We picked 22 different people from 22 different countries, each with a negative opinion about someone else’s country or culture. We placed these rivals together in 2 teams to play a football match, promising only the winning team 11 Champions League tickets. In order to win the match, these rivals needed to learn how to communicate with each other and overcome their differences. Little by little, they started to play together as a team, gaining a mutual respect that eventually led to them celebrating goals as if they were friends. After the match was over, Pelé gave them further reason to be united by rewarding both teams, winner, and losers, with tickets for a Champions League game.

We met 327 candidates from 41 countries to guarantee we found the best individuals to take part in our experiment. During the shoot, we needed 7 multilingual translators to be able to understand our group of 22. We documented the experiment and created a short film as our hero piece, launching it on social media in over 50 countries. Aside from the main piece, we created ‘Pele’s Cut’, showing the POV of the legendary player.

The film received over 200M impressions and 17.4M engagements and was covered by 650 news sites all over the world. Most importantly, the film started a conversation about tolerance and integration.