WSC Sports is automating the entire highlight pipeline: clipping, formatting, localization, and commentary across all 104 matches. Their personalized clips are hitting fans’ phones before the live TV replay even finishes.

Meanwhile, Pixellot’s2 automated cameras are doing the grassroots equivalent, recording over two million matches a year globally.

On the other hand, FIFA shows its work. Semi-automated offside calls now render full 3D avatars built from scans of all 1,248 players in the tournament, replacing the textureless mannequins that made the old system feel like a black box.

One of the engineers behind it put the logic plainly: when you can see the actual player — his build, his posture, his hair — the call lands as credible in a way a faceless figure never managed.

Referees are wearing body cameras for the first time too, and VAR footage is now shown live on the stadium screens instead of staying inside the review room.

The mechanics of the offside decision haven’t changed at all — what’s changed is that fans can finally watch how it gets made, which after years of complaints about flat blue-and-red lines was the actual grievance all along.

What Did AFA Sell Google? (Hint: Not a Logo)

Gemini became AFA’s main global sponsor back in March, which on its own would read as another jersey deal. The scope is what makes it interesting: the agreement put Gemini inside the coaching staff’s actual workflow — breaking down opponent tactics, monitoring player load alongside the team’s physios — rather than only onto the training kits of the men’s, women’s, and youth squads.

From a PMM seat that’s a very different thing to grant than a logo placement. AFA has made a habit of it, selling not just the team’s visibility but the team itself as proof that a product holds up under real pressure. Access like that is worth more to Google than a shirt front ever could be, which is the part worth asking about: what did AFA get back for handing it over?

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Four stories in, the pattern holds:

• the heirs license the dead man’s voice, and the family doesn’t get the vote that counts,

• two different commentators get blamed for lines a voice clone put in their mouths, and even major European papers can’t always tell the difference,

• the highlight reel that never pretends to be human draws no complaints at all,

  FIFA finally explains a call instead of just making it,

• and a sponsor pays its way not onto a shirt but into the room where the decisions get made.

AI showed up at this World Cup without asking. The thing worth tracking is who waved it through anyway — and who’s now left explaining why.

What do you think — let’s discuss below.

Carla | Off-Ball Logic

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This week’s piece is a collaboration with , writer behind Any Given Monday — a newsletter about the money, power, and culture behind what you watch in sport. Will and I have been circling the same questions about piracy and sponsorship from different angles. His newsletter is excellent; worth adding to your stack.

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The World Cup kicked off on June 11th, and the piracy conversation arrived with it.

That isn’t new. Piracy has followed paid sport since its inception, and the version we have now (grown from the torrent era of the early 2000s) is now professional, organized, and nearly impossible to dismantle.

What’s different is the response. In the days before kickoff, Operation Kratos 2 pulled more than 27,000 illegal streaming URLs offline across thirteen countries1. The warnings now go beyond lost revenue: illegal streams also expose viewers to malware, spyware, and data theft.

The enforcement numbers tell you how embedded the habit is. Arcom, France’s media regulator, found that almost two in ten French viewers watch TV illegally2. When it comes to football, that figure is one in ten. In Spain, LaLiga puts the annual cost of football piracy at more than €700 million3.

The more interesting question sits one layer down. What happens to sponsor value when the audience is still watching, but no one can prove it?

The Broadcaster's Problem

On 30th May 2026, the Champions League final disappeared from free-to-air television in the UK for the first time in thirty-four years. Arsenal met Paris Saint-Germain in Budapest. To watch, you needed a TNT Sports subscription at £32 a month, or HBO Max at £4.99. Every final before it, had been free.

The audience it reached was large, and the audience it lost was larger. Seven million watched legally, a 25.6% share, well short of the 12.6 million who saw the free-to-air 2022 final. Analysis by the Guardian recorded 16.2 million views of illegal streams from 3.7 million British IP addresses4, watching outside the system entirely.

Nothing obliged TNT to share it: the Champions League final does not sit among the “listed events” UK law protects, so the broadcaster could wall it off. The World Cup does, which is why all 104 matches are free on BBC and ITV. One market, two competitions, opposite outcomes. A regulatory list and a contract clock decide which fans pay — not demand.

And here the coverage reached for the wrong number.

The Real Loss: Sponsorship

The loss the coverage counted was broadcast revenue: lost subscriptions and lost advertising, which cost billions annually. Real money, but the wrong headline: the larger and quieter loss is sponsorship reach, and it behaves differently, because piracy treats the two kinds of value differently.

A pirate stream carries the host broadcaster’s pictures. The shirt sponsor, the boot deal, the pitchside LED, and the centre-circle badge all still appear. The brands paid for the pitch, and the pitch is on screen.

What does not survive is the broadcaster’s own inventory — the thirty-second spots it sold around the match. The pirate strips out the ad breaks or fills them with its own: XoilacTV charges its viewers nothing and runs betting ads instead. The rights-holder’s ad break dies; the pirate’s ad break lives.

The Ghost Impression

Nobody prices sponsorship on guesswork. It runs on media value equivalency: the cost of buying the same exposure through conventional advertising. A logo’s worth is its quality of exposure — size, clarity, prominence, position — times the number of viewers who saw it, at the going rate per thousand viewers. Nielsen, Relo Metrics, and YouGov5 all measure it the same way: detect the logo, weight the exposure, attach a verified audience, return a number.

Every term in that equation needs a counted audience. Pirate viewers sit in no panel and no ratings sample, so nothing records their impressions. The exposure happens; the value does not. This is the meter breaking: not a figure of speech but the literal mechanism.

There is a second loss beneath the first. Pirate feeds are compressed and low-bitrate, often a phone pointed at a screen. Valuation models discount a logo they cannot read clearly; an unreadable mark scores near zero however long it holds. The industry calls these ghost impressions. The pirated audience does twice the damage: invisible where no one counts it, degraded where they can see it.

The Champions League final shows this in a market that measures everything —, yet 3.7 million of its audience went dark regardless. The consequence is heavier where the meter never existed.

The Paywall Effect

How did we get here? Part of the answer lies in the way the tournament is sold.

Football rights are licensed market by market, resulting in access that looks completely different depending on where you live. In the UK, the BBC and ITV share all 104 matches free-to-air. Most markets aren’t built that way.

In the US, matches are spread across Fox, FS1, and Peacock, and following the whole tournament legally can cost between $70 and $90 a month6. But price isn’t even the main hurdle: Nexxen found that 90% of intended viewers misidentify at least one platform carrying matches7, and 87% would switch to a free, ad-supported option the moment one appeared.

When the legal route is expensive and hard to find, part of the audience stops looking—and finds the match on a pirate feed instead. The same paywalls that protect the broadcast fee drive viewers onto those feeds, where the shirt sponsor still appears but nothing records who saw it. The broadcaster protects the revenue it can measure, while sponsorship value slips away unnoticed.

The Cost to the Fan

Someone absorbs the cost of fragmentation, and it is not the rights-holder. The fan pays it, in three currencies.

The first is cash, and it stacks. Sky Sports, TNT Sports, and Amazon Prime divide English and European football between them, so a fan who wants the full season already pays three subscriptions. The UCL final used to be the one night that asked nothing—free for everyone, subscriber or not. France watched the same match for nothing: 12.9 million viewers, 61% of the country’s households.

The second is exclusion. When the stack grows too tall, fans stop paying and go without. India, a market of 1.4 billion people that delivered 745 million viewers8 at Qatar 2022, had no confirmed World Cup broadcaster until days before kick-off. For weeks, there was no legal way to watch.

The third is the product itself. It looks free, but it’s not. A 2025 study by the anti-piracy group BeStreamWise found that 39% of people using illegal streams lost money to fraud, averaging £1,680 each9. Two in three experienced security scares — malware, scam pop-ups, or hacking attempts. The stream is the lure; the viewer is the product. And the picture is poor; compressed, buffering, breaking up.

That last cost closes the loop. The blurred logo a valuation model cannot read is the same blurred frame the fan squints at. One compressed stream carries both losses at once: the supporter’s worst match, and the sponsor’s ghost impression.

The Scale of the Problem

The World Cup’s own structure makes it an easy target. A tournament sold territory by territory leaves gaps — markets where the legal feed is expensive, late, or simply missing — and those gaps are exactly where industrial piracy moves in.

Russia 2018 gives a baseline. Viaccess-Orca tracked 40,713 piracy links over the 32-day competition, reaching more than 41 million viewers, with over 14,000 links on social media10. Some of that demand came directly from the rights map: a trade dispute between Saudi Arabia and Qatar left the country with no official broadcaster, so an entire football nation had no legal way to watch its own team.

By Qatar 2022, the behaviour had become surreal. More than 40,000 people in France watched what they assumed were live pirate streams11 — which turned out to be pixelated replays of FIFA 23, Vietnamese commentary and all. When fans will accept a video-game render rather than miss a match, price is no longer the issue. The habit runs deeper than that.

Streameast, the largest illegal sports operation of its era, was drawing 136 million monthly visits12 before it was shut down. And each tournament the machinery gets bigger.

The Geopolitics of Piracy

There’s one part of this story that almost never makes the analysis, and it’s the part where the numbers are largest.

Latin America is where football culture runs deepest and legal access runs thinnest. It’s also one of the regions FIFA sells to sponsors as the game’s growth frontier — and the place where the measurement sponsorship depends on breaks down most completely.

In Argentina, for example, the pirate platforms are not fringe. Fútbol Libre, Pelota Libre, Xuper TV, Magis TV, Roja Directa13 — traffic spikes the moment the Selección plays. Reaching for them isn’t about wanting something for free. The legal options exist — TyC Sports, DSports, DGO, Flow, Telecentro Play — but getting there usually means paying for a full cable plan plus a sports add-on, rather than buying the match you want. For anyone following a foreign league, the legal feed often doesn’t carry the game at all. The pirate portal isn’t the cheaper option: it’s the only one.

For a sponsor, this is the most frustrating version of the problem. A report by Ether City, cited by Smart Protection, estimates that converting just 15% of Latin America’s illegal viewers would be worth $5.28 billion14, according to pre-tournament estimates. That figure assumes there’s a legal product to convert them to. Across much of the region, there isn’t.

The enforcement keeps arriving — LaLiga has coordinated major anti-piracy operations in Argentina, including raids in Buenos Aires province15, Operation 404 has taken down apps with millions of downloads. None of it fixes the underlying gap. Where there’s no authorized stream, the audience was never FIFA’s to lose. It’s watching, it’s seeing every sponsor — and as far as anyone paying for that exposure is concerned, it doesn’t exist.

Where the Money Goes Next

If exposure that can’t be measured is worth less, then the money eventually moves toward exposure that can. That shift is already underway.

A brand that can’t prove who saw its logo on a pirate feed puts its next dollar somewhere the audience is countable — owned apps, social channels, athletes whose accounts it sponsors directly. Every impression there is logged and attributable. The pitchside board still carries value, but a growing share of that value depends on a broadcast audience that’s leaking.

The 2026 World Cup makes this unusually visible. Three co-hosts — the United States, Mexico, Canada — means three rights markets, three regulatory systems, three sets of paywalls and gaps inside one tournament. Where that map is most fragmented is exactly where the pirate feed operates most freely, and where the measured audience thins out most.

The question facing the next round of deals isn’t whether piracy can be stopped. Three decades of crackdowns say it can only be displaced. The real question is whether the logo on the broadcast still buys what it used to — or whether the smarter money has already started paying for an audience it can actually count.

The Bottom Line

Step back, and the 2026 World Cup tells one story in two entirely different registers. The broadcasters will continue to count what they lost, lobbying for faster takedowns and tighter geofences. But the sponsors are losing something far harder to recover: not the exposure itself but the data that justifies the spend.

The unprecedented fragmentation of this North American tournament—split across three host nations, three regulatory frameworks, and a labyrinth of shifting paywalls—has created the perfect petri dish for the modern pirate economy. As the tournament progresses toward its July finale, millions of fans will inevitably find the matches outside the system. They will see every shirt sponsor and pitchside logo, but they will exist only as ghost impressions—invisible to major analysts, unreadable by valuation models, and completely decoupled from ROI.

The tournament will crown a world champion on the pitch next month. The more grueling contest, however, belongs to the sports business ecosystem left in its wake. When the next multi-billion-dollar rights cycle is negotiated, the industry will have to stop pretending that an unmeasured audience doesn’t exist, and finally start pricing the game for a world where the screen belongs to the pirate, but the pitch still belongs to the brand.

What do you think? — let’s discuss below

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This week we got a first-hand look at what FIFA’s revenuemaxxing means in practice.

We’re barely half a week in, and a pattern is already showing: almost everything FIFA touches, it’s quietly converting into something it owns and can sell.

Are cooling breaks actually cool?

FIFA announced its mandatory three-minute “hydration breaks” back in December 2025, framed entirely around player welfare for a tournament co-hosted by Canada, Mexico and the United States.1

But the same announcement let the real point slip: the breaks also make the broadcast schedule more predictable, because weather stoppages stop being a variable.

Six months on, that commercial logic isn’t a suspicion anymore — it’s on screen. Broadcasters are cutting to full-screen ads during the pauses, the in-game slot football never had before halftime.

A few holdouts stay on the pitch — the ad-free BBC2, and Telemundo, which has committed to keeping its feed on the match — but several broadcasters, led by the US networks, are treating the break as inventory.

Two guaranteed stoppages across 104 matches is airtime FIFA didn’t have before.

ITV already calls the tournament a “six-week summer Super Bowl” and says its ad revenue is running 30% above Euro 20243.

And all of this without even selling the hydration breaks.

Which raises the question of whether the welfare case was ever the whole story.

Mauricio Pochettino, now coaching the USMNT, put the worry more bluntly4:

How Levi’s picked up the ball (and left the blanket on)

The naming-rights story got attention when the Azteca (now “Estadio Banorte” for commercial reasons) became “Estadio Ciudad de México”, and venues were stripped back to generic, location-based names. But Levi’s Stadium is the cleaner illustration.

For the tournament it’s “San Francisco Bay Area Stadium,” and the red batwing logos are physically wrapped in white tarps to satisfy FIFA’s clean-venue rules — reportedly down to the Google and Apple Maps listings.6

What’s worth watching is the response. Rather than absorb the erasure quietly, Levi’s made its tarped-over logo its Instagram profile picture, turning a forced disappearance into a piece of brand content.

For context, Levi’s and the 49ers signed a combined $170M naming-and-sponsorship extension in 2024 that runs the name through 20437, so this isn’t a brand walking away from the stadium. It’s a brand refusing to be unseen in it, even when the rules say it has to be.

Is FIFA downgrading the World Cup brand?

Long before kickoff, this edition was already separating itself from past tournaments — three host countries instead of one, and a brand identity that struggled to land on a single idea.

FIFA calls the “26” logo a vessel for self-expression and built the WEARE26 campaign around it. But since kickoff, the more telling move has been on the pitch and in the broadcast: FIFA lettering dominates the team entrances, and replays carry the FIFA logo rather than the World Cup mark.

From a PMM seat, that reads as a deliberate architecture shift. FIFA is moving from a house of brands — where the World Cup, the Women’s World Cup and the Club World Cup each carry their own identity — toward a branded house, where everything resolves back to FIFA.

The risk is that brands hold meaning, narrative and identification, and “World Cup” carries far more of that equity than “FIFA” does. If the association quietly migrates from one to the other, the question is whether FIFA inspires anything close to what the World Cup always has.

Sleep deprivation (without the bias)

A map of which countries lose the most sleep to this World Cup circulated this week, and the data underneath it rewards a closer look.

The schedule traces straight back to the Club World Cup, where 5pm and 8pm BST kickoffs were built for European broadcasters but ran into peak American heat. The fix for 2026 was to push games later — which now means close to half of group-stage matches start between midnight and 5am UK time8.

Europe and Africa end up absorbing the cost of North America’s heat and broadcast windows by losing the live experience.

But the chart misses something, and here’s where I check my own bias: this isn’t pure sleep deprivation, it’s habits.

In most of Europe, life and football wrap up early. Here in Argentina, watching a game at 10 or 11pm is completely normal — anyone raised on the Copa Libertadores schedule barely registers it. At home we shifted our timetables to sleep a little later and still keep the 9-to-5. The disruption is real, but it’s unevenly felt, and not for the reasons the timezone math suggests.

Is DiCaprio better than Clutch?

Across the three opening matches, the official mascots — Maple, Zayu and Clutch — were barely visible (in Mexico, of all places, Labubus turned up instead). And that’s a strange asset to underuse.

Mascots are among the few World Cup assets inseparable from what the tournament means, and they’re the engine of FIFA’s licensing model. When a mascot lands, it becomes the tournament’s most-hugged revenue driver.

This time the cameras are finding celebrities instead — the famous faces in the crowd, not the characters meant to carry the brand to everyone, especially children.

I’m not against star power; it’s standard for properties like the NBA. But football’s center of gravity has always been the people inside the game, and the figures who actually carry weight in it are its own legends.

The question is whether this celebrity-forward framing travels, or stays a distinctly American way of selling the show.

Half a week in, the pattern across these stories is consistent:

• the cooling break becomes ad inventory,

• the stadium name becomes a FIFA asset,

• the World Cup mark gives way to the FIFA mark,

• the schedule bends to heat and broadcast money,

• and the mascots make way for celebrities.

FIFA keeps converting the tournament’s value into forms it controls — and the bill, whether it’s sleep or the rhythm of the game itself, lands somewhere else.

What do you think — let’s discuss below.

Carla | Off-Ball Logic

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There is a moment, in every World Cup, where the football hasn’t started yet and something else is happening — something that is supposed to tell you what kind of tournament this is going to be, what country you’re about to spend a month (or a month and a half) inside, why any of this matters beyond the result. That’s what the opening ceremony serves, and in some form, it has been trying to do exactly that since 1930.

What it has been used to say has changed so completely across that span that the 2026 edition, with three simultaneous ceremonies across three countries, the first halftime show at a World Cup final, represents essentially a different event, one that conveys a different message than anything that preceded it. Understanding how it got here requires going back to when nobody had thought about it at all.

Phase 1: Opening a Tournament (1930–1980)

The World Cup opening ceremony didn’t start as a ceremony in any artistic sense, but rather as a protocol: delegations presented, officials addressed the crowd, national anthems were played, and the first match began. The spectacle was the football, not the preamble.

This format held from 1930 through most of the following decades — with the 1966 England edition marking the first attempt at something approaching a structured opening event, and 1970 in Mexico introducing a more festive, televisual register.

The most revealing edition of Phase 1, Argentina 1978, wasn’t the most elaborate: the ceremony itself was modest. What was notable was that all 24 teams actually arrived, several squads having faced internal pressure not to travel to a country under military dictatorship since 1976. The ceremony worked as a diplomatic gesture precisely because of that: the message it sent had nothing to do with staging — it was the message of presence, of continuation, of the tournament happening at all.

Phase 2: Showing the World Who You Are (1990–2022)

(Or as the 2014 Brazil World Cup official song put it: “Show the world we are one”).

The inflection point arrived with the United States in 1994, when Hollywood logic entered the opening ceremony for the first time. Diana Ross performed at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, and the production scale was mass, the register was pop spectacle, but the image most people remember is her missing a symbolic penalty kick and reacting with pure theatrical delight.

It didn’t matter that she missed. The ceremony had stopped being a diplomatic gesture and become a performance.

France 1998 emphasised unity and inclusion, though the ceremony itself was a riot of colour and action — anything but subtle. Korea and Japan in 2002 showcased a spectacular display of traditional dance, music, and the symbolic merging of the South Korean and Japanese flags to represent cooperation. Germany 2006 opened with Claudia Schiffer and Pelé but also leaned into cultural heritage — traditional costumes, folk dances, precision over excess. The pattern across all of them is consistent: the host nation is using the ceremony to show the world who it is.

The peak of this logic, and the most emotionally coherent opening ceremony in World Cup history, was South Africa 2010. The first World Cup on African soil carried a weight no other edition before or since has carried in quite the same way. Shakira’s “Waka Waka” became not just the tournament’s anthem but one of the few World Cup songs that genuinely outlasted the tournament itself.

A giant beetle served as a central visual motif — a symbol of life, renewal, and tireless dedication drawn from African cultural tradition. Local artists shared the stage with global stars in a way that felt integrated rather than decorative. The ceremony overflowed with pride and hope in a way that was inseparable from the political and historical significance of the moment — a continent that had waited decades, and a tournament that finally came.

It is the clearest expression of what a World Cup opening ceremony can do when the host nation is the full protagonist and the sport is the frame.

Moving forward, they became a platform for official songs from 1998 onwards — though in some cases these were performed at the closing ceremony instead.

Brazil 2014 had 660 dancers in a performance paying tribute to Brazil’s nature, people and football, with a “living ball” at the centre of the pitch, and Pitbull, Jennifer Lopez and Claudia Leitte performing the official song. Qatar 2022 had Morgan Freeman and Jungkook of BTS and a retrospective of World Cup history — more controlled in its narrative, the host identity was still present but already sharing space with global entertainment logic.

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Why FIFA and the Olympics Diverged

The Olympics opening ceremony has a fixed architecture that has remained non-negotiable across its entire modern history: the parade of nations, the raising of the Olympic flag, the lighting of the cauldron. These elements cannot be removed without breaking the meaning of the Games. Every host country builds its artistic spectacle on top of these pillars.

When Paris 2024 moved the ceremony to the Seine, it was a radical departure in format (the first time in 128 years of the modern Games that the ceremony happened outside a stadium) and yet the parade still happened, the flame was still lit.

FIFA had no equivalent. Every host had complete freedom to define what the ceremony was and what it said. Without fixed pillars to anchor the event’s meaning, the ceremony became whatever the current priorities of the organizers dictated — and as those priorities shifted from host culture toward commercial scale, the ceremony shifted with them. FIFA’s ceremony, means whatever FIFA decides it should mean that cycle.

Now the Show Becomes the Product

The clearest signal of where the opening ceremony was heading didn’t come from a World Cup; it came from the 2025 FIFA Club World Cup at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami. The tournament—which your humble servant attended—featured an opening ceremony structured entirely around FIFA’s own brand identity. Decor spelled out “FIFA” right on the pitch, and the live performance culminated with the lyric “Que viva la FIFA” (long live FIFA) ringing out across the stadium.

For the first time in World Cup history, there will be three separate opening ceremonies — one per host nation, each tied to that country’s inaugural match. Mexico opens on June 11 at the Estadio Azteca with the most culturally specific of the three: indigenous performers, folkloric acts, and a lineup spanning Alejandro Fernández, Belinda, J Balvin, Danny Ocean, Lila Downs, Los Ángeles Azules and Maná — before Shakira and Burna Boy perform “Dai Dai”, the official tournament song, live for the first time.

This is the one that most closely resembles Phase 2 logic: the host culture as protagonist, a genuine attempt to say something specific about the country and continent staging the event. It is also the ceremony attached to the match that opens the entire tournament.

Canada follows on June 12 in Toronto, built around the theme “Mosaico” — a celebration of Canadian multiculturalism, with Michael Bublé, Alanis Morissette, Alessia Cara, and Jessie Reyez — and carrying an additional significance as the first men’s World Cup match ever played on Canadian soil.

The United States also opens on June 12 in Los Angeles, with Katy Perry, LISA, Rema, Anitta, Tyla, and Future — LISA becoming the first female K-pop artist and first Thai artist to headline a World Cup opening ceremony.

All three ceremonies are produced by Marco Balich, the Italian producer who also designed the Milan-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics opening ceremony.

The Half-Time Show Controvery

But there’s more adding to the conversation around the huge shifts in structure and, to say the least, legacy, culture and meaning.

The first halftime show at a World Cup final — Shakira, Madonna, and BTS at MetLife Stadium on July 19, curated by Chris Martin of Coldplay and produced with Global Citizen to raise $100 million for education access — is being framed as an important milestone that will entirely change the dynamics of a World Cup final. For many others, it reads as a burden: an interruption of the match for a spectacle that has no organic relationship to the football.

The organizers have already confirmed the performances will be “significantly shorter than 15 minutes” — a concession that reveals the underlying tension without resolving it.

Who Is This For?

The World Cup opening ceremony began as a diplomatic gesture — a formal acknowledgment that the tournament was beginning and that the nations of the world had gathered. It became, across decades, a cultural showcase — the host nation’s opportunity to tell its story to a global audience that would otherwise never encounter it. South Africa 2010 is the highest expression of that function: a ceremony inseparable from the history of the moment, that used the platform of the World Cup to say something about a continent that had waited decades to say it.

What it is becoming, and what the Club World Cup 2025 ceremony made visible with unusual clarity, is a branded entertainment product, curated by FIFA, in which the host nation is one element among many rather than the protagonist.

The three ceremonies of 2026 sit in an interesting tension within this shift: Mexico, Canada, and the United States are each being given space to express their own cultural identity, which is formally consistent with Phase 2 logic. But they are doing so within a framework designed and produced by a single production company, under FIFA’s commercial architecture, with an official tournament song recorded under the FIFA Sound label and a halftime show at the final that has more structural similarities to the Super Bowl than to anything the World Cup has historically been.

The most valuable thing the World Cup has ever had — more than the broadcast rights, more than the sponsorship packages, more than the prize money — is its ability to make people dream and to generate a sense of national belonging that no commercial arrangement can manufacture.

That asset doesn’t live in the ceremony alone. But the ceremony is where it is announced, where the tournament signals what it thinks it is.

When that signal shifts from “this is your country’s moment” to “this is FIFA’s product”, something changes in the foundation — and the production values, however extraordinary, cannot replace what was there before.

What do you think — let’s discuss below.

Carla | Off-Ball Logic

We came a long way so far. As you may remember, the series opened with a scene of myself at five years old wanting the USA 94 gear — a kid who had no concept of licensing deals or commercial cycles, who just wanted to be part of something she didn’t yet understand.

Four posts later, we’ve traced how that feeling was built: the foundational mythology of Era 1: posters, radio commentary, and the storytelling that preceded any commercial infrastructure; the television revolution and the cult of personality of Era 2, the social media layer and the personal brand empire of Era 3, and the revenuemaxxing architecture of Era 4, with FIFA operating as a vertically integrated enterprise, and an ICP that has shifted from the football fan to the corporate buyer.

The question at the end of Part 4 was: can the thing that makes the World Cup worth $13 billion1 survive the model built on top of it?

We don’t have the answer yet, obviously, since the last details of the 2026 World Cup are still being settled as this is written. But I wanted to look a bit into the future and think about how the children being born now will experience what I experienced in 1994.

This is Part 5 — and the last one — of a 5-part series on the commercial history of the FIFA World Cup. This series started with a simple question: how did a football tournament become the most commercially powerful property in the world? Four posts answered that. This one asks what comes next, which means stepping out of analysis and into something closer to informed speculation.

If you missed the previous parts, find them here:

• Part 1: Before It Was a Business

• Part 2: Heroes, Villains, and Sponsorship Deals

• Part 3: When the Event Went Truly Global

• Part 4: The Empire Prices Itself

What We Know So Far: 2030 and 2034

Two World Cups beyond 2026 are already confirmed, and the decisions around them tell enough about where FIFA’s priorities sit.

2030 is the first centenary of this competition — 100 years since Uruguay hosted the first tournament. FIFA’s solution is commercially ambitious and logistically staggering: Spain, Portugal, and Morocco host the majority of matches across an expected 17 cities and approximately 20 stadiums2, with the final venue reportedly still to be confirmed between Spain and Morocco. Uruguay will host the opener at the Estadio Centenario in Montevideo, with Argentina and Paraguay each hosting a single celebratory match3. Six nations across three continents, all qualifying automatically.

Football Supporters Europe called it FIFA’s “cycle of destruction.”4 The intercontinental travel this format requires — 13-hour flights between Buenos Aires and Madrid for fans following their team — is both a logistical nightmare and an ESG worst-case at a moment when sustainability scrutiny of major events is at its highest. The centenary was an opportunity to return to where it started, and it could have been straightforward — Argentina, Uruguay, and one or two neighbouring nations could have provided the required stadiums between them. Instead, FIFA used it to create the largest hosting footprint in tournament history.

The commercial logic looks coherent on paper, even if the optics don’t. Six automatic host qualifications means six commercial ecosystems activated simultaneously: six national federations deploying their full sponsor portfolios against a guaranteed World Cup platform. The co-branding architecture that defined 2026 scales to six countries in 2030. Whether it holds together operationally is a different question. And the branding complexity is real: Spain, South American countries that were former Spanish colonies, and Portugal and Morocco all bring overlapping and occasionally competing cultural identities to the same tournament. If you want to understand how Spanish colonization shaped football in South America, the Copa Libertadores is the clearest example — named after the heroes of Latin American independence from Spanish colonial rule, among them José de San Martín (yes, the one who crossed the Andes) and Simón Bolívar.

What’s also worth watching is the qualification structure, particularly in CONMEBOL: with 10 member associations in the federation, 3 qualifying automatically as hosts, and — under the expected allocation — 3 qualifying directly through the qualifying tournament, that would leave two teams in the playoff. If those teams win, CONMEBOL would have eight out of ten of its members at a single World Cup. That has never happened before in any confederation, and it raises real questions about competitive balance and the meaning of qualification.

2034 tells a more direct story. Saudi Arabia was confirmed as sole host at the same Extraordinary FIFA Congress — the only eligible bidder under confederation rotation rules restricting the award to AFC and OFC nations5, given that UEFA, CONMEBOL, and CAF were all involved in hosting 2030. The tournament will almost certainly run November–December, as Qatar 2022 did. Aramco’s 2024 signing as a Major Worldwide Partner (energy category through 2027) was read by analysts as the financial precondition for the hosting award — a commercial relationship established before the hosting decision was formalized.

The human rights debate will replay the Qatar template exactly: migrant labor conditions, women’s rights, alcohol policy, sponsor due-diligence playbooks developed for Qatar repurposed for Riyadh. The estimated new stadium-only spend is of $20 billion6 — a figure that puts the scale in context when compared to Germany’s entire 2006 organizing budget of €425 million7.

The Technology Layer

A few things already operational will define what the World Cup looks like in twenty years.

The ball is a data product. The Adidas Trionda used at 2026 features Connected Ball Technology similar to Qatar 2022’s Al Rihla — an inertial measurement unit transmitting positional data at up to 500Hz to match officials in real time8. Qatar 2022 deployed semi-automated offside technology for the first time — 12 dedicated cameras per stadium plus the ball sensor9. The real-time positional data infrastructure is live; the commercial and broadcast applications are the next layer. 93% of fans say they will second-screen on mobile during matches, scrolling while play continues during the 2026 FIFA World Cup10. This is already the operational baseline.

Piracy is a structural challenge that isn’t going away. More than 40,000 unauthorized streaming links were detected during Russia 2018, and these figures represented 41,371,139 viewers11. The commercial implication is direct: every unauthorized stream is an audience that sponsors paid to reach and didn’t. FIFA’s content protection investment and its market development investment are pointing at the same audiences from opposite directions.

Streaming is already the primary distribution architecture. Brazil’s CazéTV model of delivering all 104 matches on YouTube, the Tubi free-access layer in the US — the single dominant broadcast partner is already gone. The Rest Is Football — Gary Lineker, Alan Shearer, and Micah Richards’s hit podcast — becomes a daily Netflix show throughout the 2026 World Cup, filmed in New York, marking Netflix’s first ever daily show in the UK12.

The question for 2030 and beyond is which streaming architecture captures the full global audience, including the ones currently watching for free on platforms FIFA doesn’t control.

The Sponsorship Categories of 204613

The legacy sponsor architecture of the World Cup — food & beverage, apparel, automotive, electronics — was built in the 1980s and has been eroding at the edges ever since. Tobacco left in 1986. Imaging and film (Fuji, JVC, and Canon were all World Cup sponsors) exited during the 2000s. Beer and soft drinks face growing regulatory pressure in health-conscious markets and are already navigating alcohol bans in host countries.

What replaces it is partly visible and partly open.

🏆 Big Tech is the largest open question: Apple and Amazon are not yet FIFA Partners. Neither company has made a structural commitment to football sponsorship at this level14. If either does before 2034, it reshapes the entire commercial architecture — the distribution layer, the data layer, and the brand layer collapsing into a single partner relationship. Whether it does is the most commercially consequential uncertainty in football sponsorship right now.

🏆 AI will reshape the experience in two directions simultaneously. The concern is real: AI-generated content (deepfake footage, fabricated player quotes, synthetic match highlights) already circulates in lower-stakes digital environments, and the risk of it contaminating how major events are experienced is not hypothetical. The organic emotional power of something like the 7-1 in 2014 — a moment rooted in real, verifiable events — now competes in the same information environment as convincing fabrications. That’s a new kind of vulnerability for a property whose value is built on authentic narrative. The optimistic version is equally real: AI is already being considered for automated highlights, multi-language commentary, and real-time personalization at scale. AI-generated broadcast commentary tailored to individual viewers, in their language and adapted to technical knowledge, is a near-term application. Both directions are coming. Which one dominates the fan experience is an open question.

🏆 Brand identity and positioning may be forced to evolve. Formula 1 has spent the last decade repositioning itself as a premium, luxury-adjacent property — the Drive to Survive effect brought a new audience, and LVMH’s partnership cemented the aesthetic. Will FIFA follow a similar path, with brand identity calibrated to the host country and its audience each cycle? And if it does — luxury in 2034 Riyadh, something else in 2038, something else again in 2042 — does that coherence cost something? The risk of chasing the F1 model is that F1 owns a specific audience. The World Cup’s power has always come from owning every audience simultaneously.

🏆 In-stadium and in-home advertising is already transforming — faster than most people realise. Virtual Board Replacement technology is already deployed across the Bundesliga, UEFA EURO 2024, the NBA, and the NHL15 — meaning a viewer in Manchester and a viewer in Tokyo could watch the same match with different brands on the pitch-side boards, simultaneously. Dynamic advertising that changes message based on live match events is the next layer. For viewers watching at home on OTT platforms, personalized advertising based on consumption history could be the next operational move. The Coca-Cola first ad from the 1950s was a static asset visible to everyone in the stadium. The equivalent in 2046 will be a real-time, market-specific, viewer-specific message that doesn’t exist as a physical object at all.

🏆 Live and gaming experiences are already being reinvented. FIFA Super Soccer on Roblox — launched in December 2025 with 9.5 million monthly active users16 — already lets players compete as official national teams. During the FIFA Club World Cup 2025, a Roblox activation generated 20 million gameplay sessions, and 61% of surveyed players said it made them more likely to watch the real tournament. FIFA has also partnered with Netflix, Epic Games, and SEGA as part of a broader digital gaming ecosystem ahead of 202617. This is already the present — the question is what it scales into. VR stadium experiences for those who can’t attend in person are the logical next layer, and the infrastructure for it is being built now.

🏆 EVs are the most likely near-term entrant. Hyundai and Kia set the precedent at Korea/Japan 2002 and have never left. BYD, Tesla, and Polestar are the credible next wave — brands whose target demographics overlap with the World Cup’s premium international audience and who need the global platform that only the World Cup provides.

🏆 The Saudi dimension is different in kind from the others. Aramco is already a FIFA partner. PIF-backed brands are likely to form a structural commercial pillar at 2034 — not filling a category gap, but potentially replacing the Western legacy stack wholesale. The Visit Saudi episode at the 2023 Women’s World Cup18 — added as a sponsor, then dropped after a player revolt — was the clearest precedent for sponsor backlash forcing FIFA’s hand on geopolitics. What that precedent means for 2034, when Saudi Arabia is both host and major commercial partner, is genuinely open. It is the most complex tension in the commercial future of the World Cup, and it has no clean resolution.

What the World Cup Becomes

The series started with a question that felt simple: how did a football tournament become the most commercially powerful sporting property in the world?

The answer, across four posts, is that it didn’t happen by design. Era 1 built emotional infrastructure without commercial intent. Era 2 built commercial architecture around television and individuals who weren’t trying to be brands. Era 3 turned accidental assets into an empire through social media, and the understanding that narrative can outrun contractual rights. Era 4 priced all of it explicitly for the first time.

The next twenty years will be shaped by whether the thing that made all of that possible — the feeling that the World Cup belongs to everyone, that it is the place where dreams come true — survives the commercial logic built on top of it.

The honest answer is: probably yes, with significant and visible cost.

The emotional foundation has absorbed a great deal already. It absorbed Italy 1934 and Argentina 1978. It absorbed FIFAGate and Qatar. It absorbed the ICP shift from fan to corporate buyer, the price of a hospitality package that most fans will never see. Each time, the tournament produced something that reminded you why the infrastructure exists — a Maracanazo, a Goal of the Century, a night in Buenos Aires when strangers hugged each other in the street.

The child who will one day write about 2026 the way I'm writing about 1994 is somewhere right now, watching the World Cup for the first time, not thinking about commercial cycles or ICP shifts or co-branding architecture. They are watching because something is happening that feels like it matters.

What that child is watching has never been more commercially sophisticated, more geopolitically entangled, or more expensive to produce and attend and activate around. And it has never been more capable of producing the moment that makes all of that irrelevant.

Whether those two things can continue to coexist — at $13 billion, at 48 teams, at 2034 in Saudi Arabia, at wherever the future lands — is the question the next twenty years will answer. We don’t have the answer yet. But someone will be watching.

What does the World Cup look like in 2046? Let’s discuss below.

Carla | Off-Ball Logic

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We're back to analyze how the latest squad announcements rolled out over the past week1. However, our focus isn’t on the names themselves—it’s about how these video presentations reflect brand identity and what the national team actually means to the fans.

That’s why squad announcement spots shouldn't be taken for granted anymore; they've evolved into powerful communication tools to build hype and set the tone for the upcoming World Cup.

Before starting, something I became aware of (thanks to you readers) is that this is apparently an idea that is commonly seen in the NFL. I believe that, in an era where we are so conflicted about the “Superbowlization” of football, seeing a practice adapted in a distinctly football-specific, identity-driven way is actually encouraging.

Let’s start with Canada, who posted their announcement 2 days ago. The presentation itself isn’t much to write about: names with players and a back-and-forth transition to a building that I assume is the CN Tower in Toronto — please confirm. I brought this example because it’s the only one of the three hosts that chose video over an in-person event.

Now, speaking of hosts, we need to talk about in-person events like the one done by Ancelotti in Brazil, which has also been replicated by South Africa and, not long ago, the USA — with their coach announcing the roster with the already-named players present. This is something that sounds similar to how NBA players enter the arena and looks very USA-like, though I was expecting something more Hollywood-like and more memorable, considering they are the kings of movies.

The real question is: what did they want to say? That doesn’t mean all squad announcements must mean something, but considering that a video was absent and a personal presentation was the medium of choice, perhaps the goal was to show unity — to the players present, and to the people watching.

But of course, unity to their people can be displayed by the people themselves. And this is what Spain did, in a similar modus operandi to Bosnia — but with some specific distinctive attributes of Spanish identity that should be mentioned.

The first is the presence of craft by workers, men and women. It is important because they speak of how workers build day by day the country that is now supporting their national team. People also participate in the naming of players that made it to the squad, with landscapes interacting with the narrative.

The timing is also very subtle and perfect. Unlike Norway, they started with the coach and finished with the King of Spain, Felipe, who is also a present figure in football — the Copa del Rey, the Cup of the King, is always awarded by the King.

Furthermore, the wording he brings up is important: “porque cuando juega nuestra selección jugamos todos” — when our team plays, we all play. We are supporting them — but the message is that we are also part of how they perform.

Subtle, elegant and strong. I believe it’s one of my favourites, though not the favourite in this new round.

The Netherlands also did their announcement but it felt standard, except for the reference to the orange — and perhaps I’m missing some specific references because I’m not a local.

My favourite is definitely Uruguay, a spot presented today that delivered a masterclass in identity, community and — funnily — product placement.

The format isn’t new — player names appearing in everyday locations, like England did. But there are people interacting with them, in common attributes of Uruguay’s everyday life: the hairdresser chat, friends drinking coffee, kids swapping stickers after school, people drinking mate, a man going on a boat. The fact that people — not players like in France, not the storytelling itself like England — are connecting the dots is what makes it strong.

The song choice is just as important: “Cielo de un solo color” (sky of a single color) — a popular Rioplatense2 song by the band No Te Va Gustar — sings about the harsh life and experiences of Uruguayan people and the ability to thrive. The song became popular in 2010, during the national team’s 4th-place finish. Performed by a rock band in collaboration with a murga band (murga being a music genre exclusive to Uruguay and extremely popular there) it has a strong chorus that sings “ay celeste regálame un sol” (oh light blue, give me a sun), which recalls the “celeste”, the nickname of the Uruguayan national team, and the reference to the sun, which also appears on the Uruguayan flag.

The spot finishes with two young men identifying someone on a bike who turns out to be Marcelo Bielsa, the national team’s coach — a widely known figure worldwide, also known for his love of cycling. All the performances, including Bielsa’s, are amazing and give us the possibility to enter the everyday life of Uruguay and how life is lived there.

And regarding product placement: throughout the spot, different sponsors of the national team appear — a bank, a mobile phone company, among others. But they play specific roles in the narrative and might even look organic to someone who isn’t aware that those are brands in Uruguay.3

Now let’s cross the River Plate4 to the spot of the reigning champions of the Cup of Life: Argentina. I might not be objective, and curiously enough, everything I was hoping to watch happened. But differences in idea and execution can significantly affect the outcome.

The video starts at the Argentine FA training ground — named after Lionel Messi following the 2022 title — where we see in perfect definition a mural of the team that lifted the cup, a man on a machine mowing the lawn, and then the offices of the national team — where we imagine, and our imagination matches reality, that the first character in this spot is Lionel Scaloni, the main character of the previous 2022 announcement. Scaloni has already chosen his final list and he’s ready to send it to FIFA.

But he decides that someone special is going to send it: Marito. This choice is not random — and I believe it’s the strongest and most positive decision made for the announcement.

Marito is not just anyone; he’s the historic kit man, and in football that is a role for unsung heroes, for silent soldiers. He’s the one who knows that, without him, players can’t play, but he doesn’t care about the credits. He’s one of them, but he’s also one of us. Argentina has a historical relationship between kit men and champions, with a legendary bond between Diego Maradona and the 1986 national team’s kit man Galíndez. So yes, the decision to include Marito is very Argentine and perhaps not easy to identify as a brand attribute for foreigners, but I find it very strong.

Scaloni asks Marito to send the list “con la fuerza de todos los argentinos” (with the strength of all the Argentine people). The scene cuts to a series of images of the heroes of yesteryear alongside the heroes of today: Kempes, Maradona, and the 2022 national team squad with Messi as their leader. We can also see a Diego sanctuary that I believe is in the Argentinos Juniors museum.5

And now the list travels — hand to hand, “con la fuerza de todos los argentinos” — with a song in the background called “Tierra Zanta” — a play on “tierra santa” (holy land) — by the trap singer Trueno6, which became popular during the 2022 World Cup7.

But let’s talk about the people and the places. Argentina is a rather long country that spans different geographies — the puna, the Andes, the jungle with the Iguazú Falls, and Patagonia being the most well-known.

The list travels to a young man in the center of Buenos Aires, a kid at a monument in Rosario, a woman in the northwest of Argentina 2,200 meters above sea level, a young woman in a park in Mendoza (the land of Malbec wine), and a man in the the southernmost urban settlement on the planet: Ushuaia.

And here’s the thing: I can understand that the obvious choices for identity positioning — namely, the Iguazú Falls and Patagonia with the Perito Moreno glacier — were skipped in favour of places more distinctive to football and Argentine culture, like Rosario, the city where Messi was born, and Ushuaia.

But the execution is the issue: the decision to use AI-generated images of low quality creates a non-organic, erratic effect that makes the viewer lose the premise of “la fuerza de todos los argentinos.” And details matter — we can expect some level of excellence from a brand that became an economic powerhouse at the national team level because of its history, its trophies, and the presence of Lionel Messi.

The low image quality completely contradicts having Google Gemini as a partner, especially since Gemini generates some of the best AI images out there right now. Honestly, it would have been easier and way more impactful to just have people from those locations record themselves passing an envelope on their phones. It would have felt so much more authentic and intimate.

The spot finishes with the squad list, with a background of somewhere supposedly in Kansas — but I read somewhere that it may not be. Can’t confirm.

In a nutshell: as a local, I feel disappointed by the outcome. As a marketing professional, my take is that the result didn’t land at the level of quality expected of a renowned football brand like the Argentine national team.8

A P.S. about New Zealand. Even though I stand by my words about the rights and wrongs of the squad announcements, the presentation is now gaining more and more visibility after the unexpected fame of defender Tim Payne.

Which ones did you enjoy the most? And which ones did I get completely wrong? Let’s discuss below.

Thank you for being part of this journey!

Carla | Off-Ball Logic

We are entering the final countdown — 14 days until the 2026 World Cup kick-off. And to start talking about what’s to come, keeping with the tradition of these editions, I’ll start with a personal anecdote.

There was the final between Argentina and France on the 18th of December 2022, on a hot evening in Buenos Aires. We were prepared with all kinds of cabalas — rituals — and appetizers, but we were not prepared for the third goal that tied the match in extra time. That was the last straw for me, and I decided to leave my house with the premise of “I just cannot stand the penalties.”1

So there I was, wandering around my neighbourhood — which you may imagine was completely empty, except for the remaining fellow Argentinians who had the same issue: whether it was being unable to watch the extra time, the penalties, or the match at all2.

So I started walking and that’s where I heard a scream being repeated simultaneously all around: “Vamos Dibu” (Go Dibu). At that point I didn’t understand what was happening, but with enough footage and coverage since, we can all agree that was the moment of Dibu Martínez covering Kolo Muani’s last attempt.

At one point I found a bar with at least 30 people watching the match, and this was my best chance to read the mood. The landscape was as follows: people crying, a man lying down on the asphalt covering his eyes (don’t worry, he was fine — if fine meant alive), families hugging. And so it went: I started walking the 100 metres back and forth, from and to the bar, until the last one.

And so that one entered the net, and there I was, 100 metres from my home, running like crazy to see my family as quickly as possible, and in the meantime I hugged a woman I had never seen and have never seen since. I saw old and young crying in a way I had never seen in my life. It was probably what I felt too: a cry of release, of meeting the dream of our lives — of all of our lives.

I know there were people from around the world who wanted this to happen because of one Lionel Messi, and that’s something amazing that happens in this beautiful game. But for me and for the people surrounding me, it was for us — for those who wanted to dream and still did.

And now here we are, three and a half years later. I wanted to bring this up (besides keeping the tradition) because that feeling, that memory, is what the World Cup has always meant to me. But the question for me, for you, and for everyone is: what now?

The only thing I’m certain about, two weeks before kick-off, is that I was watching the last match of an era that was already ending. The 2026 World Cup is the first one this series is writing about in real time, and the commercial decisions that define it are happening simultaneously with the tournament about to begin.

This is Part 4 of a 5-part series on the commercial history of the FIFA World Cup. I want to understand how a sporting event became the most commercially powerful property in the world — and to do that, we need to go back to where we left off last week.

If you missed Part 3, find it here:

Revenuemaxxing™ and the Revenue Curve

FIFA reports revenue in four-year cycles anchored on the World Cup year, capturing roughly 80–85% of cycle revenue. The arc:

• 2014 Brazil: ~$1.4bn in marketing rights, record-breaking at the time, marked by social protests

• 2018 Russia: $1.45bn, dipped following the FIFAGate 2015 indictments

• 2022 Qatar: ~$1.8bn, commercial recovery, record retail and hospitality

• 2023–2026: $13bn, revised twice upward from an initial $11bn projection, as of March 2025

Going from $1.8bn to $13bn in a single cycle is not growth in the normal sense. It’s a structural change in what FIFA is now.

The name for that change is revenuemaxxing3: FIFA operating as a vertically integrated business unit optimizing revenue across every touchpoint of its commercial universe — closer a Saas like Apple than to a governing body, whose product is the experience itself, built to capture value at every layer, whose ideal customer has shifted from the general consumer to the premium one.

The composition of the $13bn shows how. Broadcasting at $3.92bn and marketing at $2.69bn track the established pattern, broadcasting grew roughly 30% from Qatar’s $3bn, marketing roughly 50% from Qatar’s 1.8bn.

But hospitality and ticketing at $3.097bn is new: for the first time in World Cup history, equal to broadcasting as a revenue source. FIFA unlocked that number by insourcing hospitality (previously outsourced under a rights-fee model) and by building the tournament around NFL stadiums with luxury suite inventory that Qatar’s purpose-built venues couldn’t match.

The Co-Branding Architecture

The 2026 World Cup has three hosts, 16 host cities, and a commercial architecture unlike anything FIFA has attempted before; one in which the host’s political brand, commercial identity, and national narrative are woven directly into the tournament’s own positioning. This is what I’m calling co-branding: not just hosting, but co-authoring the commercial universe around the event.

The US market is the engine. Bank of America entered as the first-ever global sponsor in the banking category, with a reported $100 million investment — described as the largest in its sports marketing history.

Verizon joined as Official Telecommunication Services Sponsor, centered on stadium connectivity. Neither of these brands came in as football sponsors. They came in because the 2026 World Cup is the closest thing to Super Bowl-level commercial saturation available in the North American market, and that saturation was the product they were buying.

The host city supporters program extends the architecture downward. Each local organizing committee can sign up to ten companies at approximately $5 million per package, carrying city-specific marks rather than official FIFA logos. Houston is targeting up to $90 million from local backers alone. Cities have become commercial participants in the tournament rather than venues for it, co-branding partners at the municipal level.

From Democratizing to Productizing

FIFA has consistently framed every expansion as a mission statement about inclusion. The 1998 expansion from 24 to 32 teams was real in its consequences: Senegal’s quarterfinal run in 2002 and Ghana’s last eight in 2010 happened because the format created space for them. The democratization narrative earned its credibility.

The 48-team format tells a different story. 104 matches instead of 64, more inventory, more access points for broadcasters and commercial partners — the format decision is as much about revenue architecture as about football. And the decisions surrounding it follow the same logic: hospitality insourcing, tiered sponsorship with category exclusivity, a host city supporters program that turns municipalities into commercial entities. Every level of access is priced and packaged, from global partner down to local supporter.

Furthermore, 5.5 million tickets are projected for 2026, more than any previous edition. But what’s under pressure is the sense that it belongs to everyone, which has always been the source of its emotional power. When the premium hospitality tier generates as much revenue as the broadcast, and when the ICP has shifted from the football fan to the corporate buyer, the answer to “who is this for?” starts to look different.

The Marketing Stack of Era 4

Era 4 is also the era in which the World Cup became genuinely global as a business, not just as a competition. The expansion to 48 teams in 2026 opens qualification paths across confederations that have historically been underrepresented, but unlike the 1998 expansion, the commercial rationale here is explicit from the start. The marketing stack built on top of it reflects that logic at every layer.

🏆 Mascots became a three-way co-branding statement For the first time in World Cup history, the 2026 edition has three official mascots, one per host nation: Clutch (a bald eagle for the US), Zayu (a jaguar for Mexico), and Maple (a moose for Canada). Unveiled in September 2025, the trio mirrors the tournament’s co-hosting architecture in a way no previous mascot program has. All three were designed with digital and social deployment as the primary channel—characters built backwards from platforms rather than as plush toys. The question this raises is whether a mascot trio optimized for social media can generate the individual intergenerational attachment that made single mascots like Footix commercially durable across decades.

🏆 Logos became motion assets The 2026 World Cup logo is the first in the tournament’s history designed to animate by default. Built for digital deployment from the ground up, the physical version is treated as a secondary application. The logo has moved from a cultural artifact, to a brand asset, to a motion asset distributed natively across every platform.

🏆 Anthems fragmented beyond recovery No World Cup anthem since Shakira’s “Waka Waka” in 2010 has achieved standalone cultural footprint — surviving the tournament that produced it as a recognizable artifact in its own right. The multi-track, multi-artist strategy of 2018 and 2022 optimized for territorial market reach at the direct expense of the cultural concentration that makes a single song become the sound of a summer. The anthem economy of the World Cup, which peaked with Ricky Martin in 1998 and produced its last genuinely universal moment in 2010, has become a licensing portfolio.

🏆 Jerseys became a fashion category Argentina’s three-star post-Qatar 2022 shirt was reportedly the best-selling national kit of 2023 globally, purchased as a cultural object regardless of the buyer’s actual team affiliation. This era also elevated the pre-match jersey from a functional warm-up top to a standalone fashion asset. Because they exist outside the rigid design rules of official on-pitch kits, brands have turned pre-match wear into a playground for bolder, lifestyle-driven aesthetics that appeal directly to the streetwear market. It is the natural conclusion of a process that began when Brazil’s yellow first popped on color television: the garment’s commercial value is no longer strictly tied to what happens on the pitch.

🏆 Broadcast fragmented into a portfolio model No single distribution channel reaches the full 2026 audience. In the US, Fox Sports carries English-language rights, Telemundo/Peacock carries the full slate in Spanish, and Tubi (free-to-air) airs select key matches. In Brazil, CazéTV carries all 104 matches on YouTube with no traditional broadcast partner. The model is now a portfolio of distribution channels, each optimized for a different audience segment.

🏆 Digital infrastructure became the primary commercial universe The parallel digital ecosystem that began with EA Sports’ FIFA International Soccer launching in December 1993 (before the 1994 World Cup had even started) has matured into the dominant commercial layer of the tournament. The Panini digital sticker album for Qatar 2022 reached 27 million users. FIFA+ launched as an OTT streaming platform. EA’s franchise generates billions annually regardless of whether the World Cup is happening. Every touchpoint now has a commercial layer, and every commercial layer connects to every other: the tournament has become a content universe with football at its center, and that universe is large enough that football is no longer required to activate it.

The Fragile Economics Layer

The $13bn commercial cycle creates a concentration of risk no previous edition has faced. The $900 million cancellation insurance FIFA held for Qatar 2022, significant at the time, would cover less than 7% of the 2026 projection. Insourcing hospitality means FIFA is carrying operational risk it previously transferred to rights-holders. Prize money confirmed at $871m, over double the $440m distributed in Qatar, means national federations are more financially dependent on the tournament’s full delivery than at any prior edition.

The co-branding architecture adds a different kind of exposure. Qatar 2022 was politically complex, but Qatar had total sovereign control over its environment.

The $625 million in federal security funding for US host cities is the clearest illustration of this exposure. Congress passed the funding under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in July 2025, but the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA stalled the release for months. Hindered by three separate federal funding lapses, the agencies missed their own internal January 30, 2026 deadline, leaving host cities in operational limbo just months before the tournament. Lawmakers and local organizers sounded the alarm, warning that the delay threatened years of careful preparation and left municipalities waiting on critical cash flow for police and emergency response. The money was eventually released on March 18, 2026—less than twelve weeks before kick-off.

The tournament’s commercial architecture assumed a reliable federal co-organizer. What it got was a co-organizer that delivered, but on a timeline that exposed exactly how dependent that architecture is on political and legislative factors FIFA doesn’t control.

The current US political context creates specific risks for a tournament whose commercial thesis depends on the free movement of fans, athletes, and commercial partners across North American borders.

What This Era Is Building

This is the part of the series where I’d normally summarize what the era built. But the era isn’t over — the 2026 World Cup hasn’t been played. The final at MetLife Stadium is scheduled for July 19, and none of the numbers we’ve been discussing are settled yet.

What we can say is that Era 4 has made the World Cup into something the previous three eras were building toward without fully naming: a vertically integrated commercial enterprise that captures value at every layer of the experience, tied to the political and institutional context of its hosts in ways that create both opportunity and exposure, optimized for a customer who is increasingly not the fan who built the tournament’s emotional foundation.

The question is whether that foundation can carry the weight of what’s been built on top of it. The 2022 Qatar final (and everything that night in Buenos Aires meant) suggests it still can. But the gap between the commercial logic and the emotional logic that made this worth anything has never been wider, and 2026 will tell us more about where that gap is going than any previous edition.

In Part 5 (and last of this series) we’ll look into the future of the World Cup as a commercial property, and what comes after the empire.

What do you think? Let’s discuss below.

Thank you for being part of this journey!

Carla | Off-Ball Logic

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This week, we were bombarded with the same topic throughout the socials — but mainly Twitter: squad announcements.

Once a simple task of posting who’s going and who’s not to the greatest event in football, they now come with huge surprises and genuinely amazing content. This past week alone, we went from talking about Scotland qualifying to falling in love (again) with Ewan McGregor’s voice, flashy video colors, lovely landscapes, sweet family pictures, and the greatest band of all time.

World Cup squad announcements have now changed from a simple list of names (Argentina, famously, had a low-key announcement right before becoming champions in 2022) to a whole positioning statement. And I say positioning deliberately: these announcements are now mixing brand identity, core values, cultural and emotional heritage, and not least, the ability to do more with less.

Before we start, three disclaimers:

1. I’ll only talk about announcements that included a video, not just a squad list posted.

2. I’ll cover the ones already out. Part two with the upcoming ones next week.

3. This is completely subjective. Even if I could score them objectively across criteria like identity, production, and creativity, there are so many aspects that feel personal to me that I’d rather be honest about it and hear your thoughts too. I might also miss some contextual or cultural details, so please let me know.

Let me start with the ones that didn’t make it to the top five and why.

The one that hurt me the most to leave out is Senegal’s — the brand identity built around lions (their national team being called the “Lions of Teranga”), the “call to war” framing, is genuinely powerful and feels like a true reflection of the national team’s core (also, “call to war” hits different after what happened at AFCON, but that’s a conversation for another day.) The only thing that threw me off was the possible use of AI — please don’t tell me that lion was real, or I’m going to have to call PETA.

Germany’s presentation, with family members talking about players, is really striking in concept. But considering this is one of the national teams that has won the most, alongside Italy and behind Brazil, I felt it lacked something in terms of brand identification. That dream-of-playing-the-World-Cup feeling gets me every time, but the execution felt like something we’ve already seen from other teams.

Norway had a genuinely interesting one: the King delivering a message of unity and national pride to wish the team luck, with players appearing across everyday Norwegian life scenes while the country’s stunning landscapes stole the spotlight. Beautiful, but competing in a crowded field of announcements doing exactly the same thing.

Sweden: Graham Potter announcing the team in front of a board doesn’t exactly scream brand-oriented content, so I have to leave it out.

New Zealand: this one broke my heart the most. The visual language (which felt too US-influenced) seemed disconnected from a country with rich football1 culture, a strong Māori identity, and genuinely epic landscapes. The landscapes are there, but they feel borrowed to the narrative. In a squad announcement, production can elevate identity, but it can’t replace it.

#5: France

It depicts an ad format with some, but not all, of the players in different moments of their day. The remaining names appear in different objects of the scene.

I loved how naturally the players show up and how they interacted with the narrative. It lands at fifth because, though funny and engaging, there was something missing from les Bleus’ identity — it felt slightly too US-influenced in its visual approach, which is something you can actually do brilliantly (spoiler to another announcement later)2.

#4: Bosnia and Herzegovina

One of the most pleasant surprises. Simple but extremely effective: friends and family enthusiastically announcing teammates, with typical landscapes in the background. As I mentioned with Norway, Germany, and New Zealand, what makes this different isn’t the production: it’s the emotion. The names, the people, the landscapes — they feel like it holds together, as if the people belong to the place, and together they belong to the national team and its identity. Spoiler: I really want Argentina to do something like this, with local people instead of family members. Let’s see.

#3: Scotland

There’s nothing that can beat Ewan McGregor’s voice here. Of all the globally known Scottish celebrities they could have chosen, McGregor was the right call, delivering a beautifully crafted piece of storytelling that says, without quite saying it, that one of the founders of the modern game lives and breathes football. The presence of locals — the real people who, for me, are the heart of what the World Cup means — is what makes it so strong. His voice, the locals, the landscapes, the narrative: it all feels completely on point.

#2: Czech Republic

This one feels the most compelling to me, and the reason is how much it achieves with so little. Direct family members talking about their children, about their dreams, and about how those dreams began. You might say it’s similar to Germany’s, but the details make all the difference. Seeing those kids with Nedvěd’s haircut made me imagine them dreaming of being him — walking in his exact shoes. Then the video takes you into their bedrooms, their décor, their corners of the Czech Republic where those kids dared to dream. It’s about people, not production, and that’s why it works.

#1: England

A masterpiece, and one that will leave a blueprint for how to make a squad announcement video.

It opens with audio of the mildly famous musician John Lennon3 answering a question about how British he felt. Then the video begins: a man running through London in an incredible England pre-match jersey (near Victoria Station, I think, though please correct me if I’m wrong) with different frames illustrating each name as it’s announced.

There are so many layers beautifully integrated here. One that hit me particularly hard: in an era where AI is invading everything, this announcement leans completely into human art. And even if AI played a role in small details, the idea, the craft, and the human work are unmistakably there. The fact that a song made almost six decades ago can be organically woven into a chant of unity and faith for 2026 is remarkable.

And that matters more than it used to. In 2026, audiences are trained to feel the difference — we saw it with Senegal's lion, where one AI-looking frame was enough to pull me out entirely. England bet in the exact opposite direction, and it paid off.

There are also deliberate hints of US culture — strategically strong, given The Beatles’ history of conquering America. And the video leans into that fully, blending the city’s visual world with Beatles iconography throughout: the four people, each holding a letter and striking a pose from the Help! album cover to announce Harry Kane.

The Beatles are, I’d argue, the most globally recognized symbol of English identity (I’d say after the Queen and perhaps football itself, but maybe I’m wrong), and it was an excellent choice from the founders of the game.

Closing lists

A few more thoughts before I hand it over to you.

Teams I thought would have announcements videos but didn’t (yet): USA — one of the hosts and arguably the kings of cinematic production; Brazil — though they had some kind of official broadcast; Japan — I was genuinely hoping for something Captain Tsubasa-related, not going to lie.

Teams I’m most eager to see: Argentina, Spain4, Uruguay, Australia, Mexico.

Which ones are you expecting? And which ones did I get completely wrong? Let’s discuss below.

Thank you for being part of this journey!

Carla | Off-Ball Logic

There is a specific feeling that comes from watching something happen that shouldn’t be happening, where each goal arrives before you’ve finished absorbing the last one, and the scoreboard starts to feel like it’s lying.

I was at home the afternoon Germany beat Brazil 7-1 in Belo Horizonte, books open on the desk and the television on in the background, and somewhere around the fourth goal I stopped processing what I was watching as football at all.

Brazil was falling apart in real time, in their own country, in a World Cup semifinal, and the pace of it — the way it kept going, kept accelerating — made it feel less like a match and more like watching something happen to people who didn’t yet know they were inside history. The players on the pitch didn’t know the final score, and neither did I. Every time I was sure it couldn’t get worse, it did.

I didn’t understand it then as anything more than a football match. But I was watching Era 3 at its most concentrated.

But this era, like the previous ones, didn't arrive suddenly.

To understand how the 7-1 became the symbol it did (of a tournament that now operated as much on the internet as on the pitch) you have to go back a few years and look at what was changing in the world the World Cup was trying to inhabit.

This is Part 3 of a 5-part series on the commercial history of the FIFA World Cup. I want to understand how a sporting event became the most commercially powerful property in the world — and to do that, we need to go back to where we left off last week.

If you missed Part 2, find it here:

The Two Decisions That Rewired Football

The Premier League was founded in February 1992 with a commercial thesis that sounds obvious in retrospect but was genuinely radical at the time: top-flight English football would be sold to broadcasters as a premium product at a premium price, and the money from that sale would fund a quality of football that justified an even larger sale next time round. BSkyB paid £304 million for five years of rights — nearly five times the value of the previous deal.

Almost simultaneously, UEFA rebranded the European Cup as the Champions League from the 1992-93 season — a name chosen to evoke something global rather than merely continental, to position the competition as a stage rather than a tournament, and building on the group format introduced the previous year. The group format meant more matches, more inventory, more access points for broadcasters and commercial partners.

European club football was no longer a domestic competition with an international audience. It was a media property — one that ran every year, with the world's best players, distributed globally with production values that hadn't existed in football a decade earlier.

The Champions League didn't threaten the World Cup's primacy; nothing could do that. But it changed the conditions under which the World Cup operated, and it created a commercial grammar that the World Cup would eventually have to learn to speak.

The War for Football's Story

The club game had demonstrated something Nike understood before most: football’s commercial value was partly about the sport and largely about narrative — the story of the competition, the personality of its participants, the emotional investment of its audience. In 1996, they acted on that reading. Nike signed Brazil at a moment when Nike's global football business was still finding its footing. The Brazil shirt was the most concentrated vehicle for that narrative in the sport — and they bought the vehicle.

What followed resolved in the most structurally interesting way possible: Nike won the narrative without always winning the contract. In South Africa, Adidas was the official World Cup partner but Nike dominated the conversation anyway. The lesson was structural — in the internet era, the story you tell can be worth more than the rights you hold.

Sixty Million Co-Authors

What keeps returning to me about that afternoon is how the story of the match was assembled, not through any channel FIFA owned or controlled, but by millions of people writing it simultaneously, in real time. Germany 7-1 Brazil generated 35.6 million tweets. And Era 3 made this possible for the first time.

Era 1 transmitted the World Cup through radio and print — the story was controlled by journalists and mediated by institutions. Era 2 added television, which expanded the audience enormously but kept the storytelling architecture essentially unchanged: a small number of broadcasters, a large number of passive viewers. But now, the social media layer that matured between roughly 2006 and 2014 transformed viewers into participants in the production of meaning — people who could amplify, interpret, satirize, and reshape the tournament’s narrative in real time, and whose collective output often proved more resonant than anything the official broadcast structure produced.

“It’s Coming Home” went viral in 2018 because England fans decided it was the thing — not because any broadcaster or sponsor activated it.

And what this changed wasn’t just how stories were told: it was which stories could travel. Rivalry no longer needed geopolitical backstory to reach a global audience. The internet made emotional stakes legible in minutes, without context or history behind them.

From National Exports to Global Personal Brands

Heroes from the previous era were national exports — Pelé represented Brazil to the world, Cruyff represented the Netherlands, Maradona represented Argentina. Enormous, globally visible figures, but the frame was always national. Their identity was inseparable from the shirt they wore.

Era 3 dissolved that frame. The proof of concept was Beckham — something I’ve traced in earlier posts, but worth naming here: what Real Madrid built wasn’t just a transfer, it was the first commercial architecture explicitly reverse-engineered around a single player’s cultural visibility. A footballer, for the first time, operated as a brand capable of crossing sectors and markets independently of his team’s results. What followed scaled that model by an order of magnitude.

Players had become the primary force of storytelling in football, and the World Cup was where those stories finally got their verdict.

The Marketing Stack of Era 3: 1994–Present

Era 3 is also the era in which the World Cup became genuinely global as a competition, not just as a broadcast. The expansion to 32 teams in 1998 opened the door to confederations that had been structurally underrepresented, and the results followed. Senegal and South Korea reached the quarterfinals in 2002. Ghana reached the last eight in 2010. For the first time, all five continental confederations had meaningful stakes in the outcome of a tournament, not just a presence in it. The commercial architecture of Era 3 was built on top of that expansion — and shaped by it.

🏆 Mascots became an entertainment industry commission The 1994 edition introduced Striker, a dog designed by Warner Bros. — the first Hollywood studio commission in World Cup history, and the beginning of outsourcing mascot creation to entertainment rather than design. France 1998’s Footix generated an unexpected linguistic legacy: “footix” became French slang for “bandwagon football fan.” Germany 2006’s Goleo VI, created by Jim Henson Creature Shop, produced the most expensive mascot-related commercial failure in World Cup history when toy company NICI went into bankruptcy protection after the mascot failed to generate expected merchandise demand. Qatar 2022’s La’eeb was designed primarily for animated social-first deployment — for the first time, a World Cup mascot built backwards from the platform rather than the plush toy.

🏆 Logos evolved from static to digital-native Era 3’s logo evolution follows a single arc: from descriptive to kinetic to digital-native. From 2002 onward, the World Cup Trophy shape became a consistent element in logo design, made formally compulsory by FIFA regulation in 2014. Brazil 2014’s logo was the first designed with kinetics in mind, treating the mark as a motion element rather than a static emblem. The 2026 edition will be the first logo designed to animate by default, built for digital deployment from the ground up.

🏆 Anthems peaked and then fragmented The anthem economy of Era 3 has the shape of an inverted parabola. Ricky Martin’s “The Cup of Life” in 1998 was the first genuinely global World Cup anthem1. The 2010 edition produced two standalone cultural artifacts from a single tournament: Shakira’s “Waka Waka” alongside K’naan’s “Wavin’ Flag” for Coca-Cola. Since then, the multi-track, multi-artist strategy has diluted the cultural impact that comes from a single song becoming the sound of a summer — optimizing for market reach at the expense of the resonance that makes an anthem survive the tournament that produced it.

🏆 Jerseys stopped being about the team Argentina’s three-star post-Qatar 2022 shirt became the best-selling national kit of 2023 globally, including in markets with no connection to Argentine football — purchased as a cultural object, an aesthetic signal, an affiliation with a global narrative. The jersey now circulates on its own commercial logic, one that is not primarily about football fandom. Blokecore (the wearing of football shirts as casual streetwear, entirely divorced from match attendance or team loyalty) is the endpoint of this process, the moment when the sport itself becomes optional.

🏆 Digital infrastructure created a parallel commercial universe EA Sports’ FIFA International Soccer launched in December 1993 — before the 1994 World Cup had even begun — creating a parallel commercial ecosystem for a tournament that hadn’t yet started. The Coca-Cola and Panini digital sticker album for Qatar 2022 reached twenty-seven million users. FIFA+ launched as an OTT streaming platform during the same cycle.

The Sponsor Architecture Mutates

The ISL collapse of May 2001 is the event Era 3’s commercial structure is most directly a response to. ISL had held FIFA’s marketing rights since 1982, when Horst Dassler engineered the deal that gave his company control of the World Cup’s commercial infrastructure. When it went bankrupt, FIFA brought its marketing rights in-house through FIFA Marketing AG and began building the tiered sponsorship architecture that defines the tournament today.

The structure that emerged — Partners, World Cup Sponsors, Regional Supporters — codified something the Premier League and Champions League had already demonstrated: that exclusivity, properly managed, creates scarcity value. The 2002 Korea/Japan edition ran with fifteen partners, which the trade press described as saturation point, and it was. The structure was refined from there.

The more interesting story is who those brands were. The 2015 FIFAGate indictments triggered public pressure from major sponsors, and the 2018 Russia cycle struggled to fill all sponsorship slots as a result. What filled the gap was structurally significant: Chinese brands. Wanda, Hisense, Vivo, and Mengniu entered as Western commercial credibility was temporarily disrupted. Hyundai and Kia, who signed at Korea/Japan 2002 and have never left, represent the cleaner version of this thesis: when the competition goes genuinely global, the commercial case for brands from newly competitive regions becomes self-sustaining.

The Soft Power Turn and the Broken Spell

The World Cup’s emotional job — the thing it has always done better than any other sporting event — is create the conditions for collective belonging. For ninety minutes, and for the weeks surrounding those ninety minutes, the tournament makes national identity feel uncomplicated. No commercial infrastructure can manufacture this. It has to be felt.

Era 3 made that feeling harder to sustain. Brazil 2014 is the inflection point: the “FIFA-quality hospitals” slogan (coined by protesters) captured a political argument that no World Cup host had made so publicly before. Brazil 2014 was not the first expensive World Cup, nor the first held under a compromised political context. But it was the first where the cost was legible to the public as a political choice, and the internet ensured that argument reached a global audience simultaneously with the tournament itself.

Russia 2018 and Qatar 2022 deepened this dynamic. The spell held commercially — Qatar 2022 generated $7.57 billion in revenue for FIFA, an eighteen percent increase on the prior period. But it held differently. For a growing segment of the global football audience, the suspension of disbelief the World Cup had always requested required more deliberate effort than it once did. The product kept selling but the relationship with their “customers” changed.

What Era 3 Built

Era 1 built the emotional infrastructure. Era 2 built the commercial architecture. Era 3 turned that architecture into an empire:

• A tiered global sponsorship structure built in-house, with category exclusivity creating genuine scarcity value.

• A narrative economy where the story you tell can be worth more than the rights you hold.

• Players as global personal brands, whose commercial value existed independently of the shirt they wore.

• Sixty million co-authors writing the tournament’s story in real time, producing meaning no official broadcast could replicate.

• A digital infrastructure — video games, OTT platforms, digital sticker albums — running as a parallel commercial universe alongside the sport itself.

• A jersey that stopped being about the team and started circulating on its own cultural logic.

• A genuinely global competition, where all five continents had meaningful stakes in the outcome for the first time.

The emotional layer is still there, still capable of producing what I watched at home that afternoon in June 2014. But in Era 3 it became harder to access cleanly. The internet that made the co-authorship possible also made the machinery visible. . But for the first time, the audience could see exactly what they were watching. Most kept watching. The relationship changed anyway.

In Part IV, we’ll look at what this empire looks like right now — and what the World Cup is being asked to become.

What do you think? Let’s discuss below.

Thank you for being part of this journey!

Carla | Off-Ball Logic

In the last post, I started talking about a photo of me at five years old wearing USA 94 gear and how that merch cemented a lifelong obsession with the World Cup’s commercial universe. The photo is where my memory starts — but the story had been running for years before. In Argentina in the 90s, certain World Cups already lived in the air around you. The ones that really lived in the air were 1978 and, mostly, 1986.

The last one was not the least relevant — if anything, the most. Yes, Argentina won the World Cup in 1986, but what cemented the mythology, and what I’m going to trace through this post, wasn’t just the final. It was a quarter-final against England, and two moments that people have never stopped arguing about: The Hand of God came first, and always has. Then the Goal of the Century.

The first could divide a room. The second never did.

By Mexico 86 and Italia 90, this era had already crested. What I grew up watching wasn’t new — it was the result of thirty years of foundational work.

This is Part 2 of a 5-part series on the commercial history of the FIFA World Cup. I want to understand how a sporting event became the most commercially powerful property in the world — and to do that, we need to go back to where we left off last week.

If you missed Part 1, find it here:

Television Changes Everything

Before television, the World Cup reached you through someone else’s words. England 1966 was the first World Cup to be commercially broadcast on television in the host country (ITV) — the numbers were still limited, sets were a relative novelty in many markets, but the model was set.

But Mexico 1970 changed the parameters entirely: the first transmitted in color via satellite, globally. In the black-and-white era, kit design had a specific functional constraint — teams needed to differentiate by contrast. Color was irrelevant because color couldn’t be transmitted.

The moment color arrived, that logic shifted. Brazil’s canary yellow, already a national symbol since 1958, became a visual event. The Netherlands’ orange. Kit identity, in the commercial sense, starts here.

But the most underrated consequence of television was what it did to spectatorship.

One more structural change arrived in 1974: The Jules Rimet Trophy — which Brazil had won permanently after their third title — was replaced by the current version. It was no longer named after its founder. It became simply the FIFA World Cup Trophy — an institutional symbol rather than a personal tribute. And the new World Cup immediately made it an image of a new era, directly linked to the figures we’ll talk about next.

Combined with the return to a stable quadrennial cycle after World War II, the tournament was now a predictable, recurring event on the global calendar. No more interruptions or ad-hoc organizing. A reliable institution — which was a precondition for a reliable commercial one.

Speaking of which: television is usually celebrated as the force that democratized the World Cup, that gave it to the world. That reading is true, and it misses something more important. Television didn’t give the World Cup to the world. It gave the World Cup to FIFA. Before broadcast rights existed, commercial value accrued locally — to the organizing committee, the host economy, the stadium. The moment a broadcaster paid to transmit it globally, that value transferred upward. FIFA held the rights.

The Birth of the Cult of Personality

To understand where football’s commercial ecosystem started, you need to understand the tension that created it. Era 1 gave us collective heroes: he Garra Charrúa, the Mighty Magyars, the Wunderteam. No single figure was bigger than the team, and no team was bigger than the tournament.

Era 2 dismantled that entirely. What Pelé, Beckenbauer, and Maradona built wasn’t just personal commercial reach — it was a cult of personality model: one figure per nation, around whom the entire emotional narrative organized itself.

But this goes beyond marketing: A cult of personality has psychological and political dimensions that a brand deal doesn’t capture.

Pelé was the template. By 1970 he was already the first global single-athlete brand whose commercial value transcended his sport, with deals with Pepsi and Puma, his image circulating globally with commercial intent in a way no non-North American athlete had achieved before. But Pelé’s power wasn’t only commercial: in Mexico 1970, he was the protagonist of the most aesthetically complete football the World Cup had ever seen. Brazil’s yellow, Pelé’s number 10, the Jogo Bonito — the first World Cup brand that didn’t know it was a brand.

Beckenbauer gave the model a European register — the libero, the captain, the embodiment of German tactical and organizational authority; proof that the template could travel.

But Diego Maradona took it somewhere else entirely: into moral complexity. The 1986 World Cup is where the cult of personality model produced its most sophisticated and enduring narrative, because Maradona gave the tournament something it hadn’t had before: a figure who was simultaneously hero and villain, depending entirely on which side of the globe you were standing on.

For Argentina, he was a god. For England, he was the man who cheated and got away with it. Both readings were legitimate, and were fueled by the same two moments: the Hand of God1 and the Goal of the Century, in that order, three minutes apart in the same match.

The political context underneath those minutes was fundamental: the match carried the weight of the war — without a word of official acknowledgment from FIFA, without any institutional narrative, just two teams on a pitch and a global television audience that understood exactly what it was watching.

The Marketing Stack of Era 2, 1966–1994

If Era 1's marketing stack was posters, radio, and print — locally controlled, fragmented, host-defined — Era 2's stack is television, mascots-as-IP, logo standardization, and the first formal merchandising infrastructure.

🏆 Television was the infrastructure everything else was built on And made everything in this era possible. The most immediate effect: a ball — the Adidas Telstar in 1970 — could now be marketed globally off the back of a broadcast. Panini partnered with FIFA that same year to launch the first World Cup sticker album, sparking a collecting obsession that has never really stopped.

🏆 Mascots became cultural and political objects Every host nation’s mascot is a controlled image of how that country wants to be seen by a global television audience. The first was World Cup Willie — a lion wearing a Union Jack kit, introduced in England 1966. Straightforward national symbolism, but the template was set. Argentina 1978’s Gauchito (a traditional gaucho child, romantic and folkloric) projected national heritage and pastoral identity to a watching world. Spain 1982’s Naranjito (a smiling orange) projected warmth and European identity at a moment of Spanish democratic transition after Franco. Italy 1990’s Ciao (a faceless tricolore stick figure in a deliberate design-school modernist aesthetic) was a signal of cultural sophistication, a country presenting itself through its design tradition rather than through a cuddly character. Mixed reception at launch, design canon reference now.

🏆 Visual identity was perfected in this era Before 1970, host countries designed their own everything, locally and independently. The 1970 Mexico logo marked a shift: FIFA’s first stripped-down design, an abstract football graphic that established the visual grammar for everything that followed. From there, it became a joint project between FIFA designers and host-country agencies. The 1974 Germany logo went further into abstraction — single color, virtually no cultural reference beyond “WM” (Weltmeisterschaft). From Argentina 1978 onward, host nation flag colors became a consistent design element, running through España 82, Mexico 86, Italia 90, and France 98. The poster tradition ran alongside it — in 1982, Joan Miró designed the Spain poster. The World Cup had become a cultural commission significant enough to attract figures from entirely outside sport.

🏆 Kit branding went from forbidden to foundational Manufacturers were prohibited from displaying logos on national team kits until 1974. The first prominent display came in 1978 — Adidas trefoil on Argentina’s shirts, visible in color on global television for the first time. The commercial logic was immediate: hundreds of millions of people watching a kit with your logo on it, for 90 minutes, across a month-long tournament. The kit deal became one of the most valuable assets in sports sponsorship from that moment forward.

The Infrastructure Gets Built

The commercial infrastructure of the modern World Cup was assembled through a combination of personal ambition, corporate strategy, and a specific alignment between FIFA’s need for revenue and one man’s vision of what sports marketing could become: Horst Dassler.

The son of Adidas founder Adi Dassler, Horst was the architect of the modern sports marketing industry in a way that is genuinely difficult to overstate. In 1978, in partnership with marketing agent Patrick Nally, he orchestrated the first formal tripartite arrangement between Coca-Cola, Adidas, and FIFA — the founding structure of what would become the global sponsorship program. The logic was simple and revolutionary: instead of ad-hoc local deals negotiated tournament by tournament, a small number of global brands would buy category-exclusive access to the World Cup across multiple editions, that guaranteed global visibility and category protection.

Post-1982, Dassler partnered with Japanese advertising giant Dentsu to create International Sport and Leisure (ISL), which aggregated, sold, and serviced FIFA’s commercial rights from 1982 until its bankruptcy in May 2001. For nearly two decades, it was the operating system of global sports commercialization2.

Politics, Soft Power, and the Precedents Set

The World Cup has never been politically neutral, as established in Part 1. Era 2 produced two precedents worth examining directly, because both have echoes that run all the way to the present.

Argentina 1978 established a precedent the tournament hasn’t stopped repeating: FIFA’s willingness to proceed with a host regardless of the political conditions surrounding it. The questions that surrounded that tournament — about the regime, about the circumstances of certain results — were never formally resolved, and FIFA’s institutional position was, as it would be again, to treat them as outside its remit.

The second precedent is commercially more specific: Mexico 1986 and the tobacco sponsor. FIFA overrode Mexico’s national tobacco advertising ban to accommodate RJ Reynolds/Camel as an official sponsor — a sovereign nation’s public health regulation set aside because it conflicted with a commercial commitment. This established a template that would resurface explicitly in Brazil 2014, when legislation was passed (the so-called “Budweiser Law”) allowing alcohol sales in stadiums despite Brazilian law prohibiting them.

The Heroes of this Era

Johan Cruyff’s 1974 remains one of the tournament’s great unresolved stories — the most complete footballer of his generation, leading arguably the most technically advanced team in World Cup history, and finishing second. Total Football’s peak expression produced no trophy, but it produced a legacy that outlasted every winner of that decade.

By 1990, the model was producing results of a different kind. Salvatore Schillaci, a Sicilian striker in only his first season at Juventus, became the World Cup’s top scorer and the emotional center of an Italia 90 that was, culturally, possibly the most complete World Cup ever staged. Pavarotti’s Nessun Dorma as the BBC’s theme. Un’estate Italiana by Bennato and Nannini. A cumulative television audience of 26.7 billion by FIFA’s count.

What Era 2 Built

Era 1 built the emotional infrastructure. Era 2 built the commercial architecture on top of it.

• A formal global sponsorship program with category-exclusive partners paying meaningful money.

• A rights agency managing its entire commercial portfolio.

• Kit manufacturers competing for national team deals, with an official ball carrying embedded sponsorship value.

• A sticker album in its third decade by 1994 and mascots capable of anchoring animated television series.

• Logos designed to function as brand assets across merchandise and broadcast.

The emotional layer was also deeper, not because the stories were better than the Maracanazo, but because television had made them shared in a way print and radio never could.

The overwhelming event that exists today — the $13 billion quadrennial institution that generates more simultaneous global attention than anything else in sport — was shaped in the era between England 1966 and USA 1994. The 90s, where many of us grew up hearing the stories of 1970 and 1986, were already living in the world that era had built.

What do you think? Let’s discuss below.

Thank you for being part of this journey!

Carla | Off-Ball Logic

There’s a photo of me at five years old that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. I’m standing next to my brother, seven years older — and he’s wearing the USA 94 gear. The full kit: the t-shirt, the cap, and the bag. And I remember exactly how I felt wanting to have it too.

That tournament gave me Striker. Four years later, France 98 gave me Footix. At five, and then at nine, I wasn’t thinking about licensing deals or FIFA’s commercial strategy — I was just completely, irrationally obsessed. Not just with the football, but with the stuff: the mascots, the kits, the Happy Meal toys, the symbols. The visual universe that the World Cup built around itself every four years.

It took me a long time to understand why that obsession felt so different from regular fandom. The distinction, I think, is this: World Cup merch doesn’t function as merchandise. It functions as a materialisation of meaning — objects that carry the emotional weight of something far larger than themselves. And uniquely, it manufactures nostalgia before you’ve had the chance to feel it. The sticker, the mascot, the kit — they aren’t souvenirs of an experience you’ve already had. They’re promissory notes on one you’re still living.

But the question is: What is the meaning of the World Cup? What does it symbolize?

The reason a USA 94 kit could cement itself into my identity at age five is the same reason cited in Empire State of Mind: the World Cup is the concrete jungle where dreams are made of. Ricky Martin called it the Cup of Life, and he wasn’t being hyperbolic.

The World Cup is the ultimate goal not just of top-level athletes, but of entire nations, and its strength is built on national pride, on a century of storytelling, on a mythology so powerful it eventually surpassed the Olympic Games — an institution that had a century’s head start.

That mythology had to start somewhere, and when it did, there was no mascot, no kit deal, no global sponsor, and no television — barely even a plan.

This is Part 1 of a 5-part series on the commercial history of the FIFA World Cup. I want to understand how a sporting event became the most commercially powerful property in the world — and to do that, we need to go back to when it was nothing of the sort.

Why the World Cup Exists at All

To understand where football’s commercial ecosystem started, you need to understand the tension that created it. FIFA was founded in 1904, in Paris, by a group of European football associations that wanted something the sport — still very young at the time — didn’t yet have: international governance. For the first two decades of the 20th century, the closest thing to a global football competition was the Olympic tournament — FIFA recognized it as the unofficial world championship in 1914, and the arrangement held, until it didn’t.

The 1920s were defined by a simmering conflict between the IOC and FIFA over a single, seemingly philosophical question: can footballers be professionals? For the IOC, operating under the rigidly aristocratic ideology of amateurism, the answer was no: athletes who received payment for playing their sport were barred from the Olympic Games, and the entire moral framework of the early Olympic movement rested on the idea that sport was an end in itself, not a livelihood.

Football, especially in Europe, was moving in the exact opposite direction. The sport was professionalizing fast — clubs were paying players, leagues were formalizing — and the working-class roots of the game were fundamentally incompatible with the Olympic ideal. That tension finally broke in 1928, when Jules Rimet, then FIFA president, and Dutch administrator Carl Hirschmann — who had first floated the idea of a standalone football world championship to the FA back in 1902 — brought the proposal to the FIFA Congress in Amsterdam. Twenty-three voted in favor, five against, and football became the first sport with its own world tournament, completely outside the Olympic framework.

That structural decision matters more than it looks. From the moment the World Cup was born outside the IOC’s jurisdiction, it was free — free from the amateur ideology, free from the multi-sport format, and eventually free to build a commercial infrastructure the Olympics would take another fifty years to even begin constructing.

A Trophy Before a Brand

The first World Cup was not a global event and, truth be told, it was barely an international one.

Uruguay was awarded hosting rights for reasons that had nothing to do with television markets or infrastructure capacity: they had won Olympic gold in 1924 and 1928, and July 18, 1930 marked the centennial of their constitution. Therefore, the tournament coincided with a national celebration, and that was pitch enough.

What followed was a 13-team tournament in which only four European nations made the transatlantic journey, citing the cost and length of the trip during a global economic depression — played in a purpose-built stadium, the Estadio Centenario, that was positioned as a gift to the nation as much as a football venue. The organizing budget came largely from government support, there was no global commercial partner, and revenue came from gate receipts alone.

The trophy itself tells you everything about the era’s priorities. Created by French sculptor Abel Lafleur and made of gold-plated sterling silver on a lapis lazuli base, it depicted Nike — not the brand but the goddess of victory that inspired the US-based sports behemoth — with arms outstretched.

Having said all of this, it’s clear that the 1930 tournament was not yet a brand, but an event with an identity tied to its founders and its host, not to itself as a concept — and the commercial and symbolic transformation, the moment the World Cup became the World Cup, would take decades.

The Marketing Stack of Era 1, 1930–1966

There’s a reason I’m cutting this era at 1966 — covering it in detail in the next edition. England’s tournament is the inflection point: not because the inventor of the game hosted and won, but because it was the first World Cup to feature an official mascot (World Cup Willie) and the first to be broadcast commercially on television alongside the BBC — reaching a mass live audience across Europe for the first time. Those two facts aren’t coincidental — they signal the same shift: the tournament was beginning to understand it had an audience beyond the stadium, and that audience had commercial value.

But first, let’s look at what that first era actually looked like.

🏆Radio and graphic print were the pillars. There was no television coverage before 1954, and even then it was limited to a handful of European markets — the 1954 World Cup in Switzerland reached roughly 90,000 television sets in Germany. For most of the world, the World Cup arrived through the radio commentator’s voice and the printed page. Newspapers like Gazzetta dello Sport, L’Équipe, and Mundo Deportivo weren’t just covering the World Cup but, at the sam time, they were constructing it. The match reports, the illustrated previews, the post-game analysis: print media was where the narrative lived.

🏆Players were documented by witnesses, not cameras. The visual record of the early World Cups is largely illustrative precisely because photographic coverage was so limited — players were literally sketched by artists and illustrators working for newspapers and magazines, and these drawings were the primary way fans encountered the players they couldn’t see in person. The aesthetic of the era was shaped entirely by the constraints of the medium.

🏆The posters were the brand identity. From 1930 to 1966, each host country designed its own, and those designs were essentially the only unified visual identity each edition had. They were detailed, expressive, pictorial, and deeply local — flags, landmarks, native typography, players woven into national imagery, and the visual style tracked the aesthetic conventions of their moment. There was no global platform to standardize around, so all of them are cultural artifacts as much as promotional tools. When a printed poster distributed locally is your entire marketing reach, the image has to carry everything: where the tournament is, what it represents, why it matters.

🏆There were no mascots until Willie. World Cup Willie in 1966 was the first official mascot, and this is a milestone worth noting — though I want to go deeper on what mascots actually mean for a sporting event’s commercial and emotional architecture in a dedicated post coming soon. For now, the absence of mascots through 1962 is a marker of how narrowly the World Cup conceived of its own audience. Mascots are a product for children and families, and their introduction signals the moment an event starts thinking about intergenerational reach.

🏆Kit branding didn’t exist. Manufacturers were forbidden from displaying their logos on national team kits at the World Cup until 1974, which meant players wore shirts that were, in commercial terms, anonymous. Some brands like Adidas started to be present but none of it was visible on the pitch.

🏆Jerseys were beginning to mean something, but not as merchandise. The shift began with Brazil after 1950 — following the Maracanazo, the white home kit was abandoned and a national design competition was held, giving birth to the canary yellow with green trim. When Pelé wore it in 1958 and Brazil won their first World Cup, the shirt became something else entirely, and by 1970, on color television, it had become one of the most iconic visual assets in global sports history. But in this era, it was still a symbol, not a product.

🏆Host countries controlled everything. There was no centralized FIFA commercial operation — each organizing committee designed its own identity, sold its own local sponsorships, and managed its own ticketing. The World Cup was a federated event in every sense, host-defined and locally activated, with FIFA playing the role of sporting authority rather than brand owner. Coca-Cola first appeared at a World Cup through stadium advertising at Brazil 1950, but informally and transactionally, not as a global partner. The formal FIFA sponsorship program wouldn’t exist for another twenty-eight years.

What’s easy to miss, when you map Era 1 as a set of channels and constraints, is that those channels were operated by specific people who built the mythology without equity, without credit, and without any commercial stake in what they were constructing. The journalist filing from Montevideo in 1930, describing a match to readers who would never see footage of it. The illustrators who created a visual vocabulary from secondhand descriptions and rough prints. The radio commentators who understood, without precedent, that their job wasn’t to report on a match but to make you experience one you couldn’t attend.

The First Great Story

The 1950 World Cup produced the tournament’s first piece of genuine mythology, and it came from a loss. The Maracanazo — Uruguay’s 2-1 victory over Brazil in the deciding match, in front of what remains the largest crowd ever to attend a football match (officially 173,850 at the Maracanã, though the actual number was likely higher), represented the birth of World Cup storytelling.

Brazil had built the Maracanã specifically for the tournament. The host nation was so heavily favored that a local newspaper had already printed the headline declaring them champions before the match was played, and the Brazilian Football Federation had already commissioned a song for the victory parade. The narrative was settled — and then Alcides Ghiggia scored in the 79th minute, and almost 200,000 people fell silent.

What the Maracanazo did for the World Cup was establish its narrative grammar. This was David and Goliath, a story older than modern civilization and proof that the tournament could deliver something no script could have written — the overturning of every expectation, the humbling of the enormous by the small. It also established that the World Cup’s emotional architecture was rooted in national pride and regional rivalry, particularly between South American and European countries. The early decades of the tournament were defined by this axis: Uruguay and Argentina from one continent, Italy and Hungary from the other, with the World Cup as the stage for a confrontation that was as much geopolitical as it was sporting.

Those rivalries weren’t manufactured by a marketing department — they were real, emerging from genuine ideological and cultural differences about how football should be played, and by whom. Print media amplified them because it had to. Radio dramatized them because that was its nature.

Politics, War, and the Tournament That Had to Restart

Before we accept the founding myth of the World Cup, it’s worth asking who built it and why.

The idea that Era 1 produced purely organic, spontaneous storytelling deserves some scrutiny. The emotional foundation of the early World Cup wasn’t entirely unplanned — it was, in significant part, shaped by state actors with political objectives, and that context has been softened over decades of nostalgic retelling into something that feels more natural than it perhaps was. Uruguay 1930 was a government-funded centenary project, designed to coincide with national celebrations and built on public money. Brazil 1950 produced the Maracanã as a national infrastructure exercise before it produced a tournament. The World Cup’s mythology wasn’t purely the organic output of a sport that meant something — it was also the output of governments that needed the sport to mean something, for reasons that extended well beyond football.

The clearest proof is Italy 1934, which was not a complication in the tournament’s history but a confirmation of its essential nature. Mussolini personally intervened in the hosting rights process, funded the infrastructure, and used the event as a showcase for fascist modernism and national virility. The Azzurri won — in circumstances that left enough questions to fill several books — and the trophy was received in a ceremony laden with political symbolism. It was the first, but not the last, time a nation would use the World Cup as soft power.

Afer France 1938, again with European political tension as backdrop, the tournament simply stopped, due to World War II cancelling the 1942 and 1946 editions, and for eight years the World Cup didn’t exist — the sport continued in fragments, domestic leagues and regional competitions and friendlies between whoever was available.

When the World Cup returned in Brazil in 1950, it wasn’t the same event, since the war reshaped the world’s political map entirely. The hiatus had broken the rhythm of the competition — Germany was banned from competing due to its role in the war, several other nations declined to participate for various reasons, and England, which had spent decades refusing to enter a competition it felt was beneath its footballing authority, finally participated for the first time. In commercial terms, 1950 was a restart from near-zero: the organizing structures, the local relationships, the nascent print networks — all of it had to be rebuilt.

Heroes Without Names on Shirts

In Era 1, the World Cup’s narrative heroes were nations, not individuals.

Uruguay won the first two tournaments they entered — 1930 and 1950 — and their identity was built around collective grit, defensive organization, and a fighting spirit that was explicitly framed as an expression of national character. The Garra Charrúa — named after the indigenous Charrúa people, with “garra” meaning grit and strength (even if the literal translation is “claw”) — represented a cultural narrative deeply embedded in Uruguayan identity that print journalists amplified across the continent.

Italy’s back-to-back wins in 1934 and 1938 were built around Vittorio Pozzo’s generation. Hungary’s Mighty Magyars — Puskás, Kocsis, the core of what many historians consider the greatest international team never to win a World Cup — defined the 1954 tournament through a style so distinctive that is still discussed as a tactical rupture in football history. Austria’s Wunderteam of the early 1930s. Brazil’s emergence through 1958 and 1962, winning back-to-back behind a collective philosophy that was in many ways the exact opposite of European defensive organization. And then England in 1966 — hosts, winners, and the anchor of a tournament that would be the last of its kind before the commercial structure of the game began to shift irreversibly.

What this collective structure produced, accidentally and without strategic intent, was a tournament that had no rival for its own attention. Because no single player was large enough to own the World Cup’s narrative, the World Cup owned it — the tournament became the star, which meant FIFA became the exclusive owner of the most valuable attention unit in global sport, without ever having to compete with its own players for it.

Every other major property in this era that built around individual athletes gave commercial value to those athletes; FIFA, by constraint rather than design, retained it all. By the time the individual star system arrived — and it was coming regardless — the World Cup’s gravitational center was already too established to be pulled away from the institution. Pelé would add to the property, but he would not replace it.

These were teams, not brands built around individuals. There were star players, and Pelé appeared in 1958 as a 17-year-old and was immediately exceptional, but the hero export mechanism of this era was the match commentary and the newspaper column, not the endorsement deal, not the sponsored boot, not the post carved from a personal brand.

What Era 1 Built

It’s tempting to frame this first era as primitive — the before-times, the commercial void that would eventually be filled by television money and global sponsorship programs — but that framing misses the point entirely.

What Era 1 built was the emotional infrastructure that made everything else possible. The storytelling gave the World Cup a depth of meaning that no commercial operation could have manufactured from scratch. The tournament spent its first three and a half decades accumulating narrative capital, and by 1966, when the first mascot arrived and the first commercial broadcast deal landed, there was already something real and powerful to commercialize:

• The poster economy established that the World Cup had visual language worth protecting and developing.

• The radio broadcasts built a global audience that had never seen a match but could tell you exactly what happened.

• The regional rivalries between South America and Europe gave the competition a geopolitical dimension that transcended sport.

• And the Jules Rimet Trophy — a tribute to one man’s vision — was already acquiring the weight of collective mythology.

The unified brand, the global sponsors, the kit deals, the licensed merchandise — the apparatus that would eventually make a five-year-old in Argentina obsess over a USA 94 bag — were still decades away. But the reason that apparatus would eventually work, the reason people would pay for it and feel something about it, was already in place.

The concrete jungle where dreams are made of took thirty-six years to build its commercial foundation — it had to mean something first.

What do you think? Let’s discuss below.

Thank you for being part of this journey!

Carla | Off-Ball Logic

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Few national teams in any sport occupy the space that Brazil holds in the collective imagination of football. The Seleção1 is not just a top-tier national team in the broader history of the game. Its impact reaches far beyond the pitch.

The Seleção is a brand ecosystem built across seven decades on a foundation of mythology, cultural identity, and the relentless export of a playing philosophy that transcended the sport itself.

The 1970 World Cup squad — Pelé, Jairzinho, Tostão, Gerson, Carlos Alberto — remains the most referenced team in football history. And behind all of it, a concept that would eventually become both the brand’s greatest asset and its most dangerous liability: jogo bonito.

The myth of 1970 built Brazil into the most commercially valuable national football brand on Earth, powering a Nike partnership now entering its fourth decade at approximately $100 million per year.

The Construction of the Myth

The jogo bonito philosophy and its roots are cultural, racial, and deeply political. In 1919, the Brazilian government prohibited Black and mixed-race players from representing the national team. Throughout the 1920s, exclusionary practices persisted across domestic leagues — until clubs such as Vasco da Gama and Ponte Preta began integrating their squads, demonstrating that performance trumped prejudice.

The consequences were seismic. As anthropologist Gilberto Freyre articulated2, what emerged was a distinctly Brazilian style he called futebol mulato — a unique form of play defined by improvisation, rhythm, and individual expression, rooted in the bodily art of capoeira and in direct contrast to the rigid, hierarchical European model. Football became intertwined with national identity in a way that went far beyond sport. You cannot understand Brazil without understanding how football operates inside it.

The devastating 1950 Maracanazo — Brazil’s loss to Uruguay in the World Cup final on home soil — left a wound so deep that the federation changed the team’s colors. leaving the white shirt behind. The now-iconic Canarinha (yellow shirt, green trim, blue shorts) was introduced through a national design competition, aligning the kit with the colors of the Brazilian flag.

With a visual rebrand born from trauma, then came the vindication: three World Cups in four tournaments (1958, 1962, 1970), each one reinforcing the mythology.

• The 1958 squad introduced a 17-year-old Pelé to the world.

• The 1962 squad relied on Garrincha when Pelé was injured — the two never lost a match when they played together.

• And the 1970 squad, managed by Mário Zagallo (who deployed a 4-2-4 with Jairzinho on the wing and Tostão as a false nine, concepts decades ahead of their mainstream adoption), produced what many still regard as the most beautiful football ever played.

By the time color television broadcast the 1970 final to a global audience, the brand was cemented in the collective consciousness in a way no marketing department could have engineered. This is the asset the CBF3 inherited — and it is precisely this asset that now constrains them.

The Myth Meets the Market

The commercial value of the Brazil national team brand is, by any reasonable measure, extraordinary.

In December 2024, the CBF and Nike announced a 12-year partnership extension through 2038, reported at approximately $100 million per year — with, for the first time, royalties on merchandise sales and worldwide licensing rights for the CBF. This is one of the most valuable kit deals in world football, and it was negotiated against competitive pressure from Adidas, who were seeking retaliation after losing the German federation to Nike.

The deal was not only a reflection of the brand’s current commercial power but an explicit invocation of the mythology.

CBF president Ednaldo Rodrigues framed the extension as an opportunity to “honor the jogo bonito legacy.”4

But here is where the strategy begins to fracture.

The Nike relationship — and the broader commercial portfolio including Itaú, Neoenergia, and Guaraná Antarctica — faces a structural problem that no sponsorship valuation model can easily resolve: the product on the pitch has diverged so dramatically from the brand promise that the gap is now measurable in both fan sentiment and sponsor return.

Research from Sports Value (Brazil) has shown that sponsor recognition rates for CBF partners are alarmingly low5.

• Nike itself was the most recognized brand associated with the Seleção at only 27% — a number that Sports Value argues should be at minimum 30–35% given the scale of investment.

• Guaraná Antarctica came in at 7%.

• Adidas, which does not even sponsor the team, registered 6% — the same as official sponsor Itaú.

The analysis concluded that “brands spend a lot of money and their return on the consumer’s mind is very low.”

The Product Crisis

Since winning the 2002 World Cup, Brazil has not reached a final.

• In 2014, they suffered a 7–1 defeat to Germany in the semi-final on home soil—arguably the most shocking and devastating result in the history of major international football.

• In 2018, they exited in the quarter-finals.

• In 2021, they lost the final on home soil against Argentina.

• In 2022, they were eliminated on penalties in the quarter-finals.

• In 2024, they were knocked out of the Copa América before the semi-finals, the seventh time in a row they had failed to reach that stage in a tournament played outside Brazil.

The on-field identity crisis is well documented but worth framing in product terms.

Under Tite (2016–2022), the team deliberately moved away from jogo bonito. As one analysis described it, Tite adopted a form of “fast food positional play”6 — fixing players in positions and directing the ball through predetermined zones, inspired by European tactical models, particularly the Real Madrid of Carlo Ancelotti. Tite’s initial instinct was to play with the traditional attacking fluidity of Brazilian football. He abandoned it.

Fernando Diniz attempted a correction, trying to revive something closer to jogo bonito, but his tenure was short and chaotic — he was simultaneously managing Fluminense and the national team, and was dismissed after a turbulent match against Argentina.

His successor, Dorival Júnior, arrived with a Copa do Brasil title from São Paulo but struggled to establish authority. By the Copa América, players were openly ignoring him during penalty shootout preparations. He was relieved in March 2025.

The CBF then made what many consider their most consequential modern decision: appointing Carlo Ancelotti, who took over in May 2025, becoming the first permanent foreign head coach in the history of Brazilian football. His contract runs through the 2026 World Cup, at a reported salary of approximately €10 million per season, with a €5 million bonus for winning the tournament. It is an unprecedented move — and a tacit admission that the institution could no longer fix itself from within.

The Recent Controversy

The Jordan Brand jersey controversy of 2025–2026 is the clearest illustration of how the 1970 myth constrains the CBF’s commercial evolution. In April 2025, leaked images revealed Nike planned to replace Brazil’s traditional blue away jersey with a red design featuring the Jordan Brand Jumpman logo — the first time Brazil would wear red in 106 years, and the first time a basketball-born identity would appear on a national football shirt.

The backlash operated on three levels:

• a cultural objection (CBF bylaws limit uniforms to flag colors)

• a political one (red is associated with the Workers’ Party in Brazil7), and

• an identity objection — the Jumpman was perceived not as a collaboration but as an American cultural imposition on a civilizational institution.

New CBF president Samir Xaud ordered Nike to halt production and revert to blue. The final kit, released in March 2026, retained the Jumpman but scored only 2.6 out of 5 among fans.

This incident crystallizes what we’ve been analyzing so far.

On the other hand, Argentina, under Scaloni, achieved what Brazil has not yet: adapting the myth to modern tactical demands while preserving its cultural identity. While Argentina has worked on evolving its mythology, Brazil has been paralyzed by it.

What Would a Brand Strategist Do?

Viewed through a product marketing lens, the CBF faces a classic heritage brand repositioning problem. The brand equity is real but misaligned with the current product experience and market reality. The options are limited and each carries risk.

Option A: Restore the myth. Double down on jogo bonito as both playing philosophy and brand positioning. Find coaches and players who embody the original promise. This satisfies the cultural expectation but may not produce competitive results in a tactical environment that has evolved beyond the 1970 paradigm.

Option B: Update the myth. Find a new narrative that honors the heritage while accommodating modern realities — something like “the next evolution of the beautiful game.” This is what Argentina achieved, but it requires a once-in-a-generation alignment of coach, players, and results. It cannot be manufactured by a marketing department.

Option C: Accept the tension. Treat the myth as a non-negotiable brand constraint and optimize commercial strategy within those boundaries. This means no red jerseys, no external logos, no English-language slogans. It limits revenue upside but preserves the asset.

Conclusion

In 1950, after the Maracanazo, Brazil changed its colors and deepened its commitment to the philosophy that would eventually produce three consecutive World Cup triumphs. The response to catastrophe was more identity, not less.

In 2014, after the 7–1, Brazil did the opposite. The response has been a two-decade-long retreat from identity — four coaches in two and a half years, a foreign manager for the first time in history, a kit deal that pushes basketball branding into football heritage, and an institutional structure that cycles between corruption scandals and commercial overreach.

The 1970 myth is not the problem. It is, in fact, the only asset of irreplaceable value the CBF possesses. The problem is that the institution has been unable to do what the best heritage brands eventually learn to do: evolve the product while respecting the architecture.

The 2026 World Cup, hosted across North America, will be the test.

If Ancelotti’s Brazil can find a way to play football that feels authentically Brazilian while winning matches at the highest level, the myth becomes an accelerant — and the $100 million Nike deal starts to look like a bargain.

If they cannot, the gap between brand promise and product reality will widen further, the myth will calcify into nostalgia, and the paradox will deepen.

Either way, Nike will sell the jerseys. The question is whether anyone will still feel something when they put one on.

What do you think? Let’s discuss below.

Thank you for being part of this journey!

Carla | Off-Ball Logic

In November 2025, a couple of tourists in Buenos Aires tried to buy tickets to the Superclásico. They couldn’t.

Not because the game was sold out or the prices were too high—although they are steep, with secondary market packages running between $345 and $2,500 USD. The real reason is a highly restrictive ticketing system that has been locked inside club memberships for years. There is no general sale, no tourist window, and no away fans (a policy implemented in the Argentine football ecosystem years ago).

At this point, you might wonder why this is relevant for modern football. The reason is that the “Superclásico” gathers thousands of fans and attracts the interest of tourists worldwide, becoming a brand in itself for football lovers. FourFourTwo magazine once called it the most important derby in the history of football. And yet, the most globally acclaimed football fixture is simultaneously the least globally accessible.

Opposite Brands, Shared History

To understand the Superclásico commercially, you have to understand that Boca Juniors and River Plate are not partners in a shared enterprise.

Boca Juniors was founded in the working-class docklands, and by staying in the neighborhood, it claimed the emotional monopoly on that identity. The club has famously resisted every proposal to leave La Bombonera, despite financial projections suggesting a new stadium would unlock massive revenue. Its brand equity—including its trademarked blue and yellow colors—is built entirely on cultural heritage and its physical tie to the port of Buenos Aires, not commercial engineering.

River Plate is the establishment counterpoint. Nicknamed Los Millonarios, they moved from the port to the affluent suburb of Belgrano, adopting a “Premium Aspirational” persona. This identity is physically embodied in their home: the Más Monumental. Backed by a $100 million international loan and a $110 million deal with Live Nation, the stadium expanded to 85,000 seats (more on that here).

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4 months ago · 24 likes · 14 comments · Will Colahan and Carla Bilche

It now operates with more commercial flexibility, hosting its usual rotation of national team fixtures and major international concerts alongside club matches.

If you want to deep dive into how brand equity and infrastructure differ, you can read:

The Commercial Value of Conflict

Although both are strong individual brands, when they collide, their historic rivalry and diametrically opposed identities make them even stronger.

Consider the “Old Firm” derby between Celtic and Rangers. Individually, they operate in a constrained Scottish market. Yet, combined, their rivalry generates roughly 40% of the Scottish Premiership broadcast value, acting as the sole anchor of the league’s TV contracts. Like the Old Firm, the Superclásico’s massive commercial multiplier emerges strictly from opposition, not collaboration.

To assert that the Superclásico is the “most important” match in world football relies entirely on an anthropological and cultural metric rather than a conventional, spreadsheet-driven commercial one.

Dominating the Local Market

Domestically, the “Rivalry Premium” is massive. Argentine broadcast rights are built on the “Pack Fútbol” model—a joint venture between ESPN Premium and TNT Sports. To watch, fans pay a monthly surcharge of roughly $14 USD on top of their standard cable bill. It’s a steep entry price, yet the current deal is locked in through 2031.

But even within this ecosystem, the Superclásico exists in its own commercial stratosphere. For Superclásico #266 this Sunday, April 19, the match will be uniquely simulcast across both networks. This is a move to capture every possible set of eyes in the country, cementing the match as the undisputed peak of the sporting calendar.

The league even cleared the schedule to protect this value. A few years ago, Argentina experimented with a “Rivalry Week” similar to the MLS, grouping all derbies into a single weekend. But the Superclásico is so dominant that it effectively “starved” the other matches of attention. Now, the fixture gets its own exclusive matchday, ensuring the brand isn’t diluted by local competition.

However, this is where the FourFourTwo “most important match” label hits a wall. While the passion is unparalleled, the revenue isn’t. The English Premier League generates over $16 billion per cycle through global distribution. By comparison, the Argentine Liga Profesional—distributed via niche platforms like Fanatiz and Paramount+—remains a fraction of that size.

A Global Icon with a Local Problem

The Superclásico’s “importance” is, therefore, a pure measure of raw brand equity and cultural depth. It drives irrational consumer demand locally, but lacks the international commercial infrastructure to be fully monetized globally.

To understand the Superclásico’s unique weight, we have to look at how its “exportability” compares to other global rivalries:

• El Clásico (Spain): The ultimate hyper-globalized model. Real Madrid and Barcelona took their historic political friction and built an unparalleled international infrastructure around it. By prioritizing Asian kick-off times and global marketing tours, they gained massive reach—but critics argue they’ve sacrificed a degree of authentic local hostility to become more accessible to the international consumer.

• MLS Rivalry Week: The US major league attempts to engineer rivalry value through manufactured initiatives like “Rivalry Week.” While some derbies generate strong localized engagement and admirable stadium aesthetics, many others don’t reflect the kind of historical rivalries better seen in other American sports like the NFL or the NBA.

Thanks to , , , and for engaging with this note and providing more context on how this rivalry plays out in real life!

• The Cairo Derby (Egypt): This is the closest structural equivalent. Like Boca and River, Al Ahly and Zamalek completely monopolize their domestic landscape. Al Ahly is a commercial juggernaut with 51 million social followers and $21 million in annual revenue from elite memberships. Yet, like the Superclásico, it faces a severe export problem: its soul is so tied to specific local socio-political narratives that it’s difficult to package for a Western or Asian audience.

The pattern holds everywhere: Rivalry value is highest where local identity runs deepest—and it’s hardest to export for exactly the same reason.

But going back to the topic at the beginning:

Why can’t they get in?

The tourist cannot gain entry because the product has been engineered—partially by club design, partially by socio-political necessity—to be the most exclusive, inaccessible sporting event on earth.

The Ban That Shaped the Spectacle

I previously mentioned that “no away fans” are allowed in the Superclásico, but this is actually a general measure across the league. Following a horrific, decades-long escalation of stadium violence that culminated in the tragic shooting death of Lanús supporter Javier Gerez in June 2013, the Argentine Football Association (AFA) and national security ministries enacted a comprehensive and severe restriction on away fans for all league fixtures nationwide.

Recently the AFA announced a highly publicized, controlled rollout to test the gradual return of visiting fans. However, the security apparatus of Buenos Aires City explicitly excluded high-risk capital derbies from this initial phase. (This conflict between the Argentine political landscape and football dynamics also demands its own separate post!)

Consequently, the upcoming Superclásico remains a strictly monocultural environment: 85,000 seats draped entirely in the red and white of River Plate, without a single Boca Juniors supporter permitted inside the stadium perimeter.

The ban on visiting fans was a response to tragedy, and it’s understandable. The resulting atmosphere—the deafening wall of noise, the synchronized hostility, the visual sea of a single color cascading down the steep stands—is utterly unlike any neutral, corporate, or dual-fanbase environment found in other major tournaments.

The Physics of Scarcity

Because primary ticketing for the Superclásico is entirely absorbed by the clubs’ vast, tiered membership and season-ticket hierarchies, the casual consumer is structurally and legally excluded.

River Plate utilizes a rigid pre-sale system prioritizing season ticket holders, followed by members of the “Somos River” community, before any theoretical (and virtually non-existent) general sale occurs. Boca Juniors, conversely, operates an even more exclusive system with an eight-to-twelve-year waiting list just to achieve official “socio” status to qualify for a ticket lottery.

This clearly impacts secondary market pricing: both fans of the home team and tourists are competing for access. I’ve heard of locals spending $500 to see the match in an economy where the average gross monthly wage is between $1,000 and $2,000.

For the international tourist, the only viable route into the stadium is through this secondary market, which operates largely through specialized local agencies offering premium “hospitality packages.” These packages—which conveniently bundle the match ticket with pre-game city tours, bilingual guides, transportation logistics, and security details—routinely reach astronomical multiples of the ticket’s original face value, commanding prices to nearly $800 USD per person.

The Bottom Line

FourFourTwo called this the most important match in football history. Under a global commercial lens, that claim doesn’t hold. The Superclásico lacks the broadcast architecture, the frictionless ticketing, and the international infrastructure of the Premier League or the Champions League.

But the final analysis of the Superclásico lands on a brilliant, enduring commercial paradox. The fixture’s most commercially significant feature—the sheer magnitude of its Rivalry Premium—exists precisely because it has never been designed to be commercially significant to outsiders. In the push to become accessible global brands, many historic rivalries—from Spain to England, to the United States—have traded some of their local friction for a more frictionless international appeal.

This one is different.

Anchored by a working-class club that stubbornly refuses to sell its stadium’s soul or its naming rights, and an establishment club that leverages hundreds of millions in infrastructure debt from within its own borders to dominate the continent, the Superclásico is still deciding whether it actually wants to be a global product at all.

And in that steadfast refusal to compromise its identity for the sake of international export, it retains a raw, unadulterated brand value that no amount of global commercial engineering could ever replicate or buy.

What do you think? Let’s discuss below.

Thank you for being part of this journey!

Carla | Off-Ball Logic