Saying nothing about this World Cup is saying something. And sponsors will be heard.
Andrew Wisniewski explores how The 2026 World Cup will be the most scrutinised commercial moment in sport.
The World Cup kicks off tomorrow in a country where its own civil rights organisations are warning people not to visit. More than 120 of them have cited “rising authoritarianism and increasing violence”. In any other industry that would have triggered an emergency board meeting. In sponsor marketing, the campaigns kept rolling out.
Over the past two months every major World Cup sponsor has launched its tournament campaign. Coca-Cola released “Uncanned emotions”, a 60-second spot inviting fans to #FeelItAll. Visa and Marriott have run “For fans, everywhere” since mid-April, its “Sleepover suite” giveaway open to fans in just 15 countries, none among the nations whose fans the host is barring. All variations on the same theme of fans, flags and feeling. The curtain is up, the work is in the world, and the stage it has been set for is one of unity, of the world finding itself in the same moment.
It’s a beautiful stage. Except the one this tournament will play out on looks nothing like it.
The 2026 World Cup is arriving in a country where the tournament itself is the controversy. In February the host’s own president ordered strikes on Iran, 12 weeks after collecting Fifa’s inaugural Peace Prize at the Kennedy Center. Iran has now been refused permission to stay in the United States overnight, and will sleep in Tijuana and cross the border for its matches in Los Angeles and Seattle. The Homeland Security secretary says immigration arrests at the tournament “are not off the table” and that ICE agents will be “out there every day”. A category one final ticket sits at $10,990, and last week the attorneys general of New York and New Jersey subpoenaed Fifa over its pricing, calling it “a gauntlet of confusion, fake scarcity and impossibly high prices”. Fifa declined to comment on the subpoena. This is a country at war with itself, and the world, hosting both.
Let’s assume, charitably, that none of this is news to the sponsors. They’ve had the risk briefings, sat through the agency calls where the politics got fervently discussed, and shipped the campaigns anyway.
At Qatar 2022, many sponsors believed that looking away was a move available to them, because the controversy was foreign. A tournament built on migrant labour that cost thousands of workers their lives, played in a country where homosexuality was illegal. The moments that defined the tournament’s conscience came from the pitch, not the sponsors. Germany’s starting eleven covered their mouths for the opening-match team photo, in protest at Fifa's threat of yellow cards for the OneLove armband. The sponsors, for the most part, said nothing, let the football do the work, and the commercial numbers held.
The lesson the industry took from Qatar was simple. Silence pays. It wasn’t honourable, but it was rational, because the politics were someone else’s and a silent sponsor could stand at arm’s length from the room.
That arm’s length is gone. A tournament built on the world coming together cannot credibly be sponsored in silence when the tournament and its host are visibly dividing it.
Saying nothing, at this tournament, is not neutral. It’s a position, and the fans your campaign is aimed at will read it as one.
Human Rights Watch’s director of global initiatives, Minky Worden, has called out the sponsors who underwrite the tournament and urged fans to tell them they want a sport “open and inclusive and welcoming of the players that make it possible”.
This is not an argument for activism. It’s an argument for commitment. And, for any chief financial officer reading over the chief marketing officer’s shoulder, the more commercially defensible position. Younger fans own this tournament now, with Nielsen putting 76% of the US audience in the Millennial or Gen Z bracket. Edelman found that 58% of Gen Z assume a brand that stays quiet on the issues is hiding something. The trackers have said the same thing for three years. Under-30s expect the brands they buy from to stand for something, and punish the ones that don’t.
What that commitment looks like is straightforward, something specific your brand is doing to make the game more accessible, more welcoming, for the fans who feel priced or pushed out of the sport meant to belong to them. It is a stand taken in public, expressed in programmes, infrastructure, or the people the brand is willing to back. Most of these are years in the making, not responses to last week’s news. Visa is funding permanent street-soccer parks across the US host cities. Verizon has upgraded local network infrastructure in the neighbourhoods around the venues. Bank of America backs US Soccer’s “Soccer at schools” programme, which aims to make soccer accessible to every American school by 2030.
The campaigns now in market were briefed 18 months ago, in a different country, for a tournament nobody had fully seen. That was the model, and it isn’t the model any more. Sponsors without a communications capacity built to move with the story will spend the summer being caught offside.
The brands that get remembered from moments like this are the ones that move faster than their legal departments. When Russia invaded Ukraine, Nike suspended its Russian operations within days and exited entirely by June, while slower competitors were still drafting statements. It was rewarded across every major Western market.
Sport sponsorship is still one of the most trusted channels in advertising, with the World Economic Forum putting it at 81%, higher than almost anything else a brand can buy. In a year when trust in almost every other institution has badly eroded, that figure is harder to come by than it has been in living memory. The temptation, in a London or a Munich marketing department, is to read all of this as an American problem. The campaigns run worldwide, and so will the judgement.
This summer the world will pause for the same game. The brand a fan can name a reason for is the brand they will remember. Silence, in a summer like this one, will be heard as loudly as anything else you say.
To read the full article, visit Campaign.
