The World Cup gives the World a great reason to gather

By Bren Byrne. Creative Strategist, Catapult

In the lead up to this year’s World Cup kick off, football did the one thing few other events can do … shaping thousands of separate lives and rituals into one global community.

Football no longer has an off-season, and that is a wonderful problem to have. The game has become a year-round companion: a sport, yes, but also a business, an entertainment product, a media machine, a brand platform and a piece of everyday cultural currency. For fans, broadcasters, sponsors, clubs and agencies, the appetite is endless. Football is a story we tell each other every single day, a shared language spoken in every city on earth.

And when the World Cup comes into view, that abundance is transformed into something greater. The tournament is no longer something people simply attend. It is something cities stage, communities shape and individuals step right inside.

FIFA’s 2026 World Cup will be the largest in the competition's history: 48 teams, 104 matches, 16 cities, three host nations. It will also be the most technologically rich tournament ever staged: players scanned into 3D avatars, spider cams and referee-view footage, semi-automated offside calls. There will even be AI stabilisation and data overlays designed to put fans inside the decision rather than outside it. All of it remarkable and all of it in service of something very human: the fan’s desire to feel closer to the shared emotional experience of the live game.

Proximity, not novelty. The replay, the angle, the behind-the-scenes clip - these are not extras bolted onto the match. They are how a modern fan experiences, debates and treasures the game. The best innovations don’t compete with that feeling. They deepen it. This is exactly where the opportunity lies for the people who build experiences for a living. The World Cup hands brands a rare invitation: not to interrupt this moment, but to add to it. 

And that feeling, gloriously, refuses to stay inside the stadium. The truest measure of the World Cup won't just be its scale, the fixtures, broadcast figures or attendance. It will be the sheer volume of collective joy it sets off around the planet, the roar that travels down a street, the stranger you hug, the kid watching their first match with their family. For every fan in a seat, millions more will live the tournament in a neighbourhood square, a fan festival, a bar, a park, a packed living room. The experience is no longer one place. It is a network of them, and everyone has a way in. The global game becomes a global gathering.

Being ticketless does not mean being outside the experience. At Mexico City's Zócalo, the FIFA Fan Festival will fold match viewing into music, food and civic celebration, with somewhere between 65,000 and 100,000 people expected every day in one of the city's grandest public spaces. Other host cities will create their own versions, some vast, some intimate.

The most memorable brand activations and engagements around sport have never tried to borrow emotion from a crowd; it helps the crowd express what it already feels. Sometimes that means building a place for people to gather. Sometimes it means helping a new fan find their way in. Sometimes it means strengthening an existing ritual rather than inventing a hollow new one. That is a more generous brief than any stunt, and a far more rewarding one for fans and brands alike.

This is why the World Cup remains football's most powerful promise. Its might has never simply been that the world watches. Its power is that the world participates, that for six weeks, billions of strangers briefly point in the same direction and feel, together, part of something larger than themselves.

At Catapult, we believe the strongest experiences are the ones that make a person feel part of something bigger without losing what made the moment theirs. That is exactly what this tournament does at its best: it turns a game into a shared culture and gives the world a reason to gather.

For the brands that grasp the opportunity of showing up in that space, there is something more valuable even than attention: the chance to help people feel the game together.