1998 · 2010 · nine languages
Sixteen years, five host nations and a handful of three-minute films that people can still describe from memory. Underneath them: a fortnight of squad availability, a ball that will not repeat itself, and a phrase most of these brands were never allowed to say.
Start with the one that set the ceilingSet photography
Nike · Write the Future · 2010 · Wieden+Kennedy · dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu
Nike went outside the category and hired a director who had never made an advertisement, then handed him the structural question he had already built three features around: what does one moment do to the world downstream of it? Drogba collects the ball, and an entire country tips one way or the other. Rooney scores, and the film jumps to a knighthood and then a bingo hall. Ronaldo strikes from distance and a statue goes up — a joke, in 2010.
Three minutes, no narration, and an argument made entirely in pictures, because the global cut has to survive a muted phone screen in a market that will never hear the audio.
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The Brazil squad kills a delay by playing keepy-uppy through a terminal. Nobody speaks. It works with the sound off in a bar, which was rather the point — and it is remembered better than most of the football played that summer.
Three a side, no out-of-play, sudden death. The walls kept the ball in frame, which is the whole production argument.
No shoot window, no ball physics, no tournament result to date badly. Animation removed every variable the schedule could not absorb.
A club looks at the fixture list and offers two days. The shot list is finished before anyone arrives, the lighting is set on a stand-in, and the sequences that cannot be delivered twenty times in two hours are cut from the script. Everything that reads as swagger on screen was solved by somebody in high-vis at two in the morning.
Sanctioned
FIFA sells access in tiers, and the top one buys the tournament's name, its logo, the trophy likeness and the official ball. The list is short by design. Everybody else — Nike included, which is most of this site — advertises around the edges of four words it is not licensed to use, and the best films in the genre were made by the brand that could not say them.
Who is allowed to say the nameFour cycles, four countries. In every case the film was locked before anyone knew what would happen in them.
Brands that have run their own plays inside this same genre.
