The FIFA World Cup is no stranger to controversy. Yet usually once the tournament gets started the nation becomes united by a love of football.

Putting aside the pre-tournament troubles, now the game has kicked off hydration breaks are the latest innovation being slated by pundits. Slicing the match into four quarters, critics have suggested they slow the pace of the game and are a subtle way to show more adverts. Fans do not take well to the game being interrupted.

On the flip side, footage on social media of Scottish fans in Boston celebrating their team win after a 28 year absence show the iconic moments of togetherness the game can bring. Making memories is the cultural currency that keeps the World Cup relevant and brings fans back to the game.

It is clear brands still want to be a part of the tournament, but in the age of experience, is the World Cup losing its marketing muscle?

You can scroll past an ad. You can't scroll past a moment you were part of.

The question isn't whether the World Cup has lost its marketing muscle. It's whether brands have forgotten what made it powerful in the first place.

We're living through an explosion of experiences: run clubs, creator events, fan festivals. Any brand with a budget can build an activation. What nobody can build is a World Cup. That's what makes it valuable. 48 countries. Sixteen cities. Three nations. Billions invested in the same outcome at the same moment. That's not just an experience, that's a phenomenon.

And trying to be part of that is where brands often get it wrong. They confuse presence with participation. They buy the placement, build the beautiful branded space and ask fans to stand there and look at it. That's not a moment, that's a press release. The World Cup's power was never the broadcast. Never the 90 minutes. It was always the belonging.

The brands who win WC 2026 won't be the ones with the biggest media spend. They'll be the ones who give fans a job to do. A role that only exists because they're there. The thing they post at 2am after a last-minute winner. Not because you told them to, but because you handed them something worth being part of.

Experiential is everywhere now. Shared moments aren't. So no, the World Cup hasn't lost its shine. The competition has just got stronger. The fans have got savvier. You can't buy your way into belonging. You have to build it.

The World Cup doesn't just create experiences. It spawns them.

Like hundreds of businesses up and down the country, our agency did its sweepstake. Names in a hat, a randomiser doing its worst, groans and celebrations as teams were handed out. Nobody from FIFA was in the room. No sponsor logo was visible. But the World Cup was absolutely present, and that moment, that specific, collective moment and its outcomes, will be talked about in our studio for weeks.

That is the real marketing power of the World Cup, and it has nothing to do with official partnerships.

Yes, it is a tournament. It happens in a place, at a time, with teams and a trophy. But what it actually generates is something far larger than that. Loyalties form, secret allegiances to players on other teams quietly develop, kits appear, debates spill into conversations that have nothing to do with football. Pubs get booked. Back rooms get reserved. It infiltrates everything, and it does so organically, without a media plan in sight.

This is the distinction that matters. The World Cup is arguably one of the last remaining cultural events that generates genuine user-created moments at scale. Fans, casual observers, people who couldn't name a single midfielder, all participate in something, experience something. That participation is not manufactured. It is spawned by the existence of the tournament itself.

The political controversy, the corruption headlines, the stories of teams and fans being denied entry to the host nation this year, none of it deflates that power. If anything, it feeds it. Scandal, gossip and moral outrage are just more content that keeps the World Cup at the centre of collective conversation.

Brand sponsorships remain valuable, not least for the awareness they deliver across that sprawling conversation. But the deeper truth is that the World Cup's cultural and historic significance gives it a life entirely its own.

The impact of the World Cup is bigger than the World Cup itself. In the age of experience, that is not a weakness. It is the whole point.

The World Cup losing its marketing muscle? Behave.

Yes, the media landscape has fragmented.

Yes, attention is harder to earn than ever.

And yes, rights alone aren't enough anymore.

But that's not because the World Cup has got weaker. It's because too many marketers mistake buying attention for earning it.

I'm a football obsessive and, as a lifelong blue from Manchester, I'll happily admit my bias. But every four years this tournament still does something almost nothing else can. It empties offices early, fills pubs and parks, gets kids pretending they're in the final until the streetlights come on, and gives whole communities a reason to gather around something bigger than themselves. In an age obsessed with experiences, that's not a weakness. It's the ultimate experience.

The opportunity for brands has changed, and thank God for that. Sticking your logo on a sponsorship package and calling it a strategy is over. The winners will be the brands that create rituals, participation and stories around the tournament rather than simply interrupt it.

And let's be honest: the World Cup has never just been about football. It's about identity, optimism, nostalgia and belonging. Even when your own team is out, you'll still end up watching because it’s about being part of the conversation.

If marketers can't find commercial value in the biggest shared cultural moment on the planet, maybe the problem isn't the World Cup. Maybe they've forgotten that people don't fall in love with media plans. They fall in love with moments.

And that's something football does better than almost anything else.

FIFA have many responsibilities, but this is not top of the list.

The World Cup remains the ultimate shared sporting occasion. For sponsors, it still presents an unbeatable critical mass.

That said, sponsorship is more cluttered and fragmented than ever, so any assumption that exposure automatically translates to brand salience and preference is clearly flawed.

The onus is on the sponsors to show up in a distinctive way that actually speaks to the fans.

There are two simple (but not necessarily easy) ways to do this.

First, find a way for your brand and star talent to showcase not only the event but the specific culture of the host nations. Aside from the players, the location is the other exciting variable, making it a major source of fans' emotional associations with the World Cup. This approach won't work for every sponsor but it's negligent not to consider it.

Or second, break the increasingly sanitised sponsorship mould. The number of inane, polished platitudes and cheering crowd scenes deployed in sponsors' advertising and activations is criminal. Aside from the actual competition, the most memorable (dare I say iconic?) World Cup moment is still Diana Ross's penalty in 1994. Sure, the outcome was not entirely intended. But the ambition alone was utterly unique and idiosyncratic. Fans remember her miss because it was human and real.

So, if you're a sponsor, be more Diana. Because if you're brave enough to do something weird, maybe people will still be talking about you more than 30 years later

FIFA owns the tournament, fans own the emotion.

The World Cup isn't losing its marketing muscle. It's changing shape. For a long time, brands treated the tournament as the biggest media buy on Earth. A chance to reach billions of people at once. But in a world of fragmented audiences, personalised feeds and infinite content, reach is no longer rare. Emotion is.

As a football fan, I still remember USA '94 feeling impossibly shiny, new and cinematic. Every World Cup leaves something behind: memories, behaviours and myths. Ronaldo's haircut. Zidane's headbutt. Messi lifting the trophy. Bellingham's overhead kick. Moments that escape football and enter culture.

That's what makes the World Cup different from almost every other sporting property. It creates future fans. The kids copying a celebration in the playground the next day. The teenager buying their first shirt. The pub erupting when an underdog scores. These are the moments that build lifelong emotional attachment.

What's changed is that culture no longer ends at the final whistle. Every goal now becomes reaction content, memes, creator stories, watch parties and fan channels. The tournament is now a cultural operating system.

The tension is fascinating. The World Cup has never been more commercial, yet the moments people care about remain stubbornly human. FIFA owns the tournament. Broadcasters own the rights. Sponsors buy the media. But fans still own the emotion.

For brands, the opportunity is to create experiences that become part of football folklore. The brands that win will be the ones helping shape the memories, rituals and emotional moments that people carry long after the trophy has been lifted.

Having spent the final day in May surrounded by 1.5 million Arsenal fans, hoping to catch a glimpse of my heroes in the flesh, I know this to be true: few things unite us quite like football (played with your feet). And while I had to endure 22 years of waiting before another Premier League title, 4 years is still a long time. Particularly when I think my daughter wasn’t even a thought at the last World Cup.

Although much has changed over the past 4 years - did somebody say AI? - there’s still nothing that can replicate the scale of the human collective experience that is the World Cup. Ergo: no single event represents a greater marketing opportunity for brands to drive short- and long-term gains.

Experiences play a key role - we saw firsthand the impact of real-world activations on brand through our Paris Olympics work with ASICS - but when I look at my football WhatsApp group for intel on what people are really talking about, content still seems to be king (at least in this corner of North London).

There are some brilliant partnerships, particularly within the fashion space, and brands finding innovative ways to activate around the event - but all of the chatter remains around the various World Cup films. If “players play to be remembered,” then legacy for brands still lies in creating standout film content that people will continue to share for years to come