On Monday morning, Sydney time, Spain won the World Cup. By lunchtime, the score was the least interesting thing on my feed.
Circulating instead: Keyne, Lamine Yamal’s three-year-old brother, in his Paw Patrol hat and miniature number 19 shirt, borrowing a security guard’s cap and out-charming the entire tournament. Jude Bellingham, the internet’s newly anointed boyfriend, shedding various items of clothing. Erling Haaland doing literally anything (and a growing number of uncanny lookalikes). Messi flat on the turf while Spain celebrated around him. Victoria Beckham, eternally unbothered. The list goes on. The result was already becoming yesterday’s news. The fragments were the ongoing story.
This is the part of a World Cup that media plans pretend doesn’t exist. Every sponsorship deck, every reach curve, every campaign flight treats the tournament as a window: five weeks of elevated attention, bought at a premium, optimised hard, then closed. Success. The event ends, the dashboards get exported, everyone moves on to Christmas planning.
But that model describes how brands experience a World Cup, not how anyone else does.
A tournament, much like a match, is played in two halves. The first is the broadcast: scheduled, rights-managed, sold by the thirty-second slot. The second half starts at the final whistle and runs for years in group chats, edits and arguments. It is remixed and replayed time and time again as culture runs its editing process and decides which two or three seconds of a month-long event deserve to survive. And it is here, where value is actually created.
Attention is cheap. Memory has no rate card.
The uncomfortable truth is that brands can buy access to attention. They cannot buy retention.
Research found 52.8% of World Cup viewers stop watching once their national team is eliminated. In Australia, The Socceroos’ group match against Paraguay reached 4.84 million people, the most-watched World Cup game in SBS history and the second most-watched broadcast the network has ever aired. Then Egypt knocked Australia out on penalties, and in the fortnight that followed the biggest match not involving Australia reached 2.88 million. A 40% drop, for the pick of the knockout rounds.
The live audience is national, conditional and perishable. The cultural audience meanwhile is much harder to lose. Hear me out.
From an entire month of football in 2018, England’s collective memory retained roughly three things, and one of them was a waistcoat. Gareth Southgate’s M&S three-piece lifted waistcoat sales 35% mid-tournament, with sales doubling by the time the cup was lifted. The Museum of London and the National Football Museum actually argued over who got to display it.
M&S held the kit deal, sure, but nobody there had planned any of it. The brand didn’t create the meaning. Culture did. The waistcoat became a symbol of something larger: restraint, reliability, a particular version of Englishness. The smartest thing M&S did was recognise what was happening and stand close enough to benefit.
The 2026 edition? A bottle of salad dressing. Visiting fans discovered ranch, declared it a human right on Reddit, and bought so much of the stuff that the TSA issued carry-on warnings and airports from Philadelphia to LAX began stocking bottles post-security as World Cup souvenirs. This, according to Brandwatch, caused social mentions of ranch to increase 324% and google Searches to increase 586% between 11 June to 8 July. Hot on their heels, Kraft immediately rushed out a TSA-compliant ranch kit.
None of this was bought: Hidden Valley’s own marketing VP told CNN the fan interest happened organically. That is the strange power of culture: it will turn a bottle of salad dressing into a souvenir before the marketing department has finished writing the brief. Hidden Valley’s job was not to create the moment. It was to notice it quickly enough to participate. That’s the instinct we push for at WiredCo. The result? A meme became an object people could take home, and Hidden Valley saw a whopping 3,998% increase in social mentions.
And once something is in the public archive, it doesn’t sit still. In the days before Sunday’s final, the image that framed the whole occasion wasn’t from this tournament at all: it was the 2007 charity-shoot photograph of Messi cradling an infant Lamine Yamal. An eighteen-year-old picture, pulled from storage by the internet, did more to set the stakes than any promo FIFA cut. Messi’s 2022 trophy lift works the same way at scale: around 75 million likes, the most-liked Instagram post ever, still resurfacing four years on, and this week handed a devastating sequel by the sight of him watching Spain lift the same trophy.
Playing the second half.
None of this means abandoning the live moment. You can’t be remembered for something you weren’t part of after all. But the brief changes shape. The question stops being “how do we maximise exposure during the event” and becomes “what are we contributing that culture might choose to keep”. One brief produces beautiful thirty-second films. The other produces artefacts: a garment, a song, a photograph, something specific enough to argue over and open enough to be reinterpreted.
The 2026 tournament has produced its raw material: a three-year-old in a Paw Patrol hat, a few thousand bottles of ranch going home through customs, Messi’s last look at the trophy. Culture will now spend years deciding which of it endures, and which brands, if any, were woven in closely enough to endure with it. Almost none will be. Which leaves the question every brand should be sitting with now ahead of 2030.
If every brand can buy a moment, what does it take to create something people carry with them?
