This year’s FIFA World Cup marked a turning point for US soccer culture and the marketing opportunities for MLS. The final was viewed by more than 62.8 million people, almost triple the 22.3 million who watched the 2022 final in Qatar.
A number of factors contributed to this success. For one, the tournament was hosted across the US, Canada and Mexico, creating a sense of national investment that a tournament abroad could scarcely replicate. But it wasn’t just the home advantage that drove interest. The star power on and off the pitch helped draw in fans and casual viewers alike.
There’s no doubt that it was a huge moment and opportunity for brands, and many rose to the occasion, collectively investing over $3.5 billion toward the tournament. The question now is: how do you turn a flash-in-the-pan moment into something sustainable?
Major League Soccer (MLS) is one organization attempting to answer this question. The league has recently kicked off the largest coordinated marketing campaign in its history to see if it can successfully convert the one-time attentioninto long-lasting passion with the World Cup MLS marketing campaign.
MarketCast is vying for a highly competitive spot at SXSW 2027 to discuss what this strategy will look like in action with Cory Bildstein, Head of Partner Solutions & Insights at MLS, and our very own CEO, Lana Busignani.
To whet your appetites, here’s a sneak peek of what the panel Move Over World Cup: Can MLS Turn Hype into Habit? will cover. And if you’re already sold, why not head over to the SXSW website and give it a vote?
Passion > Attention
62.8 million viewers. That’s a lot of eyeballs. And a lot of attention.
For many brands, that alone justifies their World Cup ad spend. But what many fail to realize is that optimizing for attention, which is a moment that is neither positive nor negative, isn’t the same as optimizing for loyalty and passion.
Loyalty and passion are imbued with emotion and often stand the test of time. But they’re much more difficult to capture than attention. They require resonance, repeated emotional payoff, and consistency. Brands that want to move people by building lasting relationships need to show up all the time, not just at big tentpole events like the World Cup or Super Bowl.
What’s more, they need to know what to do once they’ve captured attention. This requires understanding which creative cues elicit genuine emotional responses, not just recall, and having a measurement model that can track emotional shifts, not merely exposure frequency.
Emotional Resonance as the New Playbook
When it comes to big moments like the World Cup, brands tend to default to traditional metrics such as reach and engagement. Reach can tell you who’s seen your ad, but emotional connection tells you whether it mattered.
They represent two very different outcomes, but for the longest time the industry has optimized for the first while assuming the second would follow.
It doesn’t.
Our sponsorship data consistently shows that the brands generating the strongest lifts in purchase consideration are the ones fans feel genuinely connected to, not the ones with the most impressions. Take F1. The brands that show up with genuine cultural fluency averaged a 34 point lift in purchase consideration among fans who recognized their involvement. On the other hand, brands that bought inventory without building that connection saw far less return.
This cements a core belief of ours: emotional resonance is not a soft metric.
The Perfect Match-Up
Another way to convert a moment into momentum is through a well-matched partnership.
However, before brands invest, they need to double down on audience intelligence. This doesn’t mean demographics. It means deeply understanding an audience’s emotional relationship with a league or sport.
And once brands do take the plunge and commit, measurement needs to follow the same logic. If the goal is long-term relationship building, the framework shouldn’t stop at exposure. Measuring emotional resonance, attitude shifts, and sentiment over time is key to understanding if anything has actually changed in how an audience relates to a brand, and whether your sponsorship investment is delivering.
World Cup MLS marketing: Keeping the Cultural Conversation Alive
Sustaining interest and passion beyond the big moment is the challenge, but some brands are already showing how it’s done.
MLS’s “Thanks World, We’ll Take It From Here” campaign is perhaps the clearest example. Launched just before the final, it is the largest coordinated marketing effort in league history. Bringing together Lionel Messi, MLS stars, and celebrity team owners including Magic Johnson, Matthew McConaughey, and David Beckham, the campaign ran across both semi-final games and the final itself.
But it wasn’t just a one-off moment. MLS has been collecting data throughout the tournament and is now using it to inform its post World Cup strategy.
Ultimately, the World Cup has given soccer in the US something it’s never had at this scale: Mass attention. But only time will tell if brands can sustain this excitement and turn it into something longer lasting.
If this blog has caught your attention and you’d like to learn more about World Cup MLS marketing strategy and how to convert attention into passion and loyalty, then make sure you get your vote in for MarketCast’s SXSW panel before 23 August 2026. Simply click on this link, log in, and vote.