The whole world knows Brazilians’ passion for football. This is because Brazilians love beautiful football. And ESPN knows that, if they can choose, Brazilians will go for football. Especially if we’re talking about the prime time of Brazilian football: Sunday afternoon.

There was only one problem: during Brazilian elections, there is no national football on TV. And every Brazilian was used to leaving that part of their schedules open. And that part of their hearts. But nobody said anything about international football.

How to make the biggest football classic in the world become the most important attraction on an election Sunday? Like this: on their official fan page, ESPN Brasil posted images promoting the biggest classic in the world - Barcelona X Real Madrid – making fun of the elections’ heated debate.

In the week before the classic, and on the day of the match, Mundo ESPN aired posts to engage fans of each team. In only seven days, Mundo ESPN got more than 19 million views of the posts related to the game. Up to the day of the match, ESPN Brasil published 30 posts, which got over 288,000 people liking and 183 thousand sharing. There were more than 67,000 comments on those posts in one week. The result? ESPN Brasil was number one in pay-TV audience, and got its biggest overall audience in the last six years.

The match was also aired online, on WatchESPN. In total, more than one and a half million people were reached. A real slam.

During the week before the classic, as in the day of the match, ESPN’s official page on Facebook (http://facebook.com/mundoespn), and profile on Twitter (http://twitter.com/espnagora) uploaded 30 posts with relevant content regarding the match universe and interaction content with the fans. Website, TV and PR also collaborated to the integrated campaign.

The pieces brought the traditional heat of the election’s debate, focusing on the dispute between two global idols: Messi x Cristiano Ronaldo, as if they were competing against each other. They were Gods above the real competition regarding their teams.

The game was aired also through the webcast platform Watch ESPN (http://espn.com.br/watchespn). To access the content, please go to https://espni.go.com/player-admin-viewer/index.html and login with espnid-demo_brazil-0, and password demo_brazil.

Over 19 million people were reached on the social networks in just one week, with the MundoESPN fan page breaking its record for engagement: more than 288,000 likes, 183,000 shares and 67,000 comments. Radio, website, Twitter and WatchESPN also broke audience records.

But the most unusual thing was to get a new audience, achieved by Facebook, directly to cable TV. ESPN won over new subscribers, got 1.5 million new fans, and had the largest audience for Brazilian pay-TV that day - ahead of most open TV channels. For the first time an international football match was a champion in Brazilian ratings.