Three days to kickoff: LEGO's viral Messi-Ronaldo stunt, Fox Sports' home-soil bet, and six more campaigns you need to watch
Six campaigns that haven't appeared in earlier roundups: LEGO's improbable Messi-Ronaldo-Mbappé-Vini Jr. film (1.2M+ views before kickoff), Fox Sports' 2M-view 'Do You Believe?' home-soil promo, Pepsi's platform play, Heineken's VTO loophole, Paddy Power's England-vs-America culture war, and Stella Artois's Beckham beer-flying-in-a-crowd spot. Plus three cross-campaign trends as the tournament kicks off Thursday.
The tournament starts Thursday. Brands have been loading their chambers for months — and the final wave of pre-kickoff creative is hitting now. This week's roundup covers six campaigns not featured in earlier issues, from a LEGO film that quietly accumulated over 1.2 million views, to an ingenious Heineken HR hack, to Paddy Power's noisy argument about who actually invented the game. Closing observations cover three patterns shaping how this World Cup's advertising wave differs from 2022.
LEGO — "Everyone Wants a Piece"
Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam pulled off one of the more implausible casting coups in recent memory: Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi, Kylian Mbappé, and Vinícius Júnior in the same 60-second film, each reaching to place the final brick on a LEGO World Cup trophy. The joke is that none of them can agree on who gets top billing. The ending pulls the rug out — a kid walks in, completes the build, and walks off with it.1
The film had accumulated over 1.2 million views by early April, before the tournament had started.2 The Messi-Ronaldo co-appearance is the viral engine; those two sharing a frame for an ad remains genuinely rare. But what makes the creative work beyond the casting stunt is that LEGO's core message — play belongs to everyone, not just the famous — lands intact. You could swap in any four global stars and the brand truth survives.
Agency: Wieden+Kennedy, Amsterdam.
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Fox Sports — "Do You Believe? Everything Can Happen on Home Soil"
Fox Sports is the US English-language rights holder for all 104 matches, and its main pre-tournament promo treats the assignment as an opportunity to invoke the mythology of American sporting upsets.3 The film — produced by Special US — opens with the USMNT winning the tournament, cutting through celebrations across the country, before snapping back to reality with the knowing subtext that a home win would be the most unlikely of outcomes.
Tom Brady features in it. So does former US Soccer coach Bruce Arena and US Hockey legend Mike Eruzione, whose inclusion is deliberate: Eruzione was on the 1980 "Miracle on Ice" team, and the film is leaning heavily on that precedent. It's a smart borrowing — the 1980 hockey team is the most culturally resonant proof point that American sporting upsets can happen on home soil.
With nearly 2 million YouTube views since May, it's one of the most-viewed tournament spots from a US broadcaster.4
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Pepsi — "Football Nation"
Pepsi's 3.5-minute film reads less like a traditional World Cup commercial and more like a brand manifesto.5 The premise is that Pepsi now operates a destination — Football Nation — where fandom, banter, and rivalry live permanently, not just during tournament cycles. David Beckham, Mohamed Salah, and Vinícius Júnior appear alongside Gordon Ramsay, who has no obvious football connection but significant crossover appeal with the brand's target audience in the US.1
Agency: BigTime Creative Shop.
The strategic intent is different from Nike or Adidas's hero films. Where those brands bet on a single cinematic statement, Pepsi is building a persistent content platform — the "Football Nation" handle is meant to generate material across the tournament window, not peak on launch day and fade. Whether that approach pays off in brand recall against the big-budget single-film formats is the interesting test case to watch.
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Heineken — "FanVolunteers"
The cleverest piece of thinking in this round of World Cup advertising may be a one-minute film from LePub New York that doesn't feature a single celebrity.6
The problem Heineken is solving is real: many World Cup matches air during US working hours. The brand's answer is to point fans toward Volunteer Time Off (VTO) — a corporate benefit many employees already have but rarely use — and frame watching daytime games as community service. The mechanic involves logging volunteer hours at a local venue while the game plays. It's a loophole, and the film is openly cheerful about being a loophole.
What separates this from ordinary brand cleverness is that it addresses a genuine friction point rather than inventing one. The 2022 Qatar tournament was evening-friendly for European markets but awkward for US viewers. 2026 is hosted in North America — games are daytime or early evening in the US — which creates a different kind of scheduling tension for office workers. Heineken found it.
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Paddy Power — "Nobody Does Football Better Than Us"
BBH London's campaign for Paddy Power is built around an argument: England invented football and America keeps trying to claim ownership of everything.7 Danny Dyer represents the English side. Rob Lowe is his American opposite number. The film exaggerates the cultural gap — terrace pints vs. stadium fireworks, proper chants vs. kiss cams, standing in the rain vs. halftime shows — and arrives at the joke that both sides claim to do football better.
It's a format Paddy Power has used effectively before: find a cultural tension in football, cast personalities who embody each side, let them bicker. The casting is precise. Danny Dyer as the hardened English football traditionalist is close enough to his actual public persona to feel authentic. Rob Lowe as the smooth American counterpart works because he's recognizable in both markets. The campaign debuted on Paddy Power's YouTube on May 29 and has accumulated around 16,000 views.7
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Stella Artois — "Celebration" ft. David Beckham
Stella Artois's campaign reduces the World Cup experience to a single moment: the beer-in-the-air goal celebration. The 37-second film, made by Gut New York, opens with stadium chaos as a goal goes in — beer flies everywhere. Cut to David Beckham, holding his Stella, completely composed. Tagline: "When the beer hits the fan, hold onto your Stella."8
It's a product truth expressed through a social situation most football fans recognize — the involuntary soaking after a goal in a crowd. Beckham in that setting is calibrated: he's been in enough stadiums to make the scene credible, and his composure is the brand payoff. The broader campaign adds US bar takeovers, limited-edition packaging, and a sweepstakes under the tag #AllRoundsOnBeckham.1
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Three patterns worth watching as the tournament begins
Beckham has become the World Cup's default luxury signal. He was already in Lay's, McDonald's, and Adidas campaigns covered in earlier issues. Now Stella Artois adds a fourth. When four brands from different categories converge on the same face — snack food, fast food, sportswear, beer — the signal is less about Beckham's individual value and more about a market reading: if you want to simultaneously reach the US, UK, and the global diaspora with a single image, he's the most efficient choice available. That calculation may start to show diminishing returns as the tournament progresses.9
The US hosting context is generating a specific creative sub-genre. Fox Sports' "Do You Believe?", Heineken's VTO hack, and Paddy Power's England-vs-America culture clash are all doing something earlier World Cups couldn't: they're built around what it means for North America to host. The tournament being on home soil creates genuine creative territory — national identity questions, scheduling peculiarities, and the cultural novelty of major football in American cities — that sponsors are only beginning to explore.
Fan-platform brands are emerging alongside hero-film brands. Adidas, Nike, and Budweiser have committed to large single-film formats. Pepsi, with "Football Nation," is betting on a persistent content platform. Heineken's FanVolunteers is a community-behaviour mechanic, not a film. These are three different theories of how brands build memory during a tournament cycle — and this World Cup, running through mid-July, is long enough that single-film saturation may start to create gaps that ongoing platform brands can fill.
Campaigns covered in this issue: LEGO, Fox Sports, Pepsi, Heineken, Paddy Power, Stella Artois. Tournament runs June 11–July 19, 2026.
Previously covered: Adidas (Backyard Legends, Eight Generations, Pet Jerseys), Michelob ULTRA, Coca-Cola, Lay's, AXE, Air Transat, Canada Soccer, Betano, VW Brasil, Brahma, Budweiser, Nike (Rip The Script), Burberry, McDonald's, IRN-BRU, Hyundai, Orange France.
References
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- 6Adweek — FIFA World Cup 26 Ad Tracker
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