World Cup 2026: Nike v Adidas – the brand battle

Kylian Mbappe, Erling Haaland, Cristiano Ronaldo and LeBron James are just some of the names who feature in Nike’s Rip the script World Cup advert.

Adidas’ Backyard Legends offering doesn’t scrimp on A-List talent either with Lamine Yamal, Jude Bellingham, Lionel Messi and Zinedine Zidane all included. Even an AI David Beckham makes an appearance.

They look more like Hollywood blockbusters than traditional adverts and those stars don’t come cheap.

The German brand spent a whopping £50m making theirs, according to reports. Neither company will disclose exactly how much they spent (we did ask), but you can be sure that the bills will run into tens of millions.

Eye-watering budgets are nothing new, but this year both Nike and Adidas have gone bigger and bolder than ever before.

If we’re judging purely on YouTube views, there’s only one winner at the time of writing.

Nike’s has pulled in 76 million views with Adidas’ ad on about seven million.

Camilo Andrade, the vice-president and general manager of Nike Global Football, said: “What has changed is the speed and shape of culture. In the digital age, stories travel faster, fragment faster, and get reinterpreted faster. That means the old model of one polished film doing all the work is no longer enough.

“With Rip The Script, we’ve built something broader: a football universe that lives both digitally and in real life.

“With this campaign in particular, success was never going to be measured only by how many people watched a film, but rather how we open the world up to give fans, players and creators something they could interpret, remix and take further themselves.

“When that starts happening, you know the work is moving beyond advertising and becoming part of football culture.”