By Katie Deighton
The commercial at the center of Adidas's FIFA World Cup mammoth marketing campaign features the usual soccer suspects from team lineups old and new. But leading the cast is the mustachioed actor Timothée Chalamet, playing an amateur yet intense three-on-three manager.
The five-minute ad drops celebrity athletes and entertainers into a neighborhood soccer match being played on a basketball court. Bad Bunny and Lionel Messi watch as the likes of Trinity Rodman and Jude Bellingham show up to take on a local team that once upset '90s stars including David Beckham and Zinedine Zidane, whose loss is depicted in faux flashbacks.
It's an expensive extension of Adidas's ongoing "You Got This" campaign and the linchpin of a global World Cup marketing effort that the German sports brand hopes will turbocharge U.S. sales in particular.
Adidas and its fellow World Cup sponsors from Budweiser to Marriott Bonvoy for years have been gearing up for the tournament set to take place across the U.S., Canada and Mexico this June and July. Hoteliers, Airbnb hosts and NJ Transit are growing increasingly disgruntled about the tournament's potential economic benefits, but marketers still hope that the buzz of live games across North America will catalyze summer spending at a time of depressed consumer sentiment.
They have also looked forward to a more commercially amenable World Cup than the last go-round in 2022, when host country Qatar U-turned on its promise to allow in-stadium beer sales and searing heat pushed what is usually a summer affair into the winter months. Matches played in North and Central American time zones also make the prospect of buying commercial airtime more palatable for advertisers looking to reach U.S. consumers, many of whom would have been sleeping when games in previous tournaments were played halfway across the world.
The 2026 World Cup will generate an extra $10.5 billion in global ad spending in the second quarter of this year, a gain of 1.1% compared to nontournament years, according to a projection by marketing research firm WARC Media. Ad spending during the last World Cup declined 4.6% from the quarterly norm, as incremental activity was undermined by macroeconomic challenges and the overlap with the holiday marketing season, WARC said.
But in the U.S., a country with historically lukewarm feelings towards international soccer, the World Cup has helped lift ad spending for only five of the past 10 tournaments, and by 1.5% at most, WARC found. Even with the games in North America and a final set to be played in New Jersey's MetLife Stadium, the research firm doesn't expect the World Cup to drive incremental ad spending in the U.S. this year.
Adidas nonetheless aims to use the tournament to win over more U.S. customers and close the gap with Nike, its much larger rival.
"America is for us the biggest opportunity over a long period, because we're so far behind our competitor," Chief Executive Bjørn Gulden said on a call to discuss the results.
The U.S. World Cup marketing effort "is just so much larger in size, scope and scale, resources, money, energy, effort, than it has been in the past," said Chris Murphy, senior vice president of brand marketing for Adidas North America. In addition to running traditional advertising, the company is planning live events in Atlanta, Los Angeles , Houston, Toronto and New York. Murphy declined to disclose the budget for the overall effort.
The World Cup campaign continues Adidas's two-year-old "You Got This" theme, as part of a strategy to repeat a consistent message rather than jumping around between ideas, Murphy said.
The company said it has sold around 250 million euros, equivalent to about $292 million, of 2026 World Cup products. It makes the balls used during games and estimates that around one-third of World Cup players wear its shoes on the field.
Write to Katie Deighton at katie.deighton@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
May 06, 2026 12:02 ET (16:02 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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