How Challenger Brands Can Compete at the World Cup

The brands writing $200 million checks will own the noise. The brands reading culture correctly can stand a chance at cutting through it.

The World Cup is nearly upon us.

Hype is building. Spots are rolling out.

adidas dropped Backyard Legends a couple of weeks ago — a five-minute, era-jumpig Mark Molloy short that features Timothée Chalamet, Messi, Bellingham, Yamal, Beckham, Zidane, Del Piero, Trinity Rodman, and Bad Bunny. It’s pretty incredible and harkens back to the José +10 spot from the 2006 World Cup (20 years later… coincidence?) and old Nike spots.

That’s the blessing and curse, though. It’s impressive and attention grabbing. But, it’s also interchangeable with adidas’ biggest competitor.

Then, you have other brands like Lotto and Brahma, which launched spots in the same week. Lotto’s Legends Begin with LOTTO is a 90-second Anthony Mandler film shot in Mexico City fronted by Flavor Flav, the public phase of a four-year quiet relaunch under WHP Global. Brahma’s Tá Liberado Acreditar is a nostalgia spot for Brazil starring Ronaldo (R9) and Carlo Ancelotti, recreating 1990s street football in Rio and asking Brazilians to believe in the hexa again. Both are competent, expensive, well-cast pieces of work. Both have also already been drowned out by Chalamet, and the tournament hasn’t started yet.

That’s marketing at a World Cup. The brands at the top of the spend pyramid take the oxygen. Everyone else burns budget to be invisible if they are attempting to play the same game.

The leaders will undoubtably drive narratives and association with legendary campaigns and kits that live well beyond the final whistle, but the brands best positioned to capitalize on World Cup 2026 may not be the ones spending the most money on it.

The downsides of scale at the World Cup

The industry leaders enter every World Cup with a version of the same problem. They are everywhere, which means they own the most expensive spaces and, consequently, can get trapped by them.

When a brand appears on a third of the kits, plasters airports and city centers with campaign imagery, runs a spot a hundred times across a twenty-two-day tournament, and offers generic watch parties, it creates ambient noise speaking to broad sets of fans.

Scale also limits creativity. The tactics are predetermined by the system the leaders are bound to. If you are at the top, you cannot disrupt yourself. You have to play into the system as it exists.

Challenger brands do not have this problem because they do not have the budget to create it. The opening can capture attention with mechanisms that reinforce a clear point of view — and the resonance can run deeper than nine figures of media spend.

The scale is naturally smaller but the impact within a focused and influential audience can be more impactful with the right self-reinforcing point-of-view across core tactics.

Where challenger brands can make an impact

The highest level of World Cup sponsorship is too expensive for most challengers. That is fine. The highest level is not where the value lives. Particularly at this World Cup, where the host nations do not share a singular football culture for a global sponsor to tap into.

The value lives in three layers that have to run as a system when tailored to well-defined and focused audiences and messaging:

• Athletes, who carry specific stories and character arcs the leaders’ rosters are too large to tell.

• Activations, which create cultural interventions the leaders cannot structurally make.

• Content and partners, which amplify the first two where attention actually lives.

Sometimes, challengers can fall into the trap of trying to keep up with the leaders and/or not being extremely precise with who they are trying to speak to.

The result can be a feed or spot nobody watches and connections never made.

Let’s dig into each.

Athletes are where asymmetry lives

Quantity can dilute. When Nike has two hundred players at a World Cup wearing variants of the same colorway, the brand association blurs into the background and novel pairs stick out more.

A challenger with the right anchor athletes inverts that math. The following reference is played-out but it works… Michael Jordan did not make Nike Basketball through volume. He anchored the brand, the credibility, the aspiration, and the story as a single player in a single product.

Multiply that across 6 or 12 and well chosen athletes can punch above their weight class.

The key is to ensure the players fit a brand narrative and then that narrative is reinforced in storytelling.

I keep going back to this quote from Jo Redfern, “Editorial teams need to think more about character arcs. If you make a doc about Vinícius Jr or El Clásico, do not structure it as a recap. Structure it as an origin story with rivals, named obstacles, and allies, real stakes. Borrow the Captain Tsubasa template. Drive to Survive worked when it cast Christian Horner and other team principals as characters, not interviewees. Recap journalism isn’t as compelling to social first fans.”

The leaders have too many players to tell any single story well. The challengers have too few to not do it well.

With the aforementioned Backyard Legends, players are being used as cameos and nothing deeper is being said about them. When the cast list is the strategy, you are not running character arcs. You are running flag-planting. The leaders have to. The challengers can’t and shouldn’t.

adidas dropping graphic posts to associate with all its key players, clubs, and federations, is recap journalism and it is diluted. A brand setting the stakes and stories of their athletes pre-event and then carrying it through the tournament is character building, even if statement posts are part of it.

This also isn’t a knock on adidas. Their scale, reach, and use of football as a brand platform is strategic and serves a different purpose. Challengers need specificity and to act purposefully.

The tournament structure can create an advantage when those elements are intentionally deployed. Only twenty-two players start a World Cup final. Attention narrows toward the climactic moment, the field of athletes who can carry brand presence shrinks, and the leaders’ scale advantage shrinks with it. A challenger with the right anchors, placed deliberately in stories that already connect, can win share of voice at exactly the moments the audience is most focused.

The risk is real. Injuries, omissions, and early exits can sink such an approach. A challenger that bets on three players and loses two of them is in trouble. The bet is that depth of storytelling and deep personification of brand beats breadth of presence. The hedge is strategic alignment between athlete, story, and club/country context with the following two elements utilized all together.

Activation is where the war is fought

Again, the mistake challengers make at major tournaments is trying to compete with the leaders on the leaders’ terms. They run smaller campaigns inside the same system the leaders built and benefit from. The result is relatively significant spend to be invisible.

The correct approach is to do something the leaders structurally cannot. There are two such moves. Subversion and restraint.

Subversion

Subversion is straightforward but difficult. The challenger picks a load-bearing assumption in the incumbent’s model — that federation kits are scarce, that sponsored athletes are the only ones who matter, that visible branding is the entire point of a kit contract — and builds an activation whose mechanic re-enforces brand identity and ethos at the sake of the leader. The spend is negligible. The incumbent’s response options are zero. This isn’t easy to do but when it hits, it can shift the game. Some recent examples that come to mind:

Corteiz, the Germany Jersey Swap (Germany, 2024). During Euro 2024, Corteiz ran a version of the play they had refined with the Bolo Exchange. Fans were invited to trade in official adidas Germany shirts for a Corteiz-designed alternative. The cultural target was not a streetwear competitor. It was a federation kit. A piece of official tournament product made by the brand that had paid nine figures for the deal. adidas spent the GDP of a small country on the German federation contract. Corteiz spent the cost of producing a few hundred bootleg-coded jerseys and turned a competing event-week conversation into a pop-up. It turned the commercialization and scale of the national team deal into a drag, where the novelty, limited nature, and cultural attunement of Corteiz’s design.

Bandit Running, the Unsponsored Project (US Track and Field Championships, ongoing). Bandit is a New York running brand competing in a category Nike has owned for half a century. Rather than buy athlete sponsorships it cannot afford, it gives elite track athletes blacked-out kits with no logos, $1,500 cash with no strings, and a public declaration that they are unsponsored. Forty-plus athletes wore them at the most recent USATF Championships. Six athletes in the program have since signed full-time deals, including Trevor Bassitt, who made the 2024 Olympic team and signed with adidas. Bandit publicly celebrated him leaving.

The point is not athlete acquisition. It is a permanent, on-stage critique of how the major brands treat the talent they do not quite want to pay and embodies Bandit’s positioning and worldview.

Hummel, the Disappearing Kit (Denmark, Qatar 2022). In September 2022, with the World Cup three months out, Hummel released three Denmark shirts. The home and away kits were nearly invisible. Federation crest and branding was all tonal. The third was completely black, the color of mourning. The brand statement made the point explicit: they did not want to be visible during a tournament that had cost the lives of thousands of workers, and supporting the Danish national team was not the same as supporting Qatar as a host nation.

The mechanic inverted everything a kit supplier is supposed to do at a World Cup. Nike, adidas, and Puma had all paid significant sums for federation deals whose commercial logic depended on maximum visible branding across the most-watched event on earth. Hummel paid for the same thing and chose to use it as a platform for their point-of-view. Every contractual obligation was met. What Hummel removed was the value FIFA, the host, and the broader sponsorship ecosystem extracted from the visibility.

This is the move Nike, adidas, and Puma could not make. Their businesses are too large, their tournament infrastructure too commercially valuable, their host-nation relationships too load-bearing. Their silence on Qatar was a function of their scale. Hummel weaponized that silence by using the kit supplier system to indict it.

None of these activations cost what a single industry leader campaign costs. None required tournament-level sponsorship. All of them traded on something legacy brands structurally can not replicate: cultural insurgency and industry critique that re-enforces the brands’ positioning.

What unites them is not ambush alone. They treat the official sponsorship as infrastructure the challenger can stand alongside and subvert rather than a wall they need to crash through.

The move is to identify the contradiction at the heart of the incumbent’s model and designing an activation whose entire mechanic is that contradiction made visible. Hummel’s kits do not just protest Qatar. They expose that brand visibility is FIFA’s lifeblood and removing it is the loudest thing a kit-maker can do. Corteiz’s swap does not just hijack the Euros. It exposes how absurd a £100+ federation kit is when a hand-printed one trades with more street credibility. Bandit does not just show up at the Trials. It exposes that the system pays Olympic-caliber athletes nothing.

Restraint

The other move closed to the establishment is restraint.

When a mega-brand activates, it leads from the front. The logo is loud. The campaign sets the rules. Cultural partners get dressed in the brand’s colors, briefed on the brand’s lines, scheduled around the brand’s rollout. The result can be a community moment that feels staged. A grassroots run club does not behave like a brand asset. Forced into one, it stops being a community and starts being content.

A challenger has the freedom to do the opposite. Fund the space, enable the experience, assemble the community with intention, then get out of the way.

What that buys is access. The partners that matter at ground level (the run clubs, the underground tournaments, the designers and small organizers who are already the center of gravity in their cities) are not endorsers. They are collaborators with skin in the game. They work with brands they believe in. The arrangement is not transactional or one and done. The partner has standing to push back, shape the activation, and keep the brand honest about what their community will and will not accept.

Authenticity is the word every marketing deck reaches for and almost no one earns. The reason is structural. You cannot manufacture authenticity by leading from the front, because the act of leading from the front is what makes the moment inauthentic. The only way to land it is to fund the work and let it belong to the people doing it.

The payoff is two-sided. The brand earns standing it could not claim on its own: the cultural specificity and credibility of operating inside a scene that already exists. The partner becomes the brand’s most credible advocate, carrying the brand into networks the brand could never reach on its own. The activation ends. The relationship does not. That is the part you cannot buy at scale, because at scale every relationship is structured to be controllable, transferable, and renewable on the brand’s terms.

The Soccertes Global Football Tour, powered by Under Armour across London, Milan, Paris, and Amsterdam, ran on this principle. Full disclosure: I led that work at UA, so take the example with whatever salt you need. UA did not dress Soccertes, did not brief them, did not build a campaign around them. UA underwrote the tour, supplied product, and let Soccertes run it. The footage that came out was not advertising or brand controlled. It was four cities of creative football culture doing what it was already going to do, with UA visible enough to be associated with it and quiet enough not to break it.

New Balance ran a version of it for the 2026 London Marathon, taking over M Manze pie and mash on Tower Bridge Road and partnering with Run The Boroughs for a 5K that ended with a recovery meal nobody else would have served. NB did not manufacture the community. They put themselves inside one that already existed and let it host them. Football is not running and a marathon is not a World Cup, but the playbook is identical. Identify a community that already has the credibility. Fund the space. Get out of the way.

Nike and adidas cannot run restraint either, but for a different reason than subversion. The discipline of funding cultural work without front-loading the brand runs counter to how the organization is built. Scale produces the instinct to lead from the front. The activation that earns the most credit is the one where the brand has the confidence to lead from behind. Most marketing teams are not built for that.

The content layer as the amplifier

Once the athletes and activations exist, content extends the attention.

A World Cup generates twenty-two days of daily football conversation. The matches account for roughly 150 hours of it. The other hours are analysis, debate, cultural commentary, off-pitch stories, group chats, podcasts, livestreams, posts, threads, edits, reactions, and arguments. That is where the audience lives during a tournament. Most brands activate around matches but an editorial position in the space between them can cut through — especially as younger generations consume sports from pretty much all media except broadcast.

The reference for what this looks like at scale is Copa90. At Russia 2018, Copa90 had no rights to a single match and no federation sponsorship. What they had was 30 staff on the ground, a creator network of 300 sending fan-perspective footage from every participating country, and a tournament-window output of 6,000 pieces of content that drew roughly 750 million views. They built editorial infrastructure that lived in the spaces around the broadcast. Fan culture, diaspora communities, supporter rituals, the stories rights-holders were structurally too constrained to tell. The audience came to them. Their 2026 creator program, The Best Job in the World, takes the same logic into the host markets specifically. Five emerging creators selected from 5,000 applicants to document football communities the mainstream broadcast will not reach.

That is the multiplier on a strong activation and athlete performance. It’s how the athlete character arcs and narratives are built. The moves alone are not the wins. The way the moves are sustained, re-contextualized, and pushed back into the conversation by the people who care about them is.

Football has no brand-owned editorial program that functions as Copa90 does. The seat is empty. The challenger that builds it for the next decade owns a position that does not currently have a tenant. The opportunity is open.

For a challenger at World Cup 2026, the content layer means an editorial cadence with a sharp point of view on the tournament, its athletes, and communities — with tentpole activations. Creators and analysts can serve as core distribution rather than influencer line items. All of it running in the formats the audience consumes.

The environment matters, as well. Football culture across the three host countries is vast and under-explored. Queens and Miami’s immigrant football identities. New England’s grassroots scene. Mexico City and Los Angeles’s underground football cultures. Toronto, where food is the entry point to understanding soccer communities. Atlanta’s Black soccer culture. All of them have their own creators, designers, flavors of football, and on-the-ground influencers. All of them are the stories that will define how 2026 is actually experienced, can be tapped into authentically, and can build long-term influence and connections.

The leaders cannot fill this space because their organizational instinct is to spend money on the thirty-second spot, the product launches, the activations that feed the system instead of breaking it. The space between is left open by default. A challenger that runs a twenty-two-day editorial program through their athletes, activations, and content can create presence and cultural alignment in a way no amount of stadium signage can match.

What’s actually on the table

2026 is a uniquely good moment for this. The market is open. The culture is forming. The audience is ready for a brand with a genuine point of view, and the host nations are full of cultural positions and audiences no one has claimed.

Being the establishment can be a positioning trap. The neutrality that lets a brand sponsor everyone prevents it from taking a side, focusing on a singular audience, or leaning into a POV sharp enough to actually move people. The assets that make Nike and adidas dominant (universal presence, official status, global reach) prevent them from acting on the cultural insights where football is most alive.

Counterfeit kits and custom boots are live evidence. Fans buy bootlegs because £110 for an authentic is absurd, and the bootleg has its own aesthetic codes. Off badges. Wrong shades. Misspelled names. Impossible player-and-club combinations no real federation would ever sanction. Players paint over the swoosh, black out their boots, send them to independent customizers like Boots n Pieces who matter more to the player than the brand rep does. Cultural energy sitting unclaimed. Nike and adidas are structurally barred from engaging. Their model depends on protecting the official product and pushing the campaign colorways. A challenger has no such constraint. It can lean into bootleg aesthetics, design product built for personalization, and tell the stories of how players actually express themselves on and off pitch.

Most challengers will not show up with a real POV, though. They will run a smaller version of the global campaigns run by the leaders. If one or two challengers read the tournament correctly: pick a community, build a roster of two or three athletes who actually represent the thing the brand wants to be, design a move sharp enough that the incumbent has to feel it, and run a twenty-two-day editorial program off the back of it, they can make an impact.

If done right, these brands can spend the next decade building on the connections and infrastructure they established in twenty-two-days.

That is the prize on the table and, unfortunately, is not the one anyone seems to be bidding for.