For the 2026 World Cup, adidas and Nike are casting a wide net. Are they missing an open goal?

Nike and adidas are both putting cultural icons, not just footballers, at the centre of their pre-tournament campaigns.

As football’s dominant apparel providers, few brands are better poised than adidas and Nike to capitalise on the buzz ahead of this year’s World Cup. But rather than lean into their footballing heritage, the pre-tournament campaigns of each are spotlighting as many cultural icons as they are sports stars.

On one level, the choice to adopt similar strategies, and to directly compete, comes as no surprise. The war between sportswear’s two biggest brands has lasted nearly sixty years. World Cups are a key battleground. At the last, in Qatar, commentators were split as to whose campaign outshone the other, partly because they were so similar. However, the sales figures since tell a more one-sided story, framing adidas as the victor. At the climax of a long-running trajectory, 2025 saw Forbes report a 5% increase in adidas’ annual revenue, which reached a total of £21.5 billion. While Nike still remains ahead, with £34.5 billion’s worth of sales over the same period, that actually represented a 10% decline for the brand.

With many commentators attributing that ever-narrowing gap to adidas’ broader adoption as a streetwear and lifestyle brand, as opposed to a purely sportswear one, a culture war with Nike makes a certain sense. Neither wants to limit sportswear to players or even fans of sport and nor, arguably, is the World Cup just for fans of football. A cultural phenomenon, its rivalries, characters, and stories express a national pride that sucks more and more non-fans into its orbit every four years.

Cultural relevance is the name of the game. 

Cultural icons don’t necessarily clash with football. As noted fans of the game, figures as disparate as Ed Sheeran, Elton John, the Gallagher brothers, and Ryan Reynolds, to name a few, all famously overlap with the sport. But oddly, with the exception of adidas’ Timothée Chalamet and Nike’s Kim Kardashian, most of the ambassadors chosen for the two campaigns don’t share that prior connection to football. Evidently, adidas is banking on stars like Bad Bunny, and Nike on stars as disparate as Travis Scott, 21 Savage, and BLACKPINK’s LISA to offer something else. Here, we take a look at what that might be and whether the gamble’s benefits outweigh the risks.

Given that the majority of the audiences for the respective campaigns, as well as for the World Cup itself, don’t play football, adidas and Nike aren’t likely to sell many football boots. So, rather than showcase a new hero boot, both campaigns lean on cultural figures to instead amplify the brands’ cultural capital and potential adoption as general apparel. The question is whether that proves to be effective. 

With most players at the World Cup dressed head to toe in Nike and adidas logos, the brands might’ve reasoned that they couldn’t associate any more strongly with the game itself, so – safe in that knowledge – better to invest their ad spend where it goes furthest: on asserting their non-athletic credentials, which are arguably less well-established. Additionally, with the campaigns of countless other brands already tapping footballers, the use of cultural figures may help adidas and Nike to cut through the football noise and stand out to both casual and die-hard football fans alike.

Eight years ago, that logic wouldn’t have been very contentious. But even ignoring the 51% of consumers who dislike ads if they don’t learn anything about specific products (as opposed to a brand’s values), this year’s World Cup is already generating negative headlines – like the last in Qatar – off the pitch instead of on. A cocktail of controversies (including exorbitant ticket prices, travel bans barring fans, and human rights risks amid the tense political climate in the US) is shifting focus away from the game and its players. By doing the same, skeptics might contend that sports brands are entering the half of the football conversation that audiences don’t like, when they’re arguably the only brands with a legitimate claim to align with the half that audiences love.

Indeed, according to Sky Sports an impressive 52% of fans say that watching live games is what drives their passion for women’s football, so if the meteoric rise of that is anything to go by it’s football itself that excites audiences, more so even than the players – let alone the surrounding culture – and an argument could be made that brands ought to remain focused firmly on the game to best appeal to consumers. Relatedly, with 45% of millennials, 52% of Gen Xers, and 57% of boomers all saying they want ads to “give them product information”, above all else including “entertainment” and “relevance to my identity”, are sports brands missing an opportunity to talk directly about their football products at the moment football is most on consumers’ minds, during the World Cup? Or are they smart to prepare for a World Cup audience of an unprecedented size?

Sports brands might be right to take their eyes off the ball.

With the addition of sixteen new teams, this year’s World Cup features a record number of games, played by a record number of nationalities, for a record forty days. It’s also the first time three different nations are hosting the tournament, vastly expanding its physical geographic reach too, across Canada, Mexico, and the US. Altogether, this means FIFA is expecting a larger total addressable market for the World Cup than ever before. That forces brands to speak at serious scale. And with the inclusion of sixteen extra nations – several of which lack a substantial footballing history – a lot of new viewers won’t be die-hard football fans.

Cultural icons may, then, fill a gap that footballers can’t. With few exceptions, footballers tend to be relevant specifically and exclusively to football, whereas multi-hyphenate stars such as rapper-actor-wrestler Bad Bunny can cast a wider net, appealing – as his Super Bowl halftime show proved – cross-culturally, even to sports fans. They help adidas and Nike address a wider audience than footballers can, no matter how much more relevant the latter are to the game at hand. And this might be particularly helpful in resonating with the new viewers in those nations without long footballing histories, where the sport is yet to truly penetrate but Western film and TV have, thanks perhaps to the latter’s faster transition to mobile. According to YouGov, only 19% of people watch sports on phones, whereas Comscore notes that 49% of Netflix subscribers aged 18 to 34 use phones to stream films and TV (a trend also adopted by 36% of users aged 35 to 54 and even 30% of users older than 55).

It’s no surprise that the audiences for the chosen cultural ambassadors skew young, too. 66% of Gen Zers consider music an important part of their lives, whereas only 23% are passionate sports fans. So, young viewers – particularly in new territories, enticed to follow the World Cup for the first time – might sit up and take more notice of the brands that combine what Gen Zers know with what they don’t, the familiar with the exciting, to meet them where they are while simultaneously transporting them somewhere new.

Moreover, the Gen Zers who do watch football are much less likely than earlier generations to choose and follow a favourite sports team. In the US, almost 40% don’t bother to, so even if they do recognise specific footballers, would the players resonate in the same way if those players aren’t part of the story of a team that they support, with all its attendant characters and rivalries? Probably not, so overall, thus far, a cultural strategy stacks up.

Still, the safest bet may be the game itself.

Nonetheless, as with any strategy there’s a right way and a wrong way to execute it. If 77% of Gen Zers aren’t passionate sports fans – and 27% are “actively anti-sport”, a designation much more common among Gen Z than it is other generations – by over-indexing culturally, sports brands risk hopelessly chasing after a demographic they may be simply unable to convince, while alienating their die-hard football demographic. The key, then, is balance.

That’s what adidas’ highly viral five-minute short film achieved. While Timothée Chalamet might be the indisputable protagonist, he and Bad Bunny appear alongside legacy footballers like Beckham, Messi, and Zidane. The film spotlights culture – but integrates it with football. And, crucially, it sells this not as a shoehorned compromise but as a natural, authentic fit.

To be culturally relevant to the almost 80% of people globally who expect brands to capture their “true culture” in campaigns, authenticity is clearly key. And adidas’ film delivers that in its storyline – with scenes in which people throw shoes into trees to dislodge a stuck ball reflective of the reality of football culture as it’s experienced by kids everywhere – and also in its star. Importantly, Chalamet doesn’t just capture the cultural zeitgeist: his football fandom goes viral regularly, whether because of a photo of him as a child playing against Liverpool defender Joe Gomez or a photo of him wearing a retro England training tracksuit. So, as an authentic ambassador for football, Chalamet makes the campaign authentic, which in turn makes it more culturally relevant. Accordingly, amid the immensely positive coverage of the campaign the day after it landed, the brand’s stock rose by 4%.

In contrast, Nike relied predominantly on rapper Travis Scott to host its Toma El Juego series of street football tournaments across the US over the past year, in the run-up to the World Cup. While the tournament itself received praise for its authenticity and for rekindling Nike’s legacy as a street football brand, it’s unclear how much cultural relevance Travis Scott added, at what must’ve been a high price. That said, it’s too early to judge Nike’s overall strategy, which so far they’ve only teased with a series of polaroids, hinting at collaborations with a mix of footballers and pop culture icons, including Travis Scott, BLACKPINK’s LISA, and, promisingly, Kim Kardashian. Although it remains to be seen how big a role she’ll play, among the forty other famous faces, wielding her reputation as the “ultimate soccer mom” suggests at least the potential for Nike to merge culture and football with a naturalness and authenticity equal to adidas’ and Chalamet’s – especially given the reports of Nike’s plans for more localised activations, in contrast to adidas’ global approach. 

Whether adidas or Nike wins this latest battle in their long rivalry, for us sport and broader culture increasingly belong together. It’s just a matter of tapping the right icons who, as fans, have the power to fuse the two authentically, where they naturally intersect. At the World Cup, we’ll see who did it best.