Rebel Thinking

The tournament for attention: How to win over the audience at the 2026 World Cup?

Roberto Solano & Sofía Restifo

11 June 2026

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With 51% of consumers identifying themselves as World Cup fans, the tournament represents an opportunity too significant for brands to ignore.

If social media is today’s battleground for attention, the World Cup is one of the most fertile territories in which to win it. For a few weeks, millions of people take part in the same conversation, actively consume content and react in real time. Rarely do brands encounter an audience that is so concentrated, engaged and receptive.

However, joining the conversation by default is not enough. In an environment saturated with opportunistic messaging, relevance is not achieved simply by showing up, but by contributing something that genuinely deserves people’s attention.

Before exploring the opportunities and best practices for brands looking to tap into this global cultural moment, it is worth understanding the context and the playing field before the first whistle blows.

A massive impact on culture and the digital ecosystem.

Long before the rise of social media, the World Cup already had an enormous presence across traditional media. It has never been just about football. It is about belonging, identity and cultural influence. One of its most visible expressions is found in its official songs, which over time have become genuine global anthems.

Whether football interests you or not, the World Cup inevitably reaches you in one way or another.

For weeks, and often months, it dominates not only media coverage but also the wider communication landscape, influencing messaging, conversations and popular culture.

During the group stage of the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil, more than 815 million interactions were recorded on Facebook, alongside nearly 300 million tweets generated by 200 million users. At that moment, social media cemented the World Cup’s position as far more than a sporting event: it became a global real-time conversation.

Eight years later, during the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar, the engagement grew exponentially. According to FIFA, nearly five billion people interacted with the tournament across different platforms and devices. The final between Argentina and France alone generated 93.6 million posts. Unlike 2014, the conversation was no longer concentrated on Twitter (now X) and Facebook. It was amplified across mass-market platforms such as Instagram and TikTok.

It’s going viral: Tim Payne, Internet’s unexpected MVP?

The World Cup’s digital phenomena began before the tournament had even kicked off. The Tim Payne story became one of the most fascinating internet experiments in recent years, demonstrating just how far online communities can reshape traditional dynamics of global popularity.

On the eve of the tournament, Argentine content creator Valen Scarsini set his audience a challenge that was as simple as it was unlikely: turn Tim Payne, a New Zealand defender virtually unknown outside his home country and with only around 4,000 Instagram followers, into an internet celebrity.

 

 

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What began as a joke among followers quickly evolved into a viral phenomenon driven by Spanish-speaking communities online. The bandwagon effect was immediate. Within days, Payne went from being an anonymous footballer to approaching five million followers, getting the attention of FIFA, Google — which even introduced an interactive Easter egg when searching his name — and numerous brands eager to join the wave of popularity.

Isn’t it remarkable that a creator with 1.2 million followers managed to help a footballer gain nearly 5 million followers within a matter of weeks?

That is how the internet works. And during a World Cup, everything is amplified.

So, how can your brand play this match?

One of the biggest challenges surrounding major global events is differentiation. This is particularly true across digital channels and social media, where exposure is constant and content moves at extraordinary speed.

When brands attempt to join the World Cup conversation, they often end up reproducing the same messages, visual cues and creative codes. The result is a flood of content that looks remarkably similar.

This repetition weakens campaign effectiveness and creates a situation where audiences recognise the atmosphere of the event, but struggle to identify which brand is actually behind the content.

To help brands participate more strategically, we have identified four approaches to planning, developing and executing content that connects with audiences without being drowned out by the competition.

And naturally, we are going to explain them using football terminology.

The Centre-Backs | Strategically planned content.

This type of content can be developed weeks before the World Cup begins, or even during the tournament itself, provided it is built around timeless themes.

It does not depend on the outcome of a particular match. Instead, it draws from the broader context of the tournament.

The focus is on belonging, collective emotion and the cultural significance of an event that takes place only once every four years. It taps into national identities, historic rivalries, shared sporting culture and the global narratives that surround the World Cup.

These pieces perform best when they are not trying to chase the latest headline. Instead, they build brand value through the overarching emotional significance of the event, avoiding overly topical references that may become irrelevant within hours.

The Fast Attack | Real-Time content done right.

When it is time to accelerate, real-time marketing requires teams to be fully immersed in what is happening minute by minute.

The objective is not simply to publish quickly. It is to identify the moments with genuine storytelling potential: standout highlights, controversial incidents, disputed refereeing decisions or situations that rapidly evolve into cultural memes.

Luis Suárez’s infamous bite in 2014 is a perfect example of how a single moment can become a global conversation.

Success in this environment depends on actively listening to social platforms, identifying emerging discussions and having the creative agility to transform those moments into ideas that feel relevant rather than generic.

It also requires a deep understanding of the brand itself. Even at speed, content must remain recognisable and consistent. Alongside this, teams need the operational capability to produce and publish assets or copy within an extremely short timeframe.

The Fans | Community Participation.

Reacting to posts from other brands or even FIFA can also create value. But that does not mean dropping a “🐐” emoji (GOAT – Greatest Of All Time) and moving on. The key is to contribute something meaningful, whether through humour, a deep understanding of community codes or genuine fan passion. In many cases, the best content ideas emerge from users themselves.

On TikTok, the comments section has become a goldmine of creativity, generating conversations that are often more entertaining and insightful than the videos themselves. The platform’s video reply feature allows brands and creators to turn comments into content. When the opportunity presents itself, don’t let it pass.

Moreover, if your brand is still active on X (formerly Twitter), you have the opportunity to engage with other brands and your community. And don’t forget to make use of the ‘Quote’ option when reposting to add witty comments to other tweets.

The Assists | Collaborations: UGC, Influencers and Branded Content.

Another key pillar is working with creators and influencers who speak about football naturally and are already embedded within the sport’s digital culture. These collaborations help humanise brands, make them more relatable and increase credibility by associating them with voices that are already trusted by fans.

There is also an opportunity to integrate brands into established formats such as podcasts, which often have highly loyal audiences and discuss football in an authentic and engaging way. In these environments, branded placements can take more subtle forms, such as logo visibility or brief mentions within the content itself. This allows brands to establish a presence within highly relevant spaces without relying on intrusive advertising.

A strong example comes from NordVPN’s collaboration on Jordi Wild’s World Cup special podcast episode featuring Maldini. The partnership generated over one million views on content where the brand was integrated naturally into the conversation.

The VAR: When creativity begins where permissions end.

There is something many brands discover only after a campaign has already been approved: not everything associated with the tournament can be used freely. Official names, logos, trophies, typefaces and even certain hashtags form part of a protected intellectual property ecosystem. And the larger the event, the stricter the monitoring tends to be.

Yet this creates an interesting paradox. Restrictions are often viewed as barriers to creativity, when in reality they frequently achieve the opposite effect.

Paddy Power has understood something the internet has been proving for years: communities rarely fall in love with official assets. They fall in love with stories, shared cultural codes and the conversations that emerge around them.

Its campaign, Nobody Does Football Better Than Us, is not really about the tournament itself. It is about the different ways cultures experience football. And precisely because of that, it becomes part of the conversation.

That is why many of the most effective campaigns do not focus directly on the match itself. They focus on the nerves before kick-off. The superstitions. The WhatsApp groups that suddenly come back to life after months of silence. The packed pubs. The friends and families gathering together to watch the tournament.

Because football happens on the pitch. But the conversation happens everywhere else.

The Fitness Coach: Paid Media.

During a World Cup, the problem is rarely a lack of content. Matches, reactions, memes, debates, analysis, creators commenting on every play and brands attempting to join the conversation.

The internet produces far more content than any individual could ever consume. That is why one of the most important decisions is no longer what to publish. It is deciding what deserves amplification.

For years, paid media was viewed primarily as a tool for increasing reach. Today, its role is considerably more interesting. It allows brands to identify which stories are genuinely resonating with audiences and provide the support needed to extend their lifespan.

Organic signals become a strategic advantage. A comment generating discussion, a video retaining attention longer than expected or a post activating a specific community can often provide more valuable insight than any pre-event forecast.

This becomes particularly important as investment continues to rise. According to WARC, the 2026 World Cup is expected to generate more than $10.5 billion in additional global advertising expenditure. However, despite growing levels of investment around the tournament, its ability to concentrate audience attention is lower than in previous editions.

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WARC

Audiences no longer experience the World Cup in a single place. They move between social media platforms, creators, podcasts, WhatsApp groups and multiple screens.

In an environment where everything happens in real time, metrics are no longer just reporting tools. They become decision-making tools.

Because when everyone is publishing about the same topic, the difference is not always creating more content. Often, it comes down to understanding which content genuinely deserves amplification.

The Breakthrough Signing: AI.

If social media transformed the World Cup into a permanent global conversation, artificial intelligence is beginning to change how brands participate in it.

AI is helping brands address one critical challenge: understanding which conversations are gaining momentum before everyone else starts talking about them.

Beyond generating copy or imagery, one of its most valuable applications lies in pattern recognition. It can analyse thousands of comments, identify emerging themes and uncover connections that would be difficult to detect manually. That capability becomes incredibly valuable during events where conversations shift constantly.

Today, AI-powered social listening tools can analyse millions of posts in real time to identify emerging trends, changes in audience sentiment and cultural phenomena that are beginning to gain traction within specific communities.

Because when millions of people are commenting simultaneously, the challenge is no longer finding information. The challenge is identifying what genuinely deserves attention.

AI can help read the game. But deciding where to play remains a human responsibility.

The golden opportunity that only comes around every four years.

The Tim Payne phenomenon is a reminder that the World Cup is no longer an event people simply watch. It has become a global, dynamic, real-time conversation.

The real challenge is not jumping on the trend for the sake of visibility. It is understanding the pulse of the conversation and contributing genuine value at exactly the right moment.

To achieve that, success is not driven by sheer presence but by strategic agility. When marketing teams combine social listening with authentic partnerships with content creators, the World Cup stops being a risk of saturation and becomes the ideal stage on which to strengthen brand equity.

Ultimately, the brands that succeed during football’s biggest tournament are those that amplify their voice, personality and values, turning the noise of the competition into a rare opportunity for meaningful human connection.

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