The Rebranding of Squad Announcements
How a simple roster reveal became a full brand manifesto, and what separates the teams that nailed it from the ones that didn't
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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:
I’ll only talk about announcements that included a video, not just a squad list posted.
I’ll cover the ones already out. Part two with the upcoming ones next week.
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.
Before the ranking, one thing I noticed: the ones that work best share a formula: real people, landscape as context rather than decoration, and an emotion that felt private until someone decided to share it. The ones that don’t have it, regardless of budget, feel hollow. You’ll see it in every entry.
#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
In terms of sports involving kicking the ball with the foot, and that obviously includes rugby.
Credits to Beinsports for the video links.
Joke. There is genuinely no one more famous.
This just dropped this morning, but I actually wrote and scheduled this post late yesterday. I’ll save the review for Part 2!
Lovely to see some appreciation of these releases. Amongst the online overflow of squad leaks and criticism of whos on the plane, we tend to gloss over the WHY and HOW, instead of the WHO. And thats the unity and pride of the country coming together summed up in one these announcement videos.
This World Cup’s batch have reminded me of NFL schedule announcements (albeit with better taste).