Why We Love Football

The Controversy Paradox: the more unfair a game appears to be, the more people watch it. And the counter-argument that holds equally true: a perfectly fair game, with no disputed decisions and no injustice, would be a game nobody cared about. Every brand manager in the world should be taking notes.

On the 26th of June 2026, in Seattle, a country held its breath. Iran’s substitute Shoja Khalilzadeh had just poked the ball home in the 93rd minute. It would have been Iran’s first-ever World Cup knockout qualification.

The stadium erupted. The players ran. The fans wept.

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Then VAR intervened. Khalilzadeh was offside. The footage went viral.

Hundreds of millions who had not been watching went looking for the clip. This is football. And this is one of the most important lessons in brand building that most marketers will never study in a classroom.

Football has never been a fair game. The Hand of God in 1986. Zidane’s headbutt in 2006.

Suarez’s deliberate handball against Ghana in 2010, denying an African nation a World Cup semifinal. Each was a failure of the game. Each became the reason people who were not watching started watching.

FIFA is one of the most valuable sports brands on the planet, estimated at over $1.5 billion. It generates that value not by delivering a perfect product, but by delivering a product that is impossible to be indifferent about. The controversy is not a threat to the brand.

It is the brand’s primary distribution mechanism. Every disputed decision is free media. VAR was supposed to fix football.

It created new controversies faster than it resolved old ones. In brand terms, FIFA tried to manage its reputation by eliminating the source of complaint. Instead, it gave the complaint a higher resolution.

At the 2026 World Cup, Ghana’s coach Carlo Queiroz said “VAR went for a coffee” after his team was denied a clear penalty against England. In the final minutes of Portugal vs Croatia, Gvardiol’s stoppage-time equaliser was ruled out by a frame-by-frame review. Croatia argued the contact was unintentional.

Portugal advanced 2-1. Croatia went home. The internet did not.

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