Right now, the World Cup is happening. 48 teams, 16 cities across the US, Mexico, and Canada, over a hundred games. It’s the biggest one ever.

You don’t have to know anything about soccer to notice something interesting: a lot of what makes this tournament work is stuff marketers try to do every single day. Here’s what we can learn from it.

1. People love an underdog

Some of the teams playing this year have never made it to a World Cup before. Others haven’t been back in decades. Those are the stories people actually talk about — not “who’s ranked number one,” but “can you believe they made it this far?”

What this means for marketing: Nobody gets excited about a brand that only talks about how great it is. People get excited about a story with real stakes, a comeback, a first try, a long shot. If your content never shows the struggle, you’re skipping the part people actually connect with.

2. Bigger doesn’t mean better if it’s not targeted

This World Cup added way more teams than usual. But instead of just throwing everything at everyone, the games are grouped by region and timed so people in different time zones can actually watch.

What this means for marketing: More content and more channels only help if they’re aimed at the right people at the right time. Blasting the same message everywhere isn’t a bigger strategy, it’s just more noise.

3. Borrowing a good idea from somewhere else can pay off

This is the first World Cup ever to have a Super Bowl-style halftime show at the final, with Coldplay’s Chris Martin putting it together alongside Madonna, Shakira, and BTS. That’s soccer borrowing a page straight from American football.

What this means for marketing: You don’t always need a brand new idea. Sometimes the smartest move is taking something that already works somewhere else and making it fit your world.

4. You don’t need the biggest budget to get noticed

Official sponsors pay a lot to be part of the World Cup. But some of the best marketing moments this year came from outside that circle. Adidas dropped a short film, Nike dropped their own, and a streamer named IShowSpeed built such a big audience covering matches that Fox Sports partnered with him directly.

Levi’s Stadium in San Francisco isn’t backed by an official FIFA sponsor, so for the tournament its logo got covered with a tarp and the venue got a generic new name. Levi’s didn’t fight it, they leaned in, swapping their Instagram profile photo to the covered logo and rolling the same tarp look out on storefronts in Paris, London, and Hong Kong. Heinz got the same treatment on their bottles inside stadiums and turned it into a bit, selling a blacked-out “Unofficial Stadium Ketchup.” Neither brand paid FIFA a dollar, and both got more attention than a lot of the official partners did.

What this means for marketing: A great story told at the right time can outperform a giant sponsorship deal. Being clever and timely often beats being big.

5. When something goes wrong, talk about it

Ticket pricing has been a real problem this year, enough that several state attorneys general started looking into it. That’s not a small thing, and it’s happening in public, mid-tournament.

What this means for marketing: Every brand runs into problems eventually. What matters isn’t avoiding them completely, it’s whether you address it honestly instead of hoping people forget.

The big takeaway

A World Cup match doesn’t need a huge ad budget to get people excited. It just needs a good story, good timing, and a reason for people to care before you ask anything of them. That’s really the whole job of marketing, too.

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