From the pitch to the press conference: What communicators learned at the 2026 World Cup
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From the pitch to the press conference: What communicators learned at the 2026 World Cup
Only one team gets to lift the FIFA World Cup. But in comms, victory isn’t a zero-sum game–anyone can win if they nail their story, know their audience, and hit the right timing.
Comms pros who only followed the action on the pitch may have missed vital learnings off-field. Here are three defining stories from the 2026 World Cup, and what communicators should learn from the biggest sporting event of the year.
1️⃣ Sometimes the strongest PR strategy is to let an organic story shine.
This year, many individual player arcs eclipsed their team narratives. One player can single-handedly inform how the whole world sees a team or country. It’s these personal sagas that attract global fandom–regardless of a team’s performance on the pitch.
Before the World Cup even began, popular Argentine influencer Valen Scarsini identified New Zealand footballer Tim Payne as the least-known World Cup player based on his sub-5,000 followers on Instagram. After seeing this, fans worldwide mass-followed Payne, now with more than 5 million followers. That singular moment turned him into the team’s biggest social media star before he even touched the field, giving fans a familiar face to cheer for, even if they didn’t follow him before the tournament.
Even superstars benefitted from savvy comms. Norway had Erling Haaland, an established footballer who proved to be a dominant force not only on the pitch, but now also in the cultural zeitgeist. Haaland leading the team’s “Viking Row” celebration energized fans globally, but what cemented him as an icon was how he embraced fan conversations on social media. He leaned into lighthearted online memes comparing him to characters from the film “White Chicks” and the anime “Dragon Ball Z”–acknowledging, and fueling, the content. By the end of the event, he was one of the tournament’s most culturally relevant players.
The comms take–Let organic moments happen: Communicators often focus on crafting and controlling the narrative. As hands-on as we’d like to be, it can pay to take a step back and recognize the strength of an emerging, organic story–especially one with a relatable human element. Embracing and amplifying these organic, personal athlete stories–as well as the ways they’re shaping the fan experience–drove invaluable visibility that is hard to replicate.
2️⃣ Your representatives–and their reputations amongst your audience–matter.
FIFA’s first-ever World Cup halftime show tapped Gen Z-favorite pop acts like BTS and Justin Bieber to reach young fans, but diehard soccer audiences were unamused. News outlets and celebrities like The Cure’s Robert Smith or Oasis’ Liam Gallagher bashed the show, with TIME’s Judy Berman calling it “blandly, sappily crowd-pleasing.” The sentiment was clear: the show tried harder to engage new fans than it did to speak to established football fandom.
However, FIFA got the same concept right at the tail-end of the event. IShowSpeed, a massively popular American livestreamer known for his obsession with football, performed his song “World Cup (Champions)“ at the closing ceremony. IShowSpeed also provided FIFA with an inroad to young, digital audiences. But this time, it did so through a celebrity whose platform is inseparable from his genuine passion for the sport–a decision that underpinned its positive reception amongst viewers. He wasn’t just a creator FIFA paid to perform–he was a genuine mouthpiece for a generation of young fans.
The comms take–You can’t feign being cool: No matter what industry you’re in, your core audience knows when your brand is faking it. And trying to is the easiest way to damage the relationship between your brand, its representatives, and your audience. Communicators need to identify who the right people are to authentically champion your brand, and who should be sidelined. The easiest way to engage an audience is with a spokesperson who already understands and shares their perspectives.
3️⃣ Before you make your point, acknowledge the elephant in the room.
The US Men’s National Team (USMNT) guaranteed their way out of Group Stage play after winning early matchups in dominant fashion. But the team’s final matchup–a low-stakes match against Türkiye–turned their momentum on its head. The USMNT lost 2-3, still advancing to the next round of play, but on the heels of an embarrassing loss.
When USMNT head coach Mauricio Pochettino entered the press room after the game, he attempted to stick to a key message: advancing beyond the Group Stage was victory enough. But that didn’t stop reporters from focusing on how the surprise loss to Türkiye would impact the team going forward.
Reporters flocked to cover the loss, and Pochettino reacted boldly to their interest in the defeat instead of the team’s advancement beyond the Group Stage. “The mood is like we [are going] home tonight and Türkiye is staying,” he said during a post-game press conference. “I need to [remind] you and everyone that we won the group. Sorry guys, we won.”
However, the USMNT coach later acknowledged the flaw in his media approach. “What would you like me to tell you?” Pochettino asked reporters. “Whatever I tell you, it’s not going to convince you. A newspaper is going to write whatever they think or whatever they want.” Pochettino wasn’t too far off.
The comms take–You can’t control the questions, but you can control the response: An unexpected event can invalidate a prepared message. Rather than blindly sticking to the talking points, spokespeople need to master the art of the thoughtful pivot. Media were going to cover the USMNT’s loss regardless, but Pochettino forfeited the opportunity to share his perspective by dismissing the premise of their questioning. Instead, he should have acknowledged the defeat, then bridged to what the learning was and then a perspective on the road ahead.
Ellyn Briggs’ sports journalism career is still in the early innings, but her culture work is already a home run
In June, Ellyn Briggs filed her first story in her first week at her first in-house reporter role at Front Office Sports. The following day, LeBron James had shared the story on X to his 50-something million followers. The piece, which explored how AI is driving a rampant misinformation crisis in sports, was one of those stories that seemed destined to make a splash—amplification from one of the greatest athletes of all time just drove home the point.
While the story was technically her first as a full-time staff writer, Briggs is hardly a rookie. She has bylined more than 30 original stories as a contributor since 2023. Her reporting and analysis have turned up in places like NBC News, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New York Times, CNBC, Business Insider, Rolling Stone, and NPR.
Yet despite Briggs’ impressive pedigree, her reporting career is arguably still in its early innings—but not by her own volition. “I always wanted to be a journalist,” she told Talking Points, recalling the writing camps and competitions she’d been doing since elementary school. But in college her family talked her out of the major. “You need to get a real degree. You can’t study journalism,” was the gist, so she took a business degree at American University and came in through a side door: a research firm, then, nearly four years at Morning Consult, where the work was public-facing but still, as she puts it, “researchy.”
As it turns out, that research background is the throughline she sees across her work today—and if you’ve read her stories, it’s not hard to tell. Her reporting is detailed, meticulous, and original, and she has a problem of speaking to “too many sources” by her own admission. They are, in many cases, the types of stories that don’t ever see the light of day until someone like Briggs decides to dig into them—like how athletes are moonlighting as photographers, or how the USMNT coach’s plain blue shirt turned into a retail hit during the World Cup.
Her beat—which she describes as how sports intersects with culture, media, and consumer behavior—is deliberately roomy. “Each week I’m going down a different rabbit hole that’s totally different than last week,” she says. Those rabbit holes are wonderfully specific: how finance dealmaking paused in New York during the Knicks finals run, the viral ritual of mascots unmasking at graduation, a Boston dad adopted by Scotland’s World Cup fans, or the science behind post-game fireworks in Major League Baseball—from global supply chain management to specialized software.
It’s not the type of work you’d expect to see from a traditional sports business outlet, but it’s becoming more common. Other media outlets, from Vanity Fair to Politico, are also paying attention to the peripheries of sports, Briggs argued recently in her reporting. Sports, in her view, is one of the last monocultures—the rare thing she and a brother of opposite worldview still share. She isn’t a box-score obsessive, despite growing up with a dad who played professional baseball and playing sports her “whole life.” At the same time, a well-reported story in The Wall Street Journal will stop her cold. The magic, she says, is “blending the business with the sports.”
Briggs’ ideas arrive in all different places. The social feed, for one, is admittedly “not the end-all, be-all,” but it’s still “a good arbiter of what is happening in the world.” Nail salons, too, can be a great source for stories, especially if you live two miles south of Ohio State. One of those nail-salon conversations ended up seeding a story on how college athletic departments are turning into media companies, she tells us.
That nose for the overlooked story is newly valuable at a moment when AI is upending the economics of the media industry—the same forces, as it happens, at the center of a piece that caught the eye of LeBron James. And while AI-generated summaries are impacting search traffic in a way that’s forced publishers to rethink how they approach media, it hasn’t had much effect on how Briggs thinks about the job.
She’s not a “performance marketer,” nor is she interested in chasing trends to appease whatever the algorithm happens to be rewarding any given week. “There’s evidence in the market that people are interested and care about people who put out original work.”
That, in the end, is the bet she’s making. As long as people are approaching storytelling from a place of curiosity and interest, she says, there will “always be a market for that.” And the metric she thinks about isn’t search rank or page views, either, but connecting with other people through her work. “I really am more interested in people sharing my stories with other people than… showing up at the top of a search feed.” The good thing for Briggs, though, is that her work seems to be doing both.
There’s a lesson in that for communicators, too—a reminder that reach isn’t the same as reputation, and that impact is measured one reader at a time.
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