The World Cup Has No Audience. It Has Thousands of Them.
What the World Cup reveals about live culture in a fragmented era — and what brands need to do about it
Today’s post is by Maxine Gurevich, a member of our Future of Consumer & Culture team.
On February 9th, 128 million people watched Bad Bunny headline the Super Bowl halftime show. At the exact same moment, 5 million people watched Kid Rock headline a rival show organized by Turning Point USA — streaming simultaneously on Daily Wire+, OAN, and Real America’s Voice, with the explicit brief of giving Americans “an entertainment option that will be fun, excellent, and exciting for the entire family.”
Same game. Same moment. Two completely different halftime shows.
Trump called Bad Bunny’s performance “one of the worst, EVER.” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called it a celebration of culture. Both were right about what they were watching — they just weren’t watching the same event.
That’s the condition brands need to reckon with before they spend what they’re about to spend on World Cup activations. The default assumption — that a big enough event creates a big enough tent for everyone — is no longer reliable. The tent has been replaced by a thousand smaller, more intensely inhabited rooms.
Our Redefining Live study — 2,000 U.S. adults, nationally representative — found that live engagement no longer happens at a single point. It operates across three distinct layers. Real-Time Hype: the match, the broadcast, the livestream. Social Reverb: the group chats, watch parties, and social posts running alongside it. Cultural Afterglow: the memes, TikTok recaps, fan edits, and commentary that keep the moment alive for days or weeks after. Across every fandom we studied, fans engage with an average of 2–3 of these layers around any live experience — and 74% of Millennials and younger agree that what happens after a live event can matter more than the event itself.
Sports fans engage across all three. In our data, only 14% of sports fans attend in person. Another 33% watch the broadcast. But 36% live in the Cultural Afterglow — the recap, the highlight, the argument in the group chat three days later. The brands designing only for the 90 minutes on the pitch are designing for a minority of their actual audience.
76% of live-goers say they participate in live experiences because it makes them feel connected to a community. Not connected to everyone — to their community. Millennials and younger are 75% more likely than Gen X+ to feel they’ve missed out if they miss the immediate social conversation around a live event. Whether you were at the live event or watched the broadcast, or now part of a secondary or tertiary moment that goes viral — it all counts.
The World Cup won’t produce one cultural moment this summer. It will produce hundreds of them, distributed across fandoms, cities, languages, and layers simultaneously.
The campaigns that understand this are already showing up across all three layers. Lay’s hid Messi, Beckham, Thierry Henry, and Steve Carell at a supermarket and filmed real fan reactions when they were ambushed with a watch party invitation — a Social Reverb play before the tournament even starts.
Coca-Cola’s “Uncanned Emotions” is built entirely around unfiltered fan reactions rather than gameplay, betting that the Afterglow layer — what people feel and share after a goal — travels further than the event itself.
Adidas’s “Backyard Legends” works differently — it’s a five-minute film that doesn’t try to reach one audience. It builds a single narrative container with enough distinct entry points that completely different communities walk in through different doors. A film fan comes for Timothée Chalamet. A Latin audience comes for Bad Bunny, sideline-watching with Messi in a visual that carries specific weight after his Super Bowl moment. Gen X nostalgia activates when a de-aged Beckham and Zidane lose to the neighborhood crew. Trinity Rodman opens the women’s football fandom. Each of them ends up feeling the same thing: this game belongs to everyone who plays free. That’s Cultural Afterglow architecture — a piece of content designed to circulate across communities that don’t otherwise share a feed.
The brands that win this World Cup won’t be the ones with the biggest sponsorship deals. They’ll be the ones that understand how live culture works now. The World Cup is no longer one shared moment — it’s hundreds of overlapping ones happening across fandoms, feeds, group chats, and communities at once. The opportunity isn’t just to show up at kickoff. It’s to show up across the full experience: before the match, in the conversation, and long after the final whistle. Relevance this summer won’t come from being everywhere. It will come from showing up in the moments and communities that matter most.
Horizon Futures studies the future of live experience in our Redefining Live series — a three-part study on how culture, technology, and emotion are reshaping what “live” means for brands. Available on the Horizon Futures content hub.