Inside Major League Soccer’s World Cup year marketing playbook

This year, Major League Soccer has a rare marketing opportunity. When the FIFA World Cup comes to North America over the summer, soccer fandom, which has been growing in the US for years, has the potential to hit peak levels.

The league, which kicked off its 31st season last month, is looking to capitalize.

Major international events tend to bring huge spikes in fandom—look no further than this year’s Olympic hockey phenomenon. But attention spans are short, and when those events end, some people forget their fandom as fast as they found it—which is why MLS, along with some of its sponsors, has already mapped out its marketing playbook for the rest of the season with the goal of converting every-four-years fans into die-hard viewers.

“Leading up to the World Cup, during it, and after it, we’re trying to pull every lever at our disposal,” CMO Radhika Duggal told Marketing Brew. “Consumers who are so excited about soccer, so excited about the World Cup energy of 2026, we want them to realize we play that same game here in North America all season. We think if we can connect our teams—our players—to the World Cup, they’ll realize they should give us a try.”

So back

MLS opened its 2026 marketing in mid-February, about four months before the first World Cup match, with a campaign called “MLS Is Back.” The first spot, “The Call,” features a handful of MLS stars like Son Heung-Min and Diego Luna, Los Angeles FC team owner Magic Johnson, and soccer content creator Céline Dept.

For the last year, the league has been leveraging its celebrity owners, and celebrities in general, with some success, Duggal said, especially when it comes to welcoming new fans into the soccer world. Celebs help to create “a bridge between sports and culture,” she said, lending the league credibility, relevancy, and, of course, their often-massive social reach.

In the months leading up to the World Cup, players will be front and center in MLS marketing materials, Duggal added. The goal is to make them, and soccer in turn, feel more accessible, while underscoring that some of the national team members also play domestically for much of the rest of the year.

“People fall in love with other people,” Duggal said. The goal is “to make sure that consumers know that our players are not only top-notch soccer players, because they are, they’re playing for their national team, but they’re also people.”

Weekend warriors

The second component of the “MLS Is Back” campaign includes ads that Duggal referred to as “product marketing,” though they’re really promoting events: Saturday and Sunday night MLS games. The Saturday spots emphasize the league’s rivalries, while “Sundays Are Made for This” is meant to position the night as a time to get excited about soccer, as opposed to simply unwinding.

A matchup between two of the biggest stars in the league—Son and Leo Messi—kicked off this year’s season, clocking the highest opening weekend attendance in MLS history, drawing more than 387,000 fans for an average of about 26,000 per match, up 5% from last year, according to the league.

This season, Saturday night soccer is sponsored by Walmart, while Sunday night games are presented by Continental Tire. Walmart inked a multiyear deal with MLS that kicked off at last year’s Leagues Cup tournament, and Kim Tunick, the retailer’s head of brand experiences and partnerships, said the arrangement was designed not only to capitalize on expanding soccer fandom, but to keep it going post-World Cup.

“Our actual ambition is to help grow soccer in America,” Tunick told us, later adding that “we are not here for a quick win.”

Already, Walmart and MLS hosted an in-person event in Los Angeles on opening weekend featuring men’s and women’s soccer legends. Experiential events will continue to be a major component of the partnership this year, Tunick said, especially during the World Cup, which is notoriously hard to access for some fans.

Continental Tire’s work in the soccer space isn’t particularly tied to the World Cup year, or even MLS; the company has been partnered with the league for more than 15 years, and also has a presence in other soccer leagues including the Premier League, Champions League, and La Liga, according to Head of Marketing Brian Beierwaltes. Continental Tire opted to up its investment in US soccer this year, he added, including via the Sunday Night Soccer sponsorship.

The decision to go bigger in soccer is backed by “strong ROI” from the MLS deal over the years and motivated by a desire “to be part of soccer fandom in the US” for years to come, Beierwaltes said in an email.

“We have found that soccer fans are receptive to Continental Tire and are willing to support us because we have been there for so long,” he said, later adding that some “feel we have contributed to making their sport better.”

After the Cup

Even though MLS will pause its season for seven weeks to make room for the World Cup this summer, Duggal said marketing efforts will continue, largely in the form of ads and physical activations in local MLS team markets. When the season resumes on the weekend of July 17, “we are focused on making the biggest deal we can out of those two restart days,” she said.

The All-Star Game comes up quickly after that on July 29, followed by the Leagues Cup between MLS and Liga MX on Aug. 4. Sponsors like Walmart will continue to play a role in promoting the sport during that time; Tunik said that Leagues Cup in particular is “incredibly important for us,” and that Walmart is planning to further its experiential activations there.

“You will not be able to miss Major League Soccer in the months of mid-July to early August,” Duggal said.

Looking further ahead, Duggal said she and her team are working to make MLS content, from soccer to storytelling, more easily accessible through distribution partnerships. This season, media rights partner Apple TV did away with its MLS Season Pass product, making games available to all subscribers, which Duggal said she thinks will be “hugely important” to bringing new fans into the league.

“We just need to be open and enable people to have access to us,” she said. “I want as many consumers to see it as possible, and I know there are other aims of the business, but my feeling is…we’ve got to be where consumers are.”