Future of Marketing Briefing: Soccer doesn’t need better marketing, just better marketers

The Chelsea kit launch is a useful illustration. 

The campaign had paid support behind it, a media plan, a rollout strategy. But none of that is what anyone remembers. What they remember is Justin Rose pulling up to the PGA Championship in the shirt — a moment so unexpected that broadcasters called it out on air, and social spent the next hour trying to work out whether it was a leak, a stunt, or an accident. What they remember is the Jim Skins moment: Skins is a livestreamer whose internet ubiquity turns anything he touches into a meme within the hour. Madonna, separately, has a long and genuine connection to Chelsea. Fenton knew both of those things, and knew that Skins had never met her. So he arranged it, got the location agreed, got Madonna’s team on board and then deliberately told Skins nothing. The reaction, when it happened in front of hundreds of thousands of people on a live stream, was unscripted. That was the point. You cannot buy that moment. You can only engineer the conditions for it, which requires knowing enough about how the internet works, and who matters within it, to see the connection before anyone else does.

Fenton’s explanation for how he got there is almost disarmingly simple. He is, he says, just active. Not in the sense that he lacks the tools — the social listening platforms, the trends dashboards, the analytics stack that every experienced marketer now runs as standard — but in the sense that none of them are the fulcrum for his thinking. Internet culture is, for him, a lived environment rather than a monitored one. “When you look at these things,” he said, “You have a choice. You can go work any marketing job and have a nine to five.” The kit launch is what the alternative looks like.

It is also the only way to explain how a single campaign held together across so many different registers without any of them feeling forced. There were the Nike-shot hero images — the kind of polished, billboard-ready artwork that Tesco Mobile liked enough to lift wholesale for a WhatsApp campaign within days of launch. There were the murals, the projections, the basketball court in Diadema — not a random Brazilian city but the hometown of David Luiz. There was Justin Rose at a golf major, Chelsea Green on a wrestling broadcast, a São Paulo activation in a market the Premier League largely ignores.

“All of the work we do is littered with Easter eggs,” said Fenton. “If you look closely, you’ll see it. We did the court in Sao Paulo because of the story with players like Estevao being from there and many people don’t know but Diadema (where the court is) is where David Luiz is from. It’s not like we just insert a court in a random city.”

It is almost enough to make a Liverpool supporter say something generous about Chelsea. Almost. But the caveat matters less than the point, which is that football needs more people who think the way Fenton does — because the sport has a remarkable capacity to work against itself. The 2026 World Cup has been a useful reminder of both things at once. FIFA took money from nations whose fans couldn’t get visas to attend. Ticket prices hit record highs. Empty seats were visible on day one. And yet a Cape Verde supporter was caught on camera in tears watching her country hold Spain, and an Ivorian fan sat alone in a bar full of Ecuadoreans who’d just beaten his team and got congratulated anyway.

Amar Singh, SVP at MKTG Sports and Entertainment and a former head of content at West Ham, spent a lot of time thinking about why — and what it means for the people charged with marketing it in a Substack article titled “The Ruler or the Jester? How thinking more like a brand can help a football club grow its fanbase”. Since it ran last fall, his stance has only hardened. 

“Football clubs have woken up to the power of brand strategy and are more comfortable with framing fans as consumers, who need to be marketed to effectively,” said Singh. Unlike brands, they don’t have to synthetically create an identity, they have history, heritage and community to build around, so it’s about deeply understanding what sets them apart from other clubs and using that as the foundation of growing their brand. 

Central to all of this, he continued, is understanding the fans that follow the club. For example, Real Madrid and Atletico Madrid show up in very different ways on social media, using very different tones of voice and there are reasons for that, Singh added. 

On that note, I’m reminded of something James Kirkham, co-founder of brand consultancy Iconic, which worked on the Chelsea campaign wtth Fenton told me: “There’s a reason people like Central Cee are dropping hundreds of thousands on a chain demonstrating his love for the club. People are fiercely proud and loyal, and we want to do things that support them and champion those moments.”

Most clubs know this. Fewer understand why. Fewer still hire for it.

Numbers to know

$100 billion: Projected generative search and chatbot revenues by 2030

500 million: Total monthly active users (MAUs) that Meta’s Threads has reached

956 million: Total MAUs Snapchat has reached

46%: Percentage by which advertiser participation in ChatGPT ads rose in one week

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