The wrong World Cup

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Football's biggest tournament kicks off this week, and the most striking thing about the advertising around it is how few people are in it.

The same handful of names anchors almost every campaign. Adidas built its flagship film around Timothée Chalamet, Lionel Messi and a host of other footballers and celebrities; DoorDash launched its first global campaign with Kaká and Alex Morgan; Coca-Cola rebuilt Van Halen's 'Jump' with J Balvin and Travis Barker. Across the official sponsor roster and the challengers crowding the same airspace, it is a remarkably small pool of talent, bought at the top of the market by every brand that can afford the entry price.

There is a lot of money behind them. WARC estimates the tournament to drive an additional $10.5bn in global ad spend this quarter, and FIFA is forecasting $1.8bn in sponsorship revenue from the event alone. For a brand that can spend at that altitude, a share of the biggest names is the cost of being seen at football's largest gathering. For the marketing majority, it is money poured into a channel where they will be outbid for the talent that matters and drowned out before the group stage is over. The men's World Cup is the most expensive room in sport this summer, and most of the brands DCA writes for have no business trying to win it.

The more useful question is what they should do instead, and it starts with noticing that the same four weeks contain a second World Cup, and a far less crowded one.

That second tournament is the ICC Women's T20 World Cup, which starts in England and Wales the day after the men's tournament begins and runs until the Lord's final on 5 July. It arrives with a fraction of the noise and conditions that should interest any brand priced out of football. The ICC unbundled the commercial rights to its women's events from the men's last year, letting brands back the women's game on its own terms rather than as an add-on, and the first release of final tickets at Lord's sold out within a day.

There is a recent precedent for what happens next. When the Lionesses won the Euros last summer, the final drew 12.2 million UK viewers and became the most-watched television moment of the year, and UEFA's sponsorship revenue came in at more than double the 2022 figure, the result of the same unbundling decision taken earlier. Women's football has been increasing in value because the rights were structured to let brands in directly, and because the audience was there waiting once they arrived. The cricket this summer sits where women's football did before its breakout, underpriced relative to the attention it is about to command. But the tournament is the visible edge of something larger, and the larger thing is the real argument.

The person who put this most clearly to me is not a brand strategist. Louis Persent is a former professional athlete who now runs Weirdo, an independent agency, where he is founder and creative director. Over the past year his team ran a project that kept surfacing the same problem. The conventional agency could build something for a brand. It had no real model for building something for an athlete. That project became the reason for Teamwork, a new research unit Weirdo is launching to work on exactly that gap, and the conviction behind it comes from having been on the other side of it as an athlete.

His argument starts by overturning the assumption underneath most athlete deals. Brands tend to treat an athlete as a way into a sports audience. Sign the footballer, reach the football fans. Louis thinks that gets the value the wrong way round. The audience that matters is rarely the sport. It is whoever the athlete reaches as a person.

He puts it as a flip. An athlete is not a route to a sports audience, they are a route to a young mother who finds them inspiring, or a faith community, or a fashion following, or whatever group has actually attached itself to who that person is. The sport is how they became known. It is not what their audience is there for. Read that way, an athlete stops being a sports-marketing asset and becomes something closer to a creator, with one advantage most creators do not have: a reason to be followed that exists outside the feed.

That distinction sounds small and changes everything downstream. If you are buying a route into a sports audience, you pick the most famous athlete in the sport and accept the price. If you are buying a route into a specific group of people, the most famous name is often the wrong one, and a less obvious athlete whose following matches your customer is both a better fit and a fraction of the cost. Once the question becomes which audience rather than which sport, the men's World Cup stops being the obvious place to look and starts looking like the most expensive one.

The project that produced this was a pilot Weirdo ran with UK Sport. From May 2025, it worked with six emerging Olympic and Paralympic athletes, chosen to span different sports, levels of fame and degrees of comfort in front of a camera. The brief was to work out what it takes to grow an athlete's profile, or to equip them to do it themselves. What the team learned over the following nine months is what convinced them the gap was worth building a unit around.

The results were uneven, and Louis is candid about that. Some athletes took to it and some did not, which is itself the finding: a process like this cannot be run identically across six people and produce the same outcome. The clearest success involved an athlete who was about to become a mother. Teamwork helped her find a niche that had little to do with her event, leaned into the pregnancy, and built an audience of people who followed her for that. The following grew quickly, and collaborations that had been out of reach started to open up. One paired her with Helen Glover, the Olympic rower who returned to elite competition after having children, and it worked because the two women shared an audience and a story rather than a sport. Her commercial value came from a clearly defined group of people who saw something of their own lives in hers, and the athletics was only how they found her.

The wider market is starting to show the same pattern at the top end, usually without anyone planning it. Ilona Maher, the United States rugby player, is the most followed rugby player in the world, with a following built on body positivity and her refusal to separate athleticism from femininity. Her commercial partners include L'Oréal, Maybelline, Ralph Lauren and Secret, and of her major deals only the Adidas one is endemic to her sport. The rest are buying her audience, which is young women who arrived for her and stayed for what she represents. Maher has said that people now see her as a content creator and have stopped quite believing in her as an athlete, which she finds odd given that the athletics is what she does for a living. The brands followed the audience, not the sport. Maher built that following on instinct and personality, and most athletes have neither the platform nor the support to do the same. They are the ones the whole argument turns on.

The reason comes down to how the market around them is built. An athlete of any standing already has people working for them, but the jobs are narrow. An agent negotiates deals and places the athlete into opportunities that already exist; a sponsorship team buys reach against a property; a sportswear brand signs the athlete to sell the boots. None of those roles involves sitting down with the athlete to work out who they are to an audience, what story only they can tell, and how to build a following around it. That is the creative work agencies do every day for brands, and almost nobody does it for the person.

This kind of work is not new. The creator economy has spent a decade building this machinery for influencers, and what Louis is describing is that model applied to athletes, who have sat oddly outside it. The novelty is the specialisation, and the case for it is that an athlete is a stronger version of the asset the creator economy already trades in. At the end of last year Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, argued that AI is making authenticity infinitely reproducible, that audiences will increasingly start from scepticism about what they see. As that happens, the things AI cannot fake gain value, and an athlete's authenticity is underwritten by results that happened in public. Zac Shaw, one of Britain's Paralympic 100m sprinters, puts the same point from the inside. 'In a world where we're trying to capture people's attention on digital platforms, authenticity mixed with creativity can separate us from the crowd,' he says. 'As athletes within elite sport, we're always looking to get a 1% gain. This goes beyond the field of play. Moments from sporting events are etched into people's minds forever, which is exactly why athletes are the right people to use in campaigns.' In a market filling up with synthetic content, that is a meaningful edge.

So what should a marketer with a real budget and no chance of outbidding Nike actually do this summer. Start by declining the obvious game: the men's World Cup rewards the brands that can afford the biggest names and punishes the ones that try to stand beside them on a smaller budget. Then look at the calendar everyone else is ignoring. The women's cricket runs underpriced for a month. The Olympic and Paralympic cycle is full of athletes with real followings and little commercial support. The tiers below the obvious stars in almost every sport are full of people with engaged audiences and no brand paying attention. An athlete a tier or two below the household names can carry an audience that matches a specific brand far more precisely than a superstar can, and at a fraction of the price.

Pick the audience before the sport. The right athlete is the one whose following looks like the brand's customer, whatever they compete in. A skincare brand does not need the most famous footballer in the country. It needs the athlete whose audience is already paying attention to skin, confidence or routine, and that athlete might compete in a sport the brand had never thought to look at. The brief should start from the customer and work back to the athlete, which reverses how most sponsorship decisions are still made. An athlete also carries risks a shirt sponsorship does not, since a person can go off-message in a way a logo cannot, and that is the cost of buying something that feels human rather than manufactured.

For brands willing to think bigger, the prize sits at the level of the sport itself. Caitlin Clark is the clearest illustration of what one correctly chosen athlete can do for an entire property. As a rookie with the Indiana Fever in 2024, she was estimated to be responsible for more than a quarter of the WNBA's revenue. Her team averaged 1.18 million television viewers a game while the rest of the league averaged 394,000, and within months the WNBA had signed a media rights deal worth $2.2bn over eleven years, roughly four times the value of the one before it. A federation or a brand that identifies the athlete capable of carrying a sport, and backs them early, is buying into that effect before the price reflects it.

This is a market with three sides that rarely line up. Brands want a way into culture they can afford and that does not make them look like everyone else. Athletes, most well short of the superstar tier, are sitting on audiences they have never been helped to build. Federations and clubs need their sports to stay relevant between the tournaments that bring the cameras, and that relevance increasingly runs through individual athletes rather than the institution. Fans sit in the middle, attached more to people than to badges. Each side would gain from the others being served properly, and at the moment none of them is.

Teamwork, launching now off the back of that work, is Weirdo's attempt to work in that middle, and Louis is careful to call it a research unit rather than a finished proposition, a way of testing what the job involves before anyone claims to have solved it. The plan runs along all three sides at once: helping federations grow the profiles of the athletes who can carry a sport, working with brands that want athletes built into their creative thinking rather than bolted on at the end, and, in time, representing athletes directly, with the eventual ambition of using technology to reach the many who will never command an agent's full attention. The demand is highest on the sides that are usually subdued. People inside the women's game and the Olympic and Paralympic movement can already see what a serious audience is worth. Tatiana Elaguila, England player relations lead for the FA women's team, frames the shift directly. 'Long gone are the days of brands seeing athletes as just relevant within sport,' she says. 'Now they're a route to relevance across culture, with audiences craving positive human-led stories. So anything that gives athletes the power to build and grow their own fandoms is good for everyone: the athletes, their fans, their sports, and brands looking to find a cultural edge.' The brand side is where the lag sits, and it is the side the majority of brand leaders are on.

The question worth carrying out of this is simple. Before signing the obvious name in the obvious sport this summer, a marketer could ask which audience they are actually trying to reach, and which athlete already has it, whatever that athlete happens to play. Ask it early and the relevance is still underpriced. Leave it late and you will be paying for it once everyone else has caught up.

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Amar Chohan, Founder and CEO - Department of Creative Affairs.