The Heaviest Jersey turned a business problem into a brand experience. While many brands adopt leaks as part of their strategy to launch football kits, São Paulo F.C. can't do that because their kits are always almost the same (due to statute restrictions). So The Heaviest Jersey repurposed the leaking culture, by shifting its focus from the jersey design to the jersey history. Leaking not only the new kit, but everything it carries with it: 94 years of history, resilience, overcoming difficulties, glories and conquests. Creating a 1.2TB jersey image impossible to download, but also impossible to ignore.

Nowadays, it's impossible to launch a football jersey without it being leaked before the official launch. And it became a problem for clubs like São Paulo F.C., which has a strict and traditional statute that prevents any design innovations on kits. But, if on one hand São Paulo's jersey can't change so much, on the other it means it has had a strong identity throughout its history.

And there is a popular expression in the Brazilian football culture for successful clubs which have plenty of trophies, glories and history. They say this kind of club has a "camisa pesada", which in English means "heavy jersey". The stronger the club, the heavier the jersey. This topic permeates all aspects of football: new signings, new sponsorship, players' performances. To be at a club with a heavy jersey, you need to be worthy of wearing it and supporting its weight.

New Balance is a well-known sports brand and has recently joined the football world. In the last few years, the brand has sponsored clubs like Liverpool, Porto and Sevilla – all based in Europe.

In 2020, New Balance arrived in Brazil through a small club called Bragantino. But, in 2024, the brand announced the sponsorship of São Paulo FC, one of the top 3 clubs in Brazil.

Beyond communicating New Balance’s partnership, our goal also was to raise brand awareness in the local market and create a connection with the fans as we know the relationship between football clubs and fans is all about passion.

The task was not simple as Adidas was the previous sponsor for 5 years, but we had other challenges: we couldn't raise awareness through design innovation (as the club has the strictest design rules), and we had only a U$40k budget.

Nowadays, it's impossible to launch a football jersey without it being leaked before the official launch. And it became a problem for clubs like São Paulo F.C., which has a strict statute that prevents any design innovations on kits. But, if on one hand São Paulo's jersey can't be changed, on the other it means the same jersey has been through many glories and important moments over 94 years. So we decided if a jersey image would be leaked, it would carry all of this history.

We loaded all São Paulo’s history onto the Metadata of the new 2024 jersey kit image: all matches, squads, goals, stadium data, training center, idols, and much more. Creating a 1.2TB file, making it impossible to download it in a traditional way. So instead of fans focusing the discussion on the new design, they focused on how the brand recognizes their history.

New Balance chose São Paulo F.C. because it's a club with fans throughout the 26 Brazilian states, bringing greater visibility. So, the main objective was to create a deeper connection with all of these fans throughout Brazil. Therefore digital channels were key for them. Most of São Paulo's fans from other states haven't even watched a São Paulo match in person.

And as New Balance is generally perceived in Brazil as a casual brand, they also wanted to create awareness in the football category. That’s why more than highlighting a passion between supporters and the club, the brand decided to go deeper into football culture and show football culture knowledge.

Most web images are a few hundred kilobytes. Pro cameras images, however, reach up to 50 megabytes. Our image exceeded these standards by 24,000 times, ending up with 1.2 terabytes.

To do this, we accessed the image’s information segment through Exif, a format that captures details like camera settings and dates. Unfortunately, this format accepts only 40 kilobytes of data, which weren't enough for us.

So, with help of Custom Software, we developed a software in C++ that embedded 4,468 pages of the club's history in the image file, preserving the data and expanding the file to 1.2 terabytes.

Influencers and famous players like James Rodríguez and Lucas Moura invited fans on social to download the file. After failing to do so, everyone was redirected to a pre-sale, where they could buy the jersey without seeing its design, just based on the club's history.

The new campaign made New Balance a trending topic on X in less than 9 minutes.

Leading São Paulo FC’s jersey to sell out in just 48 hours, during the pre-sale, even before the jersey’s design was revealed.

Campaign reached 21,7M impacts with 115 posts related between SPFC and New Balance in just 2 days. (In raw data, almost 97% of São Paulo FC fans)

73% positive mentions, (considering that another 27% are São Paulo’s rival teams’ fans who were not happy with the weight of São Paulo FC’s history)

86k new leads generated to New Balance’s website

00 (zero) downloads of the heaviest jersey image

R$ 0.00 invested in media

In Brazil, we have a slang expression to describe clubs with plenty of history and titles: "camisa pesada", which literally translates to "heavy jersey" in English. This cultural expression was vital to the concept of our work: if São Paulo, one of the most successful clubs in Brazil, has a heavy jersey, the jersey photo also has to be heavy.

That's why we put the club's entire history in the jersey leak, creating a 1.2 TB file loaded with glories. By celebrating São Paulo's history and heavy jersey, New Balance appealed to fans more than any traditional launch could.