The 2026 World Cup finally produced football advertising that remembered one essential truth: football is supposed to be enjoyable, not earnest.
After years of slow-motion crossbar rain shots and whispered monologues about legacy, brands collectively loosened up and delivered something far more interesting this summer.
Adidas (ADDYY) led the pack with its Backyard Legends campaign, featuring Jude Bellingham, Lamine Yamal, Trinity Rodman, Lionel Messi, David Beckham and, somewhat inexplicably, Timothee Chalamet.
The campaign sat visually somewhere between 90s Nike chaos and a Netflix sports documentary operating on a £50m budget, and it genuinely made football feel playful again.
Burberry’s (BRBY) A Good Sport campaign took a sharply different angle, blending luxury aesthetics with British football culture in a way that felt both aspirational and completely unhinged.
The casting of Lucy Punch proved an immediate win, with every frame looking like a fashion editorial had collided with pub culture in a muddy field somewhere in England.
Nike (NKE) teamed up with Palace on a World Cup spot that leaned hard into English football delusion, featuring lads in pubs, street corner philosophers and enough swagger to power a small city.
The collaboration captured something painfully accurate about supporting England: the absolute certainty of victory followed by the very real possibility of spiralling in a beer garden by the quarter-finals.
Axe built its campaign around the simple, brilliant insight that football fans look absolutely chaotic during tournaments but still want to smell incredible, producing low-fi, genuinely funny work without a polished influencer in sight.
Lay’s took a comedic route with its Bandwagon ad, deploying Will Ferrell bouncing between countries and supporting whoever happened to be winning, with David Beckham appearing to round out the organised chaos.
Brazilian beer brand Brahma delivered perhaps the most energetically confident campaign of the tournament, with Carlo Ancelotti somehow appearing to calmly control the weather amid street football, beach football and relentless overhead kick attempts.
The best ads of the 2026 World Cup shared a common quality: they stopped trying to elevate football into something profound and simply celebrated why people love it in the first place.
The noise, the pub debates, the group chats and the man wearing a full kit to watch a match in his own living room all made an appearance across these campaigns in one form or another.
Football, at its most effective in advertising, looks human rather than cinematic, and the brands that understood that distinction produced the most memorable work of this summer’s tournament.