What World Cup fans are actually watching

Hello everyone, welcome to Edition 113!

I can’t believe it’s only one week SEG3 London! Unsurprisingly, a lot of the themes we’re delving into in this newsletter are going to be covered in person and in much more depth when we gather at Olympic Park next Thursday & Friday (18-19 June).

In case you missed it, we added Epic Games, Substack, Dentsu & Tottenham Hotspur to the lineup yesterday. If you haven’t got your ticket yet, a heads up that Early Bird passes end this Thursday (11th).

*A reminder: as a subscriber to this newsletter, you can get for 20% off your pass with the code TS3R20.

Back to the newsletter!

This week, I’m diving deep into the MTKG World Cup 2026 Fan Pulse report and touching on some of those aforementioned themes. In particular, around how the content creator is capturing the fan. And I’m sure you all want to know exactly how to secure that fleeting, all-important attention.

Plus Speed Reads of:

My first World Cup-watching experience was a memorable one. It was 2006, and I was a sixteen-year-old studying abroad in Japan. I was sitting on the living room floor with my host family, watching as Zinedine Zidane headbutted Marco Materazzi in a move that genuinely shocked and reverberated across the world. And that was before Twitter was really a thing. 

I’m not really a football fan, but I do love watching big matches like the World Cup. I get to root for different teams depending on how I feel (Italy, America, England, and, yes, Japan sometimes too!), and it’s a much more exciting event in my new home of London compared to what it was like growing up in New York City. 

Fast forward twenty years, and the way the World Cup reaches its audience has changed entirely, according to the MKTG World Cup 26 Fan Pulse report. They surveyed 3,000 fans across the UK, Spain, France, Germany and the US and found four major shifts in how people find and consume football globally.

Over half of fans who engage with creators (52%) now trust creator match insights more than TV pundits. 73% plan to follow creators throughout the tournament, rising to 85% in the US. Gen Z's creator engagement is roughly twice that of Gen X.

The shift from pundit to creator as the lens through which many engage with sport is about access, yes, but it’s also about trust.

Studio punditry was built, in part, on distance. It’s made up of former professionals in formal settings, with controlled discussion and deliberate authority. Creators sit inside the moment instead. When a referee blows for a soft penalty, a creator is shouting what the fan at home is already thinking, in roughly the same words, at roughly the same volume. This creates a sense of companionship and community, and is why Sky Sports FanZone is still remembered so fondly by many.

And FIFA itself is making decisions based on these audience behaviours.

TikTok was named FIFA's first-ever "Preferred Platform" for the 2026 World Cup - a deal that gives 30 Creator Correspondents press-style access to training sessions, bus arrivals and press conferences. It’s a deliberate strategic decision from them that reflects what we’ve talked about before; that not all attention is equal, and creator-driven attention carries something that broadcast can't manufacture - a sense that the person talking to you is on the same side of the screen as you.

And the commercial tail is real 57% of fans say they'll keep following the creators they discover during the tournament, with 52% saying they're willing to try products those creators recommend.

This is relevant for IP owners and brands outside football, too. Brands that treat creator partnerships as a primary channel, not a secondary layer to slide into a marketing plan’s ‘social’ budget, can build something that lasts.

If 52% of engaged fans already trust a creator's match insight over a TV pundit, that’s a signal about who your audience thinks is actually speaking for, and to, them, which we delve into in our "Why Creators Are Winning the Fan” session at SEG3 London 2026. Aptly speaking on it is MKTG’s Amar Singh, one of the very contributors to the report I’m covering now! He’ll dive even deeper into what platform behaviour tells us about where fan loyalty really lives, and why running one ambassador strategy across audiences that no longer share the same definition of authority tends to go quietly wrong.

In most markets, fandom starts with a club and deepens through identity and loyalty passed down across generations. But America is its own beast (and I use that word on purpose!), which makes tapping into American football soccer fans an entirely different operation. Though not one without an equally important scale.

Excitement for the 2026 World Cup among US fans is up 74% vs 2022, 29 points higher than Germany, the biggest jump of any market surveyed. Two in three US fans already follow football creators; that rises to 85% during the tournament. In the US, fans are drawn in through a player, a moment, or a narrative. Supporting a specific team ranked lower as a reason to watch than in any other market surveyed.

This is already visible in the commercial landscape with brands like Adidas creating its World Cup film "Backyard Legends", which leads with Timothée Chalamet, Messi, Bad Bunny, Lamine Yamal and Jude Bellingham, deliberately built around personalities and cultural pull rather than heritage. Miller Lite has even designed a limited-edition match ball for watch parties rather than for the pitch.

Beyond that, IShowSpeed released "World Cup (Champions)" on June 1, and it has charted in multiple countries, been included on FIFA's official tournament album, and yet didn’t leverage an existing legacy football club loyalty, fandom, athlete or IP.

What this data, and examples like IShowSpeed show, is that the creator is more and more becoming the gatekeeper and communicator of these drivers. 

The traditional commercial logic of a World Cup was simple - buy the broadcast, reach the audience. The structure around traditional broadcasting, however, has loosened.

YouTube has been granted global rights to stream the first ten minutes of every match for free. FIFA’s decision to do this taps into data that actively reflects how under-35s are consuming sports. After minute ten, under-35s reach for their phone, the FIFA app, social platforms, or watch-alongs with streamers. By giving them an option to watch those first ten minutes for free, they’re tapping into a more guaranteed way to capture that audience attention. 

But tapping out after ten minutes isn’t entirely disengagement. Gen Z are 20% more likely to watch games not featuring their home nation than Gen X fans, so the appetite is the same (if not greater), but their ways of engaging are different.

But it requires diversification. An opening up of more channels where you can tell stories to new audiences. And by doing so, loyalty can be built through those mediums i.e. podcasts (especially for us millennials), apps, games, a live blog etc.

As we wrote in Edition 106, the efficiency case for short-form has already been made. An analysis of 38 theatrical campaigns found audiences exposed to TikTok promotions were 172% more likely to buy, with 60% of those purchases coming from people linear TV never reached.

So to use a probably tired metaphor - the match is the hub, and there are many spokes that come from it. Using bespoke campaigns to hit all of those spokes is how you build your fandom beyond the ‘die hards’. 

The data in the report shows clearly that under-35s and over-35s consume football differently, and evaluate it differently, too.

Under-35s rank social media following, humour and public-speaking ability as meaningful markers of a player's marketability. Over-35s still lead with technical ability, reputation and club importance. 18-24-year-olds are almost as likely to follow the World Cup on TikTok as on TV. Over-35s are five times more likely to watch on TV than TikTok.

Harry Kane scored 69 goals this season, nearly three times as many as Lamine Yamal. He is objectively one of the most effective goal scorers in the world. His celebration has become a TikTok meme, comparing it to someone sliding a pizza into an oven. Yamal, meanwhile, has a multi-year deal with American Eagle built around his off-pitch style, direct creative input, and limited-edition product; the campaign wrapped around who he is rather than what he does. Oakley has been running the same logic with Mbappé since 2022.

Personality is overtaking prestige for younger fans. It isn’t because stats stopped mattering, but it’s because younger fans are watching on platforms where personality is the currency.

For IP owners in gaming, entertainment and sports beyond football, this generational split maps directly onto your fan base, too. The audience that discovers you on TikTok wants something different from the one that still reads a broadsheet. The product is the same, but the activations around it need to be different.

So remember: Run parallel strategies: platform-native personality content for younger fans, authoritative storytelling for older ones. The same player can serve both audiences; they just need to be activated differently depending on who's watching.

Mass moments are something we cover a lot (like the World Baseball Classic and the Winter Olympics), and the 2026 World Cup is certainly one of them. It has all of the five main drivers we’ve talked about: world building, consistency, high ratings, fierce fanbase and cultural relevancy.

FIFA’s strategy to appeal to different generations and different types of football fans through multiple verticals, channels, games and streams shows a truly forward-thinking approach to growing its fandom.

So while you may not be a legacy sporting organisation yourself, that strategy is what will attract the next-generation and casual fans to your brand/IP.

Enjoy the tournament, folks!

Hasbro has built an internal platform called CharacterOS and a new studio, Sixth Wall, that allows third parties to license fully authorised, voice-acted versions of its characters.

TL;DR

Why you should care

Gray Bright, the Chief Creative Officer & Co-Founder behind Hasbro’s AI Studio, is speaking about this very development at SEG3 London next week, in the When Fans Become Co-Creators session.

The problem Hasbro is solving isn't new; unauthorised use of characters has always existed, but the scale and ease of AI generation has made it existential. But their approach (as we have campaigned about in many editions!) isn't enforcement it’s finding new commercial models that keep them in control, whilst allowing them to deliver new experiences to fans.

The decision to work exclusively with real voice actors, rather than synthetic approximations, is also worth taking on board for anyone designing tools to engage fans to create content. Having a distinction between studio recordings for long-form content and licensed voice for dynamic interactions protects existing talent agreements while opening up entirely new commercial territory.

For IP owners thinking about their own strategy, the Hasbro model suggests the next step isn't just licensing your image or your logo, it's licensing your character's judgment. When everyone can create, who actually owns the outcome? That's the question Gray will be in the room to answer at SEG3 London next week.

Working on anything cool, or have a press release you would like us to cover? Send it in for the chance for it to be covered in next week’s edition!

That’s all for now, everyone - thanks again for reading the latest edition of The SEG3 Report. If you found it of interest, please do consider sharing with a colleague or friend who’d enjoy it too!