Soccer’s grandest tournament arrives in America for the first time in 32 years, and the marketing suits are sweating through their best business casual. They should be.
Sports media rights spending doubled between 2015 and 2025, from $14 billion to $30 billion — not because audiences got bigger, but because live sports became the last reliable place to find them all in one room. To make matters more complicated, 58% of fans aged 18–24 aren't even watching on a broadcast. They're on TikTok, in the group chat, catching highlights after the final whistle — and the ROI on reaching them there is getting murkier by the quarter.
The brands pouring hundreds of millions into this tournament seem to understand something the industry is still catching up to: reaching people online isn't enough. You have to meet them somewhere real.
Here’s a quick roundup of how sports’ biggest brands are approaching the game’s biggest stage, and why experiential has become a fixture in their playbooks.
adidas
adidas is the only sporting goods company in the tournament’s official commercial lineup. The structural advantage is real, but what's interesting is what they chose to do with it.
The centerpiece is "Backyard Legends," a campaign film that pulled more than 56 million Instagram views in its first four days. Timothée Chalamet plays an obsessive neighborhood scout assembling a squad of soccer superstars for a cage match against a mythical local team. It's playful, slightly absurd, and built around a simple idea: soccer culture belongs to everyone, not just the pros on the pitch.
That conviction runs through everything, even adidas’ product program. The adidas x Someone Somewhere Mexico kit had over 150 indigenous female artisans from Puebla hand-embroider 2,026 unique jerseys. Kith and Messi built a luxury lifestyle collection for the other end of the market. The logic is the same in both cases: meet the fan where their version of soccer culture actually lives.
Then the brand built the “Home of Soccer”. A 25,000-square-foot, free public space at Brooklyn Bridge Park, open daily June 13 through July 19, with match screenings, a small-sided pitch, and concerts from PinkPantheress and Larry June. Similar setups run in Toronto, LA, Houston, Atlanta, and across Mexico.
adidas’ film argued that the best soccer happens outside the stadium. These experiential hubs are adidas stress-testing that theory in public, handing the space over to whoever shows up for the entire length of the tournament.
Nike
Nike’s recently released hero film, "Rip the Script," is essentially a Hollywood backlot chaos reel where an overbearing director loses control of Mbappé, Haaland, Vini Jr., Ronaldo, and thirty others. The premise is the brand platform: the game is at its best when nobody's following the script.
Surrounding the film is where the strategy really comes alive. The X2 capsule series — seven collaborations across seven nations — rolled out for weeks before their hero film dropped, giving fans a way in through fashion, music, and culture before soccer even enters the conversation.
The physical layer runs from the House of Merc in New York to Estadio Niky's in LA to The Roof at Vanta in Dallas — fan spaces built around watching, playing, and buying across every major host city. The deepest investment is Toma el Juego, Nike's grassroots street soccer platform, which has run 100+ tournaments across six continents and is livestreaming its 2026 finals on Amazon.
Taken together, it's a brand that's decided the path to soccer supremacy runs through intentional physical spaces, not just splashy digital media.
New Balance
New Balance doesn't sponsor a single national team and has spent the summer making that look like the smartest move at the table.
Because they don't need a kit contract to have skin in the game. Ten of their athletes are playing in the tournament, including Bukayo Saka and Endrick, who front the Stone Island collaboration — a well-timed capsule of sneakers, co-branded clothing, and performance cleats that dropped June 4. It's the kind of product that sells to people who care about soccer and fashion in equal measure, which is precisely the consumer New Balance has been building toward for years.
On the ground, the brand is running a rolling pop-up across Boston, LA, Miami, and New York anchored by live Men in Blazers podcast recordings and a boot atelier — intimate spaces designed for fans who already know why they're there. No official tournament badge required. Just rooms full of people who care, which turns out to be enough.
Why Experiential’s in Everyone’s Playbook
adidas has the sponsorship rights. Nike has the star power. New Balance has neither. And yet all three arrived at the same conclusion: a physical address.
It's the logical response to a specific market problem: eyeballs are more expensive to buy, and more fragmented in where they're watching. The smart money knows that digital alone isn't enough. The brands know it too.
This summer is a preview of what’s to come. As digital fragmentation deepens and live attention gets harder to buy, the gap between brands with a physical presence and brands without one will only widen.
The brands that figure out experiential now — the strategy, the partners, the execution — won't be scrambling to catch up at the next major moment. If you want to talk about what that looks like for your organization, reach out to our team.
