Nike's World Cup Ad: Helping Yankees Learn to Love the Game
Sarah Wildman
Foreign Policy Correspondent
Posted:
06/15/10
One of the beauties of the World Cup -- which kicked off last Friday -- is its sheer global reach, the millions of tiny stories, the historical narratives known by every 10-year-old in every country, it seems, other than the United States. The stars of today -- Ronaldinho, Drogba, Ronaldo, Robinho -- are revered, of course, but stand on the shoulders of those who came before them. Whole countries embrace the recounting of triumph and dashed hopes. When a team drops out, children sob in the streets. When a team advances, carnival ensues.
In 2006, I got a taste of that, reporting from Madrid, Brussels and Paris. In every city, in every bar, everywhere I went, it seemed, a World Cup game was on. In Paris, one night, waiting for a friend in a corner bistro, the owner handed out blue, white and red makeup sticks to draw the tri-color, the French flag, on our faces. I brought them to a birthday party the following night, an academic's apartment in the 15th arrondisement, and suddenly everyone was wearing the flag, cheek to cheek.
In our little un-air-conditioned first Madrid apartment, we had no cable. Public television broadcast the games but with a maddening time delay: when a goal was scored we would hear the cheers -- or groans -- up and down the street a full 15 seconds before our television revealed the scene. By the second round we fully abandoned our couch and hit local bars. In pubs wherever we went, packed to the gills with men and women, with every score it felt like the bar's floors would cave when we all jumped up to cheer.
For a quick immersion in the sheer energy and joy and totality that is the World Cup, Americans have an immediate fix: Watching celebrated Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu's [Babel, Amores Perros] glorious World Cup Nike advertisement. At three-plus minutes, it's a mini-movie, more than a simple commercial. In it several of the world's most famous soccer players are on the field. Iñárritu's brilliance (called by one Peruvian friend "his best movie") is not just in the stars on board for this project -- of which there are many -- but it is his ability to capture those precious moments that make or break careers, teams, and make World Cup history.
The basic structure of the movie/advertisement is this: As a player hustles down the field, in a series of quick, dramatic cuts, he is urged on by soccer commentators in 20 languages, cheered by crowds in streets, and, in the milliseconds before a goal is made or lost, the player has a series of dramatic fantasies that imagine the future after the game.
In one such fantasy sequence, Ronaldinho's fast footwork is imitated, downloaded, honored by Kobe Bryant.
In another, British football star Wayne Rooney goes two directions -- like a Choose Your Own Adventure on speed. Fantasy A: the goal is missed. Rooney ends up a vagrant, heating canned beans over a Bunsen burner in a garbage heap of a trailer park. Fantasy B: Rooney's goal makes its mark, he's knighted, he plays ping-pong with Roger Federer (coolly beating 16-time tennis grand slam winner, then his name is stamped on the wrists of hundreds of newborns in a hospital nursery. Slate's Seth Stevenson called the ad "epic, witty and wonderful" and "the greatest ad I've ever seen." All that and more, I'd say. (Click play below to watch):
In 2006, I got a taste of that, reporting from Madrid, Brussels and Paris. In every city, in every bar, everywhere I went, it seemed, a World Cup game was on. In Paris, one night, waiting for a friend in a corner bistro, the owner handed out blue, white and red makeup sticks to draw the tri-color, the French flag, on our faces. I brought them to a birthday party the following night, an academic's apartment in the 15th arrondisement, and suddenly everyone was wearing the flag, cheek to cheek.
In our little un-air-conditioned first Madrid apartment, we had no cable. Public television broadcast the games but with a maddening time delay: when a goal was scored we would hear the cheers -- or groans -- up and down the street a full 15 seconds before our television revealed the scene. By the second round we fully abandoned our couch and hit local bars. In pubs wherever we went, packed to the gills with men and women, with every score it felt like the bar's floors would cave when we all jumped up to cheer.
For a quick immersion in the sheer energy and joy and totality that is the World Cup, Americans have an immediate fix: Watching celebrated Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu's [Babel, Amores Perros] glorious World Cup Nike advertisement. At three-plus minutes, it's a mini-movie, more than a simple commercial. In it several of the world's most famous soccer players are on the field. Iñárritu's brilliance (called by one Peruvian friend "his best movie") is not just in the stars on board for this project -- of which there are many -- but it is his ability to capture those precious moments that make or break careers, teams, and make World Cup history.The basic structure of the movie/advertisement is this: As a player hustles down the field, in a series of quick, dramatic cuts, he is urged on by soccer commentators in 20 languages, cheered by crowds in streets, and, in the milliseconds before a goal is made or lost, the player has a series of dramatic fantasies that imagine the future after the game.
In one such fantasy sequence, Ronaldinho's fast footwork is imitated, downloaded, honored by Kobe Bryant.
In another, British football star Wayne Rooney goes two directions -- like a Choose Your Own Adventure on speed. Fantasy A: the goal is missed. Rooney ends up a vagrant, heating canned beans over a Bunsen burner in a garbage heap of a trailer park. Fantasy B: Rooney's goal makes its mark, he's knighted, he plays ping-pong with Roger Federer (coolly beating 16-time tennis grand slam winner, then his name is stamped on the wrists of hundreds of newborns in a hospital nursery. Slate's Seth Stevenson called the ad "epic, witty and wonderful" and "the greatest ad I've ever seen." All that and more, I'd say. (Click play below to watch):
If that whets your appetite, check out the Guardian's ridiculously awesome recreation of Saturday's U.K.-U.S. game using Lego players. The commentary is the real deal, the men are . . . Legoland men.
But some of what's missing for Americans requires a quick rehashing of the history that the rest of the globe learned with their mother's milk. For that there's the coffee-table book by ESPN called the "World Cup Companion," which takes readers on an easy-reading journey from the 1930s to 2006 when France's most celebrated player, the aging Zinadine Zidane, drove his skull into Marco Materazzi's upper chest, thus ending the chance for les bleus to win the cup (and inspiring dozens of video clips and animations around the world.) Says author Roger Bennett -- who is also producing a blog on the subject, the inspiration for the book came from realizing that what Americans needed "were the back-stories that I grew up with and without which you can't really appreciate the spectacle . . . [Football] is truly through which I learned everything -- nationalism, geography and politics."
And for keeping us up to speed how intellectuals and others are thinking about the Cup, read the New Republic's GoalPost Blog, commentary on Letras Libres (in Spanish), and Sports Illustrated, among others. Back to the game.
But some of what's missing for Americans requires a quick rehashing of the history that the rest of the globe learned with their mother's milk. For that there's the coffee-table book by ESPN called the "World Cup Companion," which takes readers on an easy-reading journey from the 1930s to 2006 when France's most celebrated player, the aging Zinadine Zidane, drove his skull into Marco Materazzi's upper chest, thus ending the chance for les bleus to win the cup (and inspiring dozens of video clips and animations around the world.) Says author Roger Bennett -- who is also producing a blog on the subject, the inspiration for the book came from realizing that what Americans needed "were the back-stories that I grew up with and without which you can't really appreciate the spectacle . . . [Football] is truly through which I learned everything -- nationalism, geography and politics."
And for keeping us up to speed how intellectuals and others are thinking about the Cup, read the New Republic's GoalPost Blog, commentary on Letras Libres (in Spanish), and Sports Illustrated, among others. Back to the game.