The Creator Marketing Guide to the World Cup, Part 2 (HBBIP #145)

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As you might have noticed, there’s been a whole lot less World Cup content lately. As a non-soccer-knower, for a while there I kind of just assumed the World Cup would go on forever, but no! Apparently it really did reach a thrilling conclusion last Sunday, when Spain defeated Argentina by the scintillating scoreline of One to Zero. No offense to the soccer fans out there, or to Spain’s formidable midfield, but whatever that final game was made me pretty comfortable with my decision to be a non-soccer-knower.

Still, despite my snark about that championship snoozefest, which I’m sure was actually quite captivating from a tactical standpoint that I don’t understand, there were plenty of memorable moments along the way. Cape Verde’s inspirational run! Erling Haaland’s meme-powered takeover of your social feed! Lionel Messi’s repeated voodoo devil magic! (Trigger warning for all my English readers, and for my Egyptian and Swiss readers, if I have any; I assume my many Cape Verdean readers are still celebrating.) When you put it all together, this supersized spectacle might just take the cake as the most exciting sporting event of all time.

It also absolutely takes the cake as the most creator-centric sporting event of all time. By the way, that’s not a coincidence for what made it so exciting. While fans around the world will remember the 2026 World Cup for a whole host of reasons, as a creator marketer, I’ll remember it as the moment where creators fully came into their own on planet Earth’s grandest stage. Creators moved from a parallel viewing experience to front-and-center within FIFA’s official programming, while athletes harnessed social media to become global sensations.

Even if I still kind of think that soccer is ninety-plus minutes of waiting for stuff to almost happen, the World Cup was a wild ride, and I’ll miss it.

If you miss it too, then read on for a recap of the biggest brands, trends, and moments, as officially certified by Gianni Infantino CreatorIQ’s data. And if you really miss it, be sure to check out Part One of our recap here.

Alright, hydration break over. Let’s play ball!

The Top Sporting Event of the Quadrennial Cycle: the 2026 FIFA World Cup

Okay, so Spain won the actual World Cup: a solidly built juggernaut, and an established power within the soccer-world. But surely the *brands* who won the World Cup will present a different picture?

The Top World Cup Brands

Top five World Cup brands by global impressions, June 1 - July 20, 2026

Well, not really. As you’d expect, World Cup mainstays were all the rage here. It was a pretty dominant tournament for Adidas, for whom everything worked out ideally, minus an Argentina victory: Adidas backed both star athletes in the World Cup Final, not only the iconic Mr. Messi (more on him later), but also the emerging challenger Lamine Yamal of Spain. In fact, Messi’s "El Último Tango" boot reveal, which the GOAT posted on his owned Instagram channel, remained the single highest-performing post of the entire tournament. Meanwhile, the brand's stunt-driven playbook (the Trionda match ball sent to space, a craftsman hand-turning a ball into boots) continued generating standalone earned coverage through the knockout rounds.

One late-tournament standout was a Spanish-language business account's retelling of Cape Verde goalkeeper Vozinha's story, highlighting how a small, 18-person footwear brand backed him before anyone else believed in the tournament standout. The post generated $215k EMV on its own and was picked up by multiple brands' tags simultaneously, including Adidas, underscoring how far Vozinha and Cape Verde’s inspiring narratives traveled.

Top five World Cup brands by global impressions, June 1 - July 20, 2026

It was a similar story for engagements, which gives me a chance to talk about what the other top brands did well:

Michelob Ultra had an in-built advantage thanks to its sponsorship of the "Superior Player of the Match" program, which provided what proved to be the most reliably high-performing content pattern of any brand tracked at any scale. World Cup stars like Messi, Vinícius Júnior, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Vozinha each anchored multiple Player of the Match posts, meaning that the brand's biggest moments were built into the tournament's own rhythm, rather than dependent on a single campaign.

McDonald’s launched a soccer-centric campaign that bridged multiple generations of fans: Ronaldinho and Beckham held things steady for older millennials, while Son Heung-min and Lamine Yamal tie-ins carried the campaign with younger audiences.

Nike went full star power: the brand's hero campaign film, featuring Vinícius Júnior, Cristiano Ronaldo, LeBron James, Travis Scott, and Erling Haaland, was so culturally inevitable and unavoidable that it was recapped and shared across TikTok and Instagram by creators who typically cover anything but `soccer. A single TikTok breakdown of the film from U.K.-based streamer and sports fan Samham generated $216.7k EMV and 10.4M impressions.

Coca-Cola took a more regional approach to its creator marketing, tapping into local fandoms and networks in celebration of various World Cup rituals. The brand boasted the single largest (by Earned Media Value) creator partnership of the entire tournament, which came via Egyptian account Kora Plus, whose Mohamed Salah fan-reception content alone generated $5.6M EMV across 116 posts. Brazil's "figurinha" sticker campaign, which is a fascinating subculture in its own right, continued generating steady, distinct content throughout the tournament via creators like João Almeida and Matheus Costa.

You might not have Lenovo on your World Cup bingo card, but hey, tech companies can be cool too! Just ask CreatorIQ. As anyone who’s seen the official World Cup branding can attest to, Lenovo's format was consistent across dozens of posts: individual fans and creators thanking Lenovo for "the experience of a lifetime" at a given match, with this series of fan rewards extending all the way through the semifinal and final. Plus they got David Beckham to look semi-natural while holding a laptop, which is no small feat.

Finally, Kalshi’s emergence is a remarkable result for a new category—prediction markets—with no prior presence in World Cup creator marketing. This signals the start of a niche tournament-adjacent brand spend area: thanks to partnerships with star athletes and the ability to flood the zone with awareness-sparking messaging, prediction markets used the World Cup's cultural gravity to build a creator presence from a standing start, at a scale that rivaled brands with years of sports marketing history. This might just warrant a full HBBIP analysis down the line…

The Top World Cup Creators

Top five Creator Cup participants by global impressions, June 1 - July 20, 2026

For now, nearly rivaling the brands themselves by impressions count, we have creators. These rankings were pulled from a cohort of creators who played a formal role in a groundbreaking piece of official FIFA programming: on July 12, YouTube and FIFA staged the first-ever YouTube FIFA Creator Cup in New York’s Central Park—a live, globally streamed exhibition match captained by iShowSpeed, coached by football legends Cafu and Marco Materazzi, officiated by Pierluigi Collina, and rostered with creators commanding a combined 270 million subscribers.

And that was just one example of the way that FIFA is working with social media platforms and creators in an official capacity. Because there’s also…

Top five TikTok 'Creator Correspondents'  by global impressions, June 1 - July 20, 2026

FIFA and TikTok’s official crew, the top five of whom are shown here. This cohort consists of a hand-picked roster of 30 international "Creator Correspondents" whom FIFA and TikTok mobilized throughout the tournament to capture key moments and behind-the-scenes action.

Taken together, these initiatives demonstrate how creators have gone from generating content that ran parallel to official World Cup programming, to constituting an essential component of fans’ viewing experiences. In getting creators more involved, and tapping into their fanbases in order to reach expanded audiences, FIFA is following the lead of sports leagues across the globe, from the stateside Big Four to the Premier League to Formula 1.

The Top World Cup Athletes

But ultimately, with apologies to creators everywhere, the World Cup comes down to its primary stars: the athletes. And over the past seven weeks, those stars shined more brightly than ever. We tracked all the posts mentioning World Cup-related search terms, including the names of top athletes, to see who inspired the most discussion. I don’t think this should come as a surprise:

Top World Cup athletes by engagements, June 1 - July 20, 2026

As in the game of soccer itself, Messi stood head and shoulders above the rest of the field. (Metaphorically.) Sure, Ronaldo might have more international goals, and Haaland might be the new media darling, and Mbappé might have the all-time lead for World Cup goals, and Jude Bellingham is handsome, but Messi has nearly double the engagements! Think he’s still sad about losing in the final? He won’t be once he sees this.

Top World Cup athletes by impressions, June 1 - July 20, 2026

The gap only widens when it comes to impressions. Also, I want to reinforce a few particularly crazy things about this graph:

• Look at the scale we’re working with here. Messi garnered 16B impressions. Everyone on earth saw him twice. No wonder Adidas and Michelob Ultra did so well.
• The term ‘soccer’ garnered 11.1B impressions. We often say that an athlete transcends their given sport, but for Messi that’s a verifiable numerical truth.
• He did not, however, outpace ‘WorldCup,’ which generated 87.3B impressions. Everyone on earth tuned in ten times. No other event can match that sort of scale.
• It’s interesting to me, and not unexpected, that Haaland’s engagements outpaced his impressions. The people demand more Erling! One fun fact on this topic, which was probably mirrored countless times across the world: Mrs. HBBIP, who follows soccer even less than I do, assumed from his sudden omnipresence in her feed that Haaland was a social media influencer. Until I told her, she had no idea that he actually played soccer. Turns out he’s not bad!
• Some notable impressions totals further down the list:
• Yamal: 4.4B impressions. Not the most exciting tournament stat-wise for the young star. Just a World Cup victory, ho-hum. Alas, we don’t have totals for Keyne. Or Haaland’s raccoon.
• Rodri: 4.1B impressions. I bet he would trade that Golden Ball for a few billion more.
• Vozinha: 1.1B impressões. The guy had 50k followers before this whole thing started. Now he has his own sea slug. You can’t beat sports, man.
• Unai Simón: 9.6M impressions. He only allowed one goal all tournament, yet still can’t crack 10M impressions. Yet another reminder that goalies are underappreciated.

Ultimately, whether it ended in triumph or heartbreak, the moments that fans will remember from the World Cup were amplified, remixed, and made possible by social media. It’s a crowning achievement for the creator industry, and a sign of the increasing power that influencers wield across modern life at large.

See you back here in four years for the next one. I for one can’t wait.

*All data, unless otherwise specified, stems from CreatorIQ's public-facing brand leaderboards. We will never share performance metrics from a customer's CreatorIQ profile, or any brand's private information.

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