THE FAN CAM EFFECT

THE EVENT

Approximately 1.3 billion people watched the opening game of the World Cup. As a comparison, the Super Bowl generates around 125 million viewers, which makes me think there is something deeper than football.

In a hundred years, football went from a sideshow at the Olympics to forty-eight countries competing across three countries and an audience of almost 5 billion people during the month-long competition.

FIFA, controversies and all, figured out how to build something deeply emotional that pulls in people who don't even like sports.

Here's how they do it: you will see that a lot has to do with story because they treated it as a global serialized drama with a deep focus on narrative.

ACT ONE: THE UNDERDOG

It's almost never really Team A versus Team B. Nobody's tuning in for that.

What you get instead is a player carrying their country's entire history on their shoulders. The trophy that's eluded a generation, framed as the missing piece of a career. When Morocco reached the semi-finals in 2022, the coverage stopped being about football and became something else, a whole continent suddenly allowed to dream out loud.

Then there's the sound of it. In 2010, Shakira sang Waka Waka. This week, she sang Dai Dai. The lyrics haven't gotten more ambitious, I'll be diplomatic about it (if they need a writer, I’m here), but the whole branding shifts to match wherever the tournament lands.

That's destination storytelling.

Fast food chains do this too, quietly localizing the menu to whatever the regional comfort food is. I once watched an American friend try a ham and cheese sandwich at a French McDonald's... Offended, he didn't speak to me for 24 hours.

But here's the thing I actually remember. I can tell you exactly where I was on July 12th, 1998, July 9th, 2006, July 15th, 2018, and December 18th, 2022. Four France finals. And I don't otherwise watch football.

That's a story that built itself a place in my memory and checks back in every four years to make sure I still care.

ACT TWO: THE CINEMATIC UNIVERSE

This year, sixteen production teams across Canada, the US, and Mexico are filming fan perspectives throughout the tournament.

They are applying the Marvel approach, which basically involves plenty of films, one universe, and every fan becoming a character in it.

Around that, there's a whole other war happening between sponsors. Nike, Adidas, and Coca-Cola stopped doing product placement years ago. What they make now are cinematic short films with real stakes.

Nike's "Winner Stays" turned a neighborhood pickup game into an arena where kids morph into the pros they idolize. That ad is over a decade old, and people still talk about it.

Now brands link long films on YouTube with short clips the athletes shoot themselves, so the story keeps moving across every screen.

And then there's the part nobody can write. This year, a Somali referee, Omar Artan, the first from his country ever selected for the World Cup, was denied entry to the US and sent home before the tournament started. He landed back in Mogadishu to a welcome usually reserved for a winning team. Crowds, flags, a stadium full of people who showed up for him.

Nobody scripted that. But it's the same emotional shape as the rivalries this tournament has run on for decades, Zidane's headbutt in 2006, Beckham's red card in 1998. High-stakes failure, or in this case, high-stakes injustice, reads as tragedy instantly because we've already been taught how to feel it.

The World Cup just needs an audience that already knows how to recognize drama, and there it is, 1.3 billion in one night is quite the audience.

ACT THREE: THE QUEST

You don't need FIFA's budget to use FIFA's psychology.

Strip away the scale and what's left is something any business can borrow. Moneyball and Air are two movies wth basically the same playbook, just in a locker room and a shoe factory.

Nobody is actually selling the ninety minutes of a game. They're selling the journey toward something that matters, and every business, yes, including yours, is carrying some version of a monumental goal, whether you've ever framed it that way or not.

There's a channel on by Pooja Tripathi called Brooklyn Coffee Shop. Filmed in a coffee shop, but it’s not really about coffee at all. They're selling entertainment, the coffee is just where the camera happens to be pointed.

So what do you actually sell, versus what you've been telling people you sell?

We've been shaped by years of online perfection. First, it was curated success stories making everyone feel like garbage, now it's AI everything, making you wonder if you're even allowed to be a person anymore.

And through all of that, people still go for the underdog. Being small isn't a disadvantage here.

You don't need a Shakira anthem. But the same sounds, the same visuals, the same emotional notes across everything you put out, that repetition is what turns attention into familiarity and familiarity into trust.

The hardest shift, and the one actually changing things right now, I call it storyliving. Storytelling is something you do to an audience. Storyliving is something you build with them. It's the Fan Cam effect, the camera stops pointing at the team and starts pointing at the crowd. Your customers stop watching your story and start living inside it.

1.3 billion people just spent an evening (or morning) in front of a screen feeling something together about a game that, in the end, changes nothing about their lives.

That's the goal: To get the feeling.

That's why I cleared my schedule on July 19th, 2026.

— Théo

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