The FIFA World Cup starts next Thursday.

Not next month. Next week. June 11, with matches kicking off simultaneously in Los Angeles, Mexico City, and Toronto. Forty-eight teams. A hundred and four matches. Sixteen host cities across the US, Mexico, and Canada. And a projected 6 billion viewers watching across 39 days, 73% of the world's population, per FIFA.

If you run a consumer brand, a retail app, or anything that touches eCommerce, the next six weeks are not a spectator sport.

Most brands think the opportunity here is about reach. More impressions, bigger placements, louder campaigns. It is not. The brands that will come out of this tournament with measurable revenue gains are the ones building somewhere for their customers to actually go and then showing up inside that place during the moments when fans are most emotionally alive.

That is a very different brief than "buy more media."

What £10.5 billion in ad spend actually means

Internet Retailing projects that the 2026 World Cup will drive a $10.5 billion uplift in global advertising spend during the quarter it takes place. That number sounds enormous and it is. But most of it flows into broadcast rights and traditional media placements that the majority of brands cannot afford and would not win even if they could.

The more interesting part of the picture sits underneath it. According to the same analysis, retail media will be the real winner of the 2026 World Cup. Not broadcast. Not social ads. Retail media, performance-driven placements inside apps, storefronts, and owned channels that activate around moments of consumer intent. Before a match, during a match, right after the final whistle. When the emotional temperature is high and people are already on their phones.

According to Numerator's latest survey, 32% of US consumers plan to watch the tournament, and of those, 89% expect to make at least one related purchase. That is a highly motivated, commercially ready audience. Numerator estimates World Cup shoppers could drive $7.5 billion in consumer spending in North America alone.

The three forces reshaping the playbook

Three things are true about how fans consume the 2026 World Cup that were not true in 2018 or even 2022 at this scale.

The second screen is now the primary screen for a lot of fans.

Research from WSC Sports and IBM's 2025 global sports fan study both point in the same direction: 83% of Gen Z viewers use multiple screens simultaneously during live sports. Multi-device usage across all age groups jumped from 27% to 29% between 2024 and 2025. And fans are not using that second screen passively. They are checking stats, chatting with friends, scrolling social, and buying things. During the match.

eMarketer data confirms that more than half of US soccer fans are likely to use a second screen during the 2026 World Cup specifically. That is the engagement window brands are competing for.

Purchase peaks are shorter and sharper.

Visualsoft's research on World Cup consumer behaviour shows that in 2026, shoppers are leaving purchases later than ever but converting faster when the moment hits. That is a function of mobile-first shopping: friction is lower, decision time is shorter, and the emotional trigger is whatever just happened on the pitch. A goal, a red card, an upset. The window opens and closes in minutes.

Creator-led discovery has replaced the broadcast campaign.

On TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, demand for World Cup products is shaped by creators, not ads. Fast fashion brands are already seeing this in jersey and accessory sales. Categories are growing beyond traditional sports retail because creators are turning national team kits into cultural objects, not just supporter merchandise. The numbers back it up: sales of Adidas’s official Trionda match ball are running 219% ahead of where Adidas ball sales were at the same point last year, per Soccer.com data reported by Modern Retail.

The fan is on their phone during the match, primed to buy, and they just found something through a creator. What they need next is a destination inside your app — not a generic homepage with a banner slapped on it.

What the brands spending big are actually doing

Look past the headline sponsorship numbers and the pattern becomes clear.

Nike launched a 12-week “Rip the Script” campaign created by Wieden+Kennedy, anchored by a six-minute film featuring Cristiano Ronaldo, Erling Haaland, Kim Kardashian, Young Miko, and more than 30 other athletes and cultural figures. But the film is the opening move, not the campaign. The actual strategy is 12 weeks of product drops, creator collaborations, and cultural activations designed to keep Nike present across different communities for every day of the tournament. Nike has historically built its World Cup presence around one cinematic hero moment. This year it deliberately stepped away from that in favour of sustained presence over time.

Adidas took a different route. Its “Home of Soccer” hubs span eight North American cities: New York, LA, Toronto, Houston, Atlanta, Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Monterrey. The NYC hub is 25,000 square feet inside Brooklyn Bridge Park, running June 13 to July 19, with free match screenings, creator studios, limited product drops, and a Panini customisation station. It is retail as fan experience. The store is inside the community gathering, not the other way around.

Home Depot launched “We All Have a Name”, starring USMNT striker Ricardo Pepi alongside Home Depot associates. The campaign connects the pride of having a name on a jersey to the pride of wearing one on an apron, and brings activations across multiple host cities including viewing parties and DIY fan zones tailored to each city’s culture.

As an official FIFA sponsor, Dove Men+Care built “Ritual House” activations in Kansas City, NYC, and Miami, tied to limited-edition products and more than 300 match tickets available across promotions. And Lay’s built what is arguably the most creative brief of the tournament: a WhatsApp Broadcast Channel through which Lionel Messi, David Beckham, Thierry Henry, Alexia Putellas, and Steve Carell will distribute voice notes, memes, and match-day debates directly to fans throughout the tournament. A messaging platform turned into a branded fan experience.

On the retail side, Macy’s launched “World Soccer HQ” and JCPenney’s SportsFanShop carries official World Cup gear through Fanatics. These are not campaign banners. They are destinations.

What this means if you don’t have a 25,000-square-foot hub in Brooklyn

Most brands do not have the budget for what Adidas is doing in New York. Most also do not need it, because they have something Adidas is spending tens of millions of dollars trying to create: a direct, already-installed relationship with their customer through an app on the customer's phone.

That app is your home of soccer. The question is whether it feels like one.

If a customer opens your app during halftime next Thursday, what do they find? If the answer is the same homepage they always find, a hero banner, a product grid, a search bar, then you have the asset but not the experience. The emotional temperature is high. They are on their phone. And you handed them a filing cabinet.

The brands winning this World Cup at the app layer are building in-app destinations that feel event-specific and time-sensitive:

• Match-day countdown Stories with shoppable product tags that update per fixture
• Prediction polls (“Who wins the group?”) that unlock a discount code if you get the result right
• Flash sale Banners that trigger within minutes of a match ending
• Swipe Card carousels where fans pick their nation’s kit Tinder-style, building a personalised shortlist and giving you zero-party preference data in the process
• Canvas hubs organised by country, editorial video blended with tappable product tiles, built to hold attention for three minutes instead of three seconds

None of these require a product sprint. They are the formats fans already know from the rest of their phone, stories, swipes, short video feeds, placed inside your owned channel so that tournament-moment discovery stays inside your brand ecosystem rather than bouncing to a competitor.

The proof is already there

BetBoom, one of Russia’s largest online betting platforms, uses Storyly to run gamified story campaigns around live sports events, polls, quizzes, and emoji reactions tied to specific matches. Their results: 34% CTR and an 84% emoji reaction rate on match-day campaigns. The engagement is not happening because bettors are inherently more engaged than shoppers. It is happening because the experience is built for the moment.

Decathlon, the world’s largest sporting goods retailer, uses the same logic in a retail context. Storyly’s in-app stories organised around sport-specific product guides and personalised recommendations drive a 31% CTR and contribute 1% of overall turnover. One percent of turnover from stories is not a small number at Decathlon’s scale.

Next week is not a drill

Tournament marketing plans are usually made for the next big event. The brands who will actually benefit from the 2026 World Cup are the ones who built their in-app experience before June 11, not the ones writing a post-mortem about what they should have done.

If you still have time, and with a week to go, you do, the build is faster than you might think. A dedicated World Cup destination inside your app does not require a development sprint. It requires a content decision and a deployment that can be done in hours.

The matches start next Thursday. More than half of the fans watching will have their phones in their hands at the same time. The emotional peaks are real, the purchase intent is high, and the window in each match is narrow.

The only question is whether your app is somewhere they end up or somewhere they leave to go somewhere else.

If you want to see what a World Cup-ready in-app experience looks like, explore Storyly’s Widget Library or talk to the team.