Cristiano Ronaldo has more followers on Instagram than Beyonce or Kim Kardashian. And football is the most popular sport on this planet. You would say making something entertaining for Nike FC featuring Cristiano would be an easy task, right? But with 3.5 billion football fans come 3.5 billion critics. And they never agree on anything.

We’ve decided to create a short film that would throw rocket fuel on an already inflammatory discussion the world of football has been entertaining for decades: Who’s the GOAT?

TL;DR Just watch that thing, it’s entertaining AF.

Nike Football’s overall business performance is tied to its World Cup performance. But the brand hadn’t made an impact at a World Cup since 2014 and was losing cultural relevance.

Recent campaigns focused on product and off-pitch politics. But its most culturally impactful campaigns, Joga Bonito, The Cage, and Write The Future were all rooted in passion for the game. In order to reclaim the brand’s stake in football culture, we needed to go back to its roots.

This World Cup was different to previous years. It marked the end of an era. With Ronaldo and Messi nearing the end of their careers, the world was asking, is Football running out of GOATs?

A quick glance at football headlines would tell you football is doomed. Even the youth we interviewed felt pessimistic: “We will never see this again football will change forever” - Iams, 19 Paris. The future of the game looked bleak and anything but joyful.

But FIFA’s data proved there’s always another GOAT. Nobody thought Thierry Henry could be out-paced until Mbappe. Or that Pele could be outscored, until Ronaldo.

We needed to show the next generation that there’s always another GOAT yet to come, and inspire the belief that it could be them.

TL;DR Change the conversation from “Who’s the GOAT?” to the GOAT is always yet to come.

The creative idea is fairly simple: to end the GOAT debate, scientists in a secretive scientific research facility create a multiverse in which players past and present can finally play against each other. What nobody realizes is that the best is yet to come. As futuristic Nike ball from the future slashes through the scene the new generation steps out of the shadows, ready to prove the future is always better.

We’ve used an array of techniques to bring players from the past and present together at the peak of their careers. De-aging key athletes, 2D de-aging, proprietary AI face-building tool, CG environments and set extensions, and extensive FX work. We launched our campaign at the start of the World Cup and kept the conversation going with athlete stand-alone pieces during the six weeks following.

The FootballVerse was the comeback Nike Football needed.

“Welcome back Nike Football” - YouTube Comment

The film garnered an astounding 3.2B impressions and trended #1 on YouTube, with the brand trending #1 on Google. It outperformed Nike’s engagement benchmarks by +4.5% and saw an increase of +.4pts in Nike’s Social Quality Score.

This cultural impact set the brand up for its most successful World Cup since 2014. Footballverse content increased traffic to Nike.com and the Nike App driving 3M impressions and acquiring 4.5K members. The success seen across paid, owned, and earned media led to $26.7M in sales demand (vs. $12.4M from 2018 WC) and an increase in overall Nike sales by +37% YoY.

This campaign even caught the attention of Phil Knight himself, who reached out to express his delight.

TL;DR We were more popular than the official sponsor of the World Cup.