Tell me if you’ve heard this one before: A big-budget blockbuster World Cup ad from a footwear giant features a laundry list of star players, celebrities, and a storyline that revolves around a big game in an unexpected place or with unexpected characters.
This could describe Nike’s classic 2002 “Cage” ad, Adidas’s 2006 “José” ad, Nike’s 2014 “Winner Stays” spot . . . You get the idea. But it’s also a broad summary of Adidas’s newest World Cup commercial, “Backyard Legends,” which launched on May 7 via star Timothée Chalamet’s Instagram.
The five-minute advertising epic opens with Oscar-nominated actor Chalamet trying to put together the greatest street soccer team ever, starting with Team USA star Trinity Rodman, Jude Bellingham of Real Madrid and Team England, and Spanish teen sensation Lamine Yamal of FC Barcelona.
Turns out there is a legendary street soccer crew that hasn’t been beaten since 1996, and Chalamet is determined to end their streak. We get a peek into the mysterious street ballers’ past, as they upset ’90s stars including David Beckham and Zinedine “Zizou” Zidane. Bad Bunny and Lionel Messi are there to take in the action.
Lola USA—a new Omnicom franken-agency forged in April when the holding company combined 180 and Adam&EveDDB New York—created the spot. The magic trick it pulls off is how it manages to take a less-than unique story device (famous players, unexpected game, etc.), and give it a new spin in a way that lives up to both the hype and the occasion of the world’s biggest sporting event.
It might just be the best World Cup ad from the Three Stripes in 20 years.
Historical precedent
Like I said, the fantasy draft football squad device is nothing new to mark a World Cup. In 2002, Nike put Manchester United legend Eric Cantona in the Chalamet role, recruiting star players to participate in a secret street ball tournament on a container ship in the middle of the ocean. The swoosh was back at it again in 2014 with “Winner Stays,” in which teens pick teams from a ridiculously fun player pool.
Adidas itself helped originate this concept back in 2006 with “José,” in which two kids—on a remarkably familiar apartment-lined street pitch—pick their ultimate teams, with the help of impressive VFX to bring back luminaries of the past like German legend Franz Beckenbauer and French star Michel Platini.
Since then, Adidas’s World Cup advertising has been a bit of a mixed bag of concepts.
Its “Cantina” spot for the 2010 World Cup is easily the most original, somehow seamlessly mixing soccer stars with Daft Punk, Snoop Dogg, Jay Baruchel, and the Gallagher brothers of Oasis fame into the Mos Eisley cantina scenes from the original Star Wars.
Epic.
In 2014, “The Dream,” directed by City of God’s Fernando Meirelles, starred Lionel Messi with the requisite laundry list of Adidas-sponsored stars from various countries, including Dani Alves, Luis Suárez, Robin van Persie, Bastian Schweinsteiger, and Xavier “Xavi” Hernández. It’s a pretty intense, dramatized look at the training and pressure on these stars. No laughs here.
For the 2018 tournament, the spot was called “Creativity Is the Answer,” which sounds like the name of a panel at an advertising conference. This was a mishmash of soccer stars (including Messi, France’s Paul Pogba, and Egypt’s Mo Salah) with the likes of supermodel Karlie Kloss and multihyphenate artist Pharrell Williams in what looks like a mix between a concert and a soccer-themed bloodsport kumite. Frankly, it’s a bit of a hot mess—an insanely expensive hot mess.
Four years later, in 2022, the brand simplified and found its sense of humor with “Family Reunion.” Narrated by award-winning artist Stormzy, this spot imagined a collection of football stars (including, once again, Messi, along with Bellingham, Karim Benzema, and Son Heung-Min) as a goofy group of housemates (or cousins?) meeting up to go enjoy the tournament like some elite soccer social club.
Adidas’s best ever?
If you combine the concept of “José” with the goofiness of “Family Reunion” and the ambition of “Cantina,” you land on “Backyard Legends.”
Here Chalamet is at his Marty Supreme-esque manic best, and the footballers are also believably natural and funny. (If you’ve ever seen Messi’s work for Michelob Ultra or Lay’s, you know what an accomplishment that is.) Plus, the VFX-generated flashback looks of players like Zidane and Del Piero, not to mention Buzzcut Beckham, Blond Beckham, and Mohawk Beckham, are funny enough to ignore the whiff of uncanny AI.
As a celebrity star, and pseudo-avatar for everyday fans, Chalamet nails it. He’s no celebrity mercenary—he’s a real soccer fan. Anyone who cheers for Ligue 1 side Saint-Étienne is no run-of-the-mill bandwagon rider.
He also recently posted a social video supporting the girls’ softball team at his former high school, NYC’s LaGuardia (on a soccer field for some reason?), while rocking a Manhattan Kickers jacket (that’s the youth club he once played for, with whom he even competed against Liverpool’s Joe Gomez). As Men in Blazers founder Roger Bennett has said, he’s America’s ultimate football hipster, and here he truly earns that title.
The world-building and lore that Adidas manages to craft in five minutes is impressive, as is how genuinely fun it feels for everyone involved, not just the viewers. But perhaps its best move of all is that it ends before the supposed epic game even starts. We get a callback to 2006’s “José” with Auntie up in the apartment supplying the ball, and just as it’s all about to kick off, “Fin.”
Here’s hoping the brand leaves us excited and wanting more.
The 2026 World Cup will generate an extra $10.5 billion in global ad spending in the second quarter of this year, a gain of 1.1% compared to non-tournament years, according to a projection by marketing research firm WARC Media. That’s all just the cost of buying ad space, and doesn’t even account for the cost of actually making the ads and other brand work.
Much like they do for the Super Bowl, World Cup advertisers often appear panicked by all that extra spending and attention, making ads that reek of more money than sense. Exhibit A for this year’s World Cup is Lay’s “Most Epic Watch Party.”
For “Backyard Legends,” it’s clear that Adidas has put a ton of cash on the screen, but the story’s clarity, characters’ energy, and brand’s creativity to evolve a familiar concept makes it a shrewd investment.