The Real World Cup Marketing Opportunity Is Hiding In Plain Sight

This article by Emily Cody was originally published on Inc.com.

Every time a major cultural event rolls around, brands start circling. The emails go out. The decks get made. Someone inevitably starts talking about “owning the conversation.”

The 2026 FIFA World Cup is already proving that out: 16 cities across the US, Canada, and Mexico, and the opening match alone drew 1.2 billion viewers worldwide. For marketers, it’s the kind of moment that inspires equal parts excitement and FOMO.

Yet I keep paying attention to the businesses that aren’t on the official sponsor list. Most of my memories from major events have very little to do with the brands that paid to be there.

I remember the crowded bars. The local spot became the place to watch. The pop-up everyone heard about. The creator was documenting it all in a way that felt more interesting than the official coverage. The restaurant sold out of reservations three weeks before the tournament started because someone with 40,000 followers posted about their happy hour.

Those are the stories people tell afterward. 

The World Cup is a sporting event, but it’s also a travel event, a hospitality event, a retail event, a community event. Millions of people are planning their summers around it: where to watch, who to watch with, what to wear, and where to eat before and after. The tournament gets most of the attention, but the activity spreads outward in ways that are hard to map and almost impossible to buy your way into.

Every match creates a hundred micro moments: a packed patio where strangers are suddenly best friends for ninety minutes. A group chat that started as logistics and turned into a weekly ritual. A creator who’d been posting to 8,000 followers and suddenly has the most-watched Argentina breakdown on the platform. None of that requires official sponsorship. None of it shows up in the media plan. 

The most successful brands during moments like this are often just paying close attention to how people are already behaving. Where they’re gathering. What they need. What would make the experience better? That sounds obvious, but most marketing conversations about the World Cup immediately zoom in on stadium signage and broadcast rights rather than asking a simpler question: what do fans actually want right now?

That sounds obvious. But marketers have a habit of making things more complicated than they need to be.

Part of what makes these moments hard is that the metrics don’t cooperate. Visibility is easy to measure. Participation is harder. A sponsorship package comes with numbers attached: reach, impressions, share of voice. It’s much harder to quantify what it means when a bar becomes the place, or when your brand is the thing someone remembers from a night they’ll talk about for years. The ROI on becoming part of someone’s memory is real; it just doesn’t fit neatly into a dashboard.

Nobody comes home from a great night out talking about the banner ad they saw. They talk about where they watched the game, who they were with, and the unexpected thing they stumbled across. The place that had the atmosphere. The brand that showed up in a way that actually made sense, given the moment.

The businesses that earn a spot in those stories get something more valuable than attention. They get relevance and relevance compounds in a way that impressions don’t.

The same pattern plays out everywhere. You could have said the same thing about the Eras Tour, where local restaurants near stadium cities saw lines around the block for months. Or Fashion Week, where the off-schedule events and random pop-ups consistently generate more organic content than the shows themselves. Or the Olympics, where half the most memorable brand moments had nothing to do with official partnerships. The brands that break through aren’t always the ones spending the most. They’re the ones paying close enough attention to the surrounding culture that they can find a way to become part of it without forcing it.

If I were advising a smaller brand this summer, I’d spend less time worrying about what happens inside the stadium and more time looking at everything happening outside of it.

The crowds forming around the event are often more interesting than the event itself. And that’s usually where the best marketing lives.