Every World Cup brings the same conversations. Ticket prices rise, visa restrictions make travel difficult, sponsorships dominate every touchpoint, endless debates around sportswashing, governance and commercialisation take over headlines long before the first whistle is blown.

Yet despite all of this, millions of people still tune in. I'm one of them.

As much as I've questioned the decisions surrounding this tournament, I've also been counting down the days until I could watch my country play. I've looked forward to watching matches with friends, seeing independent designers reinterpret national jerseys, hearing new chants emerge and, admittedly, paying close attention to how brands show up during one of the biggest marketing moments in the world.

So, why do we keep coming back? Because people don't fall in love with organisations. They fall in love with culture.
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‍Football isn't just a sport. Its cultural infrastructure
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Football represents something much bigger than ninety minutes on a pitch. It carries childhood memories, family traditions, national identity and shared rituals that span generations. Every four years, the World Cup creates one of the few remaining moments of truly collective attention. Friends reorganise their weekends. Families gather around televisions. Casual fans suddenly become experts overnight.

That's not just entertainment. That's culture, and culture is remarkably resilient. This is where consumer psychology offers an interesting explanation. The World Cup reveals a powerful tension in the way we experience culture: we can feel deep love and connection to something while also questioning and criticising the systems behind it. These emotions can coexist, and understanding why helps us better comprehend how people build relationships with the cultural moments that matter most.
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How comfortable are we holding two truths at once?
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Psychologist Leon Festinger described cognitive dissonance as our ability to hold conflicting beliefs simultaneously. We can believe FIFA deserves criticism while also believing the World Cup is one of the most meaningful sporting events on earth.

Those ideas don't cancel each other out and don’t make us hypocrites. In fact, our criticism often exists because we care. If football meant nothing to us, there would be no outrage about governance, ticket pricing or access. The emotional investment comes first and keeps the sport true to its roots.

What marketers often misunderstand
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Brands frequently assume that criticism signals disengagement. But today's consumers don't work that way.

People increasingly expect brands, organisations and institutions to be accountable while remaining emotionally invested in what they represent. That's because loyalty isn't built on perfection. It's built on meaning.

Marketing professor Douglas Holt argues that the world's strongest brands become powerful when they become part of culture rather than simply products people buy. The World Cup demonstrates this perfectly. People's attachment isn't primarily to FIFA; it's to everything football represents in their lives.

This distinction matters, because when brands become culturally meaningful, criticism rarely destroys affinity. Instead, consumers demand that those brands live up to the role they've earned.
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The brands that win don't interrupt culture, they participate in it
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There is another lesson hidden in the tournament, brands don't invest billions because football has the best athletes.They invest because football captures something incredibly scarce: collective attention.

In a world where content is infinite and attention is increasingly fragmented, there are fewer and fewer moments where the world collectively stops and pays attention to the same thing at the same time. The World Cup remains one of those rare cultural moments where millions of people, across different countries and communities, experience the same stories, emotions and conversations in real time. For brands, that level of collective attention is incredibly valuable because it creates an opportunity to become part of a shared cultural memory, rather than simply another piece of content competing for attention.

That's marketing gold but the attention isn't generated by advertising alone. It's generated by stories, heroes, rivalries, hope, national pride and community.

These are emotional assets that brands cannot manufacture overnight. They exist because football has become woven into people's identities over decades. The smartest brands understand this. They don't interrupt the cultural moment, they contribute to it. 

A great example of this is Aguila's Resize the Price campaign, launched in April 2026. As the official sponsor of the Colombian national team, the beer brand identified a tension at the heart of football fandom: the desire to show national pride versus the increasing cost of official football shirts.

This year official football shirts were around $150 USD, almost a quarter of Colombia's monthly minimum wage, becoming inaccessible for many Colombian fans. So, instead of simply celebrating its sponsorship with ads, Aguila used its role within football culture to remove a barrier.

Through Resize the Price, fans could reduce the cost of their national team jersey by allowing Aguila's logo to be printed on it. The larger the logo, the greater the discount, with the biggest placement reducing the price up to 87%.

What makes this campaign powerful is that Aguila didn't ask fans to choose between their love for football and affordability, it created a way for more people to participate. 

This is the difference between sponsorship and cultural relevance. The brand wasn't simply borrowing the passion surrounding football; it was contributing something meaningful to the community that creates that passion in the first place. The result, more than 93% of buyers chose the largest logo and shirts were sold out in under two hours. 
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The real lesson
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Perhaps the biggest misconception is believing that love and criticism cannot coexist. The reality is the opposite. People criticise the things they care about most. 

Supporting your national team doesn't automatically mean endorsing every decision made by the organisation behind the tournament. Loving football doesn't require agreeing with every commercial or political decision surrounding it either. 

The game existed long before today's broadcasting deals, sponsorship models or governing bodies, and it will continue to exist because its meaning belongs to the people who play it, watch it and pass it on.

For marketers, that's the real lesson.

Don't mistake criticism for a lack of loyalty. Consumers don't build relationships with organisations because they're flawless. They build relationships because those organisations become part of their identity, their rituals and the communities they belong to and once something becomes culture, people don't stop caring when it becomes imperfect.

We care enough to want it to be better.

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