The World Cup Is Selling Belonging. Smart Brands Will Keep Selling It After The Final Whistle

This article by Temilola Agbede was originally published on Inc.com.

The most striking thing about the World Cup isn’t the goals or the ad placements. It’s the atmosphere. Fans in jerseys from every corner of the globe fill stadiums, bars and Fan Fests across the United States, Mexico, and Canada. Some are rivals in the same group standing shoulder to shoulder, celebrating a good game. Most aren’t there to prove anything, they’re just glad to be in the same place around people who understand why it matters.

That feeling has a name. The sociologist Émile Durkheim called it collective effervescence: the surge of energy and unity people feel when they’re gathered around something larger than themselves. It isn’t specific to soccer. It’s the same force behind a packed concert or a crowded election-night watch party.

But the World Cup is one of the clearest examples of it on the global stage. South Korean supporters filled the streets of Mexico City for matches that had nothing to do with their own team. Scottish fans showed up in Boston in numbers large enough that locals started joking the city had been renamed New Scotland. 

A few host cities have figured out how to design for this directly rather than wait for it to happen. Seattle built its fan venue network around exactly this idea and named it the Unity Loop, a deliberate attempt to give strangers a reason to keep running into each other across the city instead of scattering after a single match.

None of it is about the score

A German fan named Freddy is spending this summer driving through the Deep South, posting his unfiltered reactions to American football stadiums, gas stations, and fast food. His clip of trying Buffalo Wild Wings for the first time pulled in 2.7 million views and hundreds of thousands of new followers. Around the same time, a recognizable genre of video took over feeds: international visitors walking through a Walmart in open disbelief, laughing with whoever happened to be standing nearby. In Dallas, Japanese fans turned Terry Black’s Barbecue into a running storyline, posting about discovering brisket and beef ribs alongside strangers doing the same thing.

None of this is really about Buffalo Wild Wings, or Walmart, or barbecue. Freddy isn’t reviewing a restaurant. He’s documenting the feeling of being somewhere different and discovering he isn’t alone in his curiosity about it. The tourists at Walmart aren’t filming a sponsored haul. They’re sharing disbelief with whoever’s standing next to them, the same collective spirit playing out in stadiums, just compressed into a phone screen. It’s also, not coincidentally, the same reason a genuine reaction from an unpaid creator tends to outperform a polished ad: nobody scripted it, nobody asked for it, and that’s exactly why people believe it.

Belonging is what people are actually buying

This is the part that’s easy to miss if you only look at the brand mentions: none of these moments are really about brand loyalty. What people are responding to is the feeling of being let into something, a shared discovery that felt bigger because someone else was there to feel it with them. That’s a harder thing to build than a campaign and a far more durable one. A campaign rents attention for as long as the media budget lasts. A sense of belonging compounds because the people who feel it tend to bring other people into it.

Why this isn’t a six-week story

It would be easy to read all of this as World Cup color and move on once the trophy is handed out. It isn’t. The tournament didn’t create the hunger for connection on display here. It just put a few hundred million people in a position to feel it at the same time, and brands that happened to already exist inside everyday life got pulled into it by accident.

The more useful question for a consumer brand watching from the sidelines is “are we giving our own customers a reason to feel connected to each other,” the same way two strangers from rival countries end up trading stories.

What this looks like without a World Cup-sized stage

The average brand will never get a Freddy or a viral Walmart moment by accident, but the underlying behavior scales down and some of it can be designed on purpose the way Seattle designed the Unity Loop.

Be the gathering place, not just the backdrop. The World Cup doesn’t ask fans to root for the same team. It just gives them a shared reason to be in the same place at the same time. Brands can build a smaller version of this: a customer event, a comment section that actually gets replies from other customers, a community space built around the thing people love rather than the thing they bought. The connection should happen between customers, with the brand simply making the room.

Treat your most genuine advocates like creators, not assets. The fan content driving this tournament works because nobody told Freddy what to say. The same logic applies to your own best customers and smallest creator partners: the unscripted review, the unboxing nobody paid for, the comment that wasn’t incentivized. Protect that kind of voice instead of trying to replicate it with a bigger budget and a tighter brief.

Build the recognition that makes you a credible gathering place before the spotlight arrives. Belonging doesn’t show up because a cultural moment lands on your brand. It shows up because the brand was already familiar, consistent and present long before anyone was watching.

Freddy didn’t set out to make a wing chain look good and the fans bonding over barbecue in Dallas weren’t trying to sell anyone on Texas brisket. They were looking for a way to feel connected to a place and to each other in a moment that felt bigger than any one of them. That’s what makes the World Cup different and it’s the part every brand has a chance to build toward long after this summer is over.