Welcome to B-side, where Crowd DNA looks at the underexplored side of cultural trends – the hidden tracks, the deep cuts and the rarities…
This tournament will be “104 Super Bowls.” FIFA president Gianni Infantino
He’s not talking about the quality of the football.
It’s about the density of the ad space, the entertainment model and the commercial architecture being imported wholesale from American sports.
In-stadium DJs. Halftime shows stretching to 24 minutes. National anthems played before club games. The star-spangled banner as the warm- up act. FIFA got a rehearsal at the Club World Cup last summer and leaned hard into every American custom it could find: 2026 will be the full production.
Here Cultural Strategiest Tom Meadows writes about how we’ve got here, the implications, and what the future holds for a sport he feels drifting away from him.
What does this mean for the football fan?
Somewhere in the UK every Saturday at 3pm, a man in his mid-forties is watching his team play on a dodgy Amazon Fire Stick he bought off someone at work. The picture cuts out twice. He doesn’t care. He’s seen every game this season. He knows the starting eleven, the formation, the injury list, the academy kid who’ll be first team in eighteen months. He has supported this club since he was seven years old. His uncle took him to his first match, lifted him over the turnstile, pressed a Bovril into his hands and pointed at the pitch like he was showing him something sacred. He was wowed. He was gone. He never stood a chance.
He just can’t afford the ticket anymore.
This is the central paradox of football in 2026. The sport has never been more culturally powerful, more globally watched, more commercially irresistible. And the people who built that power, who gave it its noise, its fury, its meaning, are being systematically priced out of it. It’s a pattern we know well from other cultural spaces. Fashion, music, gaming: when something becomes powerful enough, capital follows. Aesthetics get borrowed. Heritage gets mined. The culture gets cleaned up and repackaged for new audiences. And usually, the original community shrugs, adapts, moves on. Culture is porous. That’s how it works.
But football has a problem that fashion doesn’t. When someone appropriates your aesthetic, you can still dress that way. The thing itself remains yours.
When you are priced out of a stadium, you lose something you cannot simply reclaim.
The seat is gone. The chant dies a little. The atmosphere, that specific, irreproducible, ungovernable thing that makes football worth watching in the first place, thins out. And in its place comes someone who found it on an app, bought the ticket as an experience, left at 85 minutes to beat the crowds. They didn’t do anything wrong. They just treated it like entertainment rather than identity. Because for them, it is.
This is the distinction that matters. And the FIFA World Cup 2026, landing on North American soil for the first time since 1994, 104 matches across 16 host cities, the largest sporting event in history, is going to sharpen it into something genuinely uncomfortable. It’s a glittering representation of the structural exclusion at the heart of the sport – once ‘the beautiful game’, predicated on accessibility, it’s now a commercial one. The sport’s global reach is extraordinary; that it should attract cultural interest across categories is logical. But taken together, it represents something worth naming: football is now so culturally valuable that the financial infrastructure surrounding it is actively hostile to the people who created that value.
But there’s still time to get this right.
The atmosphere is the product. And it requires the people who are being priced out.
Football’s value to brands and broadcasters is built entirely on atmosphere, on the sense that something real, ungovernable and emotionally alive is happening. That atmosphere is generated by supporters with genuine skin in the game. The more those people are displaced, the more the atmosphere hollows. And once it hollows, the thing brands paid billions to be adjacent to no longer exists. One senior football journalist is already calling it: empty seats, muted crowds, broadcasters facing the nightmare of having paid for noise and getting silence. Brands operating in this space need to ask themselves honestly: are we investing in the ecosystem, or extracting from it?
Micro-season fans are a market. They are not the culture. The distinction matters.
2026 will introduce football to millions of American consumers encountering it seriously for the first time. That’s genuinely valuable and worth building for. But the brands treating event-fan engagement as a substitute for deeper community relationships are making a categorical error. Casual fans come for the spectacle. They stay, if they stay, because they find something that feels real. That realness cannot be manufactured from scratch. It is inherited from the supporters who were already there, who are currently being priced away from the infrastructure their presence is supposed to animate.
The Fire Stick is a warning. Read it as one.
When genuine fans, the ones brands claim as the source of their credibility, resort to piracy not out of laziness but out of financial exclusion, that is a structural signal with structural implications. 6.2 million British people accessed illegally streamed TV in 2025. Illegal sports streaming in the UK rose 33% in the first half of the year. In Spain, nearly half of all football viewers are watching illegally. The rights holders have made the legal experience inaccessible. The subscription stack required to watch your own team has become absurd. The real fan, the one who knows every stat, every formation, every academy prospect, is now outside the official economy entirely. At some point, every brand whose legitimacy depends on proximity to “real football culture” needs to reckon with the fact that real football culture has been priced away from the infrastructure they’re sponsoring. What are they actually paying for?
How can the corporations and businesses behind ‘Big Football’ connect back into grassroots communities – the engines behind the sport – and advocate for genuine fans?
Contact us to find out more about how we take the time to really understand fans, from football to fashion, at hello@crowddna.com.