Two World Cups Are Happening At Once
One is being won in your feed. The other is being won on the pitch, and they are not the same tournament.
I started a spreadsheet before the group stage kicked off, and I have not stopped updating it since.
Not the standings. You can get those anywhere. The one I have been keeping tracks something the rest of the industry keeps talking around… whose product is actually on the feet of the players putting the ball in the net?
The dominant take this summer writes itself. Nike is winning the World Cup. The ads are everywhere, the campaign was built for a home crowd, and by the time the first group-stage match kicked off, Nike had already built the loudest campaign of anyone in the room. Fortune framed the whole tournament as Elliott Hill’s next big test, and on the marketing side, the noise is not especially close.
Side note: adidas and Nike both put out incredible videos for this year’s World Cup. Nike’s Rip The Script has been viewed nearly 80 million times. The adidas Backyard Legends, over 8 million. Both gave me goosebumps while watching them. Nike went deep on YouTube views. You can’t watch a match without seeing the adidas spot during breaks. More on this in a future issue of the newsletter, but important to keep in mind when reading further.
But impressions are not goals. A marketing win and a pitch win are two different tournaments played on the same fields, and we have spent this entire summer letting one stand in for the other.
So I built the second scoreboard.
Over at becausesneakers.com/world-cup there is a live Boot War tracker counting goals by the boot on the scorer’s foot, a Kit War tracker doing the same for the kit makers, and kit points running right alongside the actual table. It updates through the tournament, all the way to the final. This is the first time I am telling the newsletter it exists.
I built it because the question underneath all of this matters more than the ad-spend leaderboard. This is the first men’s World Cup on US soil since 1994, and if you have been in this business long enough, you know what 1994 did to Nike. A home World Cup convinced a basketball and running company to take football seriously, and a few years later, we got the Mercurial. Home soil does not just move jerseys for a summer. It rewires what American kids grow up wanting on their feet.
Which is why the boot count and the ad count telling different stories is the part I cannot stop looking at…
