The Arithmetic of Dominance
According to data from audience measurement platform System1, Messi appears in 18 of the 80 major World Cup campaigns currently being tested across the United States, United Kingdom, and Argentina — placing him in approximately 22% of the tournament’s biggest advertising efforts. The brands behind those campaigns include top-tier FIFA sponsors Adidas, Michelob Ultra, and Lay’s, alongside a range of other advertisers that have calculated, correctly, that there is no safer investment in soccer marketing than the face of the sport’s greatest player appearing in a campaign just as that player steps onto the biggest stage in the game for the last time.
The calculation is understandable. Messi’s commercial track record is exceptional. During the 2022 Qatar World Cup, his campaigns consistently ranked among the highest-performing on social media. The emotional resonance of his 2022 tournament — in which he finally won the one trophy that had eluded him throughout his career — created a biographical narrative that advertisers have been able to access ever since: the greatest of all time, complete at last. That story has not expired. If anything, the 2026 tournament on North American soil, likely his farewell, gives it a final chapter that makes it more emotionally valuable than ever.
The Risk Nobody Talks About
What the concentration of Messi across 22% of World Cup advertising also creates, however, is a set of risks that are less frequently discussed in the brand strategy conversations that led to those deals. The most straightforward is diminishing returns through overexposure. When a consumer encounters Messi in an Adidas campaign, then a Michelob Ultra campaign, then a Lay’s campaign, and then several others, the emotional connection each brand is paying for starts to feel less like an exclusive relationship and more like a shared utility. The distinctive power of any one brand’s association with Messi is diluted by the sheer volume of other brands making the same association simultaneously.
This is the structural tension at the heart of celebrity endorsement economics. A celebrity’s value to a brand is partly a function of selectivity — the sense that this person has chosen to associate with you specifically. When that selectivity disappears, the endorsement becomes primarily a reach play rather than a meaning play, and the premium pricing that attaches to a figure like Messi is harder to justify against the actual brand-building return. Each of the 18 brands featuring him has purchased access to a global audience that loves Lionel Messi. What each brand may not have purchased is any genuine differentiation from the other 17.
Why Brands Keep Making This Choice Anyway
The persistence of celebrity concentration in major sports marketing — particularly around events like the World Cup — reflects a structural dynamic in how large brands make advertising decisions. The logic is both defensive and offensive. Not signing Messi when your competitor has signed Messi creates an asymmetric risk: you lose visibility in the category while they benefit from the association. Signing him means you are at least part of the story, even if you are one of many telling it. In the risk calculus of a large advertiser facing a board that will ask why the brand wasn’t part of the tournament’s signature moment, having Messi in the campaign is the answer to the question.
That calculus is rational at the individual brand level and collectively self-defeating at the category level, which is why it persists. No single brand has an incentive to break from it unilaterally. The brands that have found alternatives — Chobani, centering the coaches and parents behind the players, and Hyundai, building its campaign around teenage athletes the world doesn’t yet know — are operating from a different strategic premise: that distinctiveness in a saturated field is worth more than safety in a crowded one. Whether that premise generates better commercial outcomes than the Messi route is ultimately an empirical question that will be answered in the weeks after the tournament’s final whistle.
What is certain is that on June 11, when the World Cup opens on American soil, roughly one in four major advertising campaigns will share the same face. Some of those brands will break through. Others will be remembered only as part of the Messi background noise of the summer of 2026. The brands that will remember which outcome they got — and learn from it — are the ones worth watching.
