L’11 giugno 2026, al primo giorno dei Mondiali, lo spot più famoso del torneo ha già ormai 75 giorni.
E i momenti di maggiore emozione devono ancora arrivare.
Today it’s Mexico v South Africa. The biggest World Cup in history begins: 48 teams, 104 matches, three host nations, final on 19 July in New York.
The longest, the most watched, the most monetised.
But what about the advertising?
Who is talking about it?
On 27 March 2026 LEGO released “Everyone Wants a Piece”: 60 seconds of Messi, Ronaldo, Mbappé and Vinícius Jr. around a table building the World Cup trophy out of bricks. The estimated cost of the image rights alone: 8 million dollars. The result: 314 million views in the first 24 hours. The comments said “generations will talk about this”.
The ad came out 75 days before kick-off. The final is 38 days away. That moment “generations will talk about” is already three months old.
A calendar that no longer exists
For thirty years, the logic of sports communication followed a predetermined pattern. Build attention before the event. Launch the showpiece ad. Ride the media window. Close. The budget is concentrated in the weeks before kick-off, when the market is still “fresh” and competition for space is lower.
That logic was built for a linear media ecosystem. Television, radio, billboards. Channels in which the signal lasts because the context changes slowly. In which a March ad is still being discussed in June because collective memory runs on longer timescales.
Then came the feed. And the feed has no memory.
Gloria Mark’s research into human attention on screens measured the average attention span on a single digital stimulus, showing that it has now fallen below 50 seconds. According to Newsworks, people are 70% more likely to remember an ad when it is aligned with the emotional moment they are experiencing. A March ad, seen today during a group-stage match, is barely a memory.
Where are the moments that matter?
The World Cup is a 39-day tournament. The quarter-finals are played between 9 and 11 July. The semi-finals on the 14th and 15th. The final on 19 July in New York. Those are the moments when collective emotion reaches its absolute peak. When audiences sit in front of the screen with a focus and intensity no other event produces.
LEGO’s ad will not be there. Adidas launched its first ad even before LEGO, in February. Coca-Cola went out in March. The attention window those brands won belongs to a news cycle that has already closed three times.
More than half of FIFA’s official sponsors have yet to publish anything, including McDonald’s and Kia. Those are the brands that have understood the most valuable moments are still to come. Or, who knows, perhaps they are simply running late for operational reasons. Only the coming weeks will tell.
A logic whose time has passed
LEGO produced what was probably the best advert of the year. Messi and Ronaldo together for the first time, the passing of the baton to Mbappé and Vinicius, a child completing the trophy. Flawless narratively, flawless symbolically.
If the problem does not lie there, then it lies entirely in the communications theory that produced it, namely the idea that you must “build the moment before the tournament, so you are already positioned when it starts”.
Perhaps this system once worked over weeks: today it is a matter of days. Perhaps even hours.
314 million views in 24 hours. An attention curve that falls off a cliff in the following 72 hours. The reality is that most World Cup advertising will be forgotten by the end of the group stage. Much of it already is.
A continuous solution
The World Cup lasts 39 days. The feed is not a television broadcasting on a loop. Communications around an event of this scale require a structured presence for its entire duration, calibrated to the tournament’s emotional moments and responsive to sporting developments.
In short, a communications direction that follows every stage of the tournament. That reacts when a team is unexpectedly knocked out. That owns the moment the brand enters the collective story of a memorable match.
This is the model Nike used in 2014 against Adidas, the official sponsor: without a FIFA badge, Nike beat Adidas on social media engagement throughout the entire tournament, building real-time presence around cultural moments instead of investing everything in a pre-tournament window. Germany won the World Cup. Nike won the communication.
By now, only brands that govern their communications as a continuous cycle can hope to be noticed at the moments that matter most. The brand that closed the chapter in March will be there, technically. But no one will see it.
New Connections (FAQ)
LEGO’s ad drew 314 million views. Why would it be wrong?
The advert was exceptional. The problem is not the quality of the execution: it is the timing structure. Those views were concentrated in the first 24-72 hours in March. The World Cup ends on 19 July. The final will be the moment of greatest collective global attention in the whole of 2026: LEGO will not be in anyone’s feed at that moment. It burned its best moment 113 days before the most important one.
Doesn’t maintaining a communications presence for 39 days cost more?
It depends on how it is built. A continuous presence does not mean 39 ads at 8 million each. It means direction: updatable assets, an operational team with fast decision-making authority, pre-emptive briefs that define in advance what the brand can say in every sporting scenario. The incremental cost compared with a single pre-tournament operation is modest. The gap in effectiveness, in light of the data on contextual recall, is far wider.
Does continuous presence apply only to the World Cup, or to all events?
For any event with a long time span and emotional moments spread over time: the Champions League, the Olympics, multi-phase product launches, extended seasonal periods. The logic is the same: the longer the event lasts, the further the moment of peak intensity is from the start. Concentrating the budget at the beginning means being absent at the climax. It also applies to seemingly shorter events: those who communicate only on launch day and disappear the following week have made the same choice as LEGO, on a smaller scale.