Run of the Show: Trophy Tour was FIFA’s Real Opening Act
Blog Post
To the world, the World Cup commenced on June 11, 2026, when Mexico defeated South Africa on home soil. But to those behind the event, it started over a year prior and kicked into high gear in January with a gold trophy and a strategy most brands never saw coming.
Despite the size and history of the World Cup, FIFA made the smart decision not to cede to its existing reputation to drum up excitement for the 2026 celebration. Not only did it activate at New York’s Fan Fest in June, 2025, but it spent five months before the first whistle blew building an audience that didn’t yet exist with the FIFA Trophy Tour by Coca-Cola: 75 stops, 30 FIFA member associations, 150-plus tour days, beginning January 3 in Riyadh.
Because FIFA knew that the brands that win a moment like this summer don't just build for the moment itself. They build the momentum that makes the moment possible in the first place.
What the Trophy Tour was
The event was seemingly simple: The original FIFA World Cup Trophy — 18-carat gold and one of the most recognizable objects in sports — traveled to 41 cities and territories across North America alone. The North American leg ran for 102 days, from February through June, covering the US, Canada, and Mexico before a single group-stage match was played. Tickets were free. The lines ran long. The object itself hadn’t changed, but the number of people who felt connected to it did.
The pre-event runway: the most underused part of a campaign?
Usually, brands leave audience building before the event to some pre-event promotion. But FIFA treated the months leading up to the World Cup — an already iconic event — as the primary opportunity to convert passive awareness into active fandom. To turn people who knew the World Cup was coming into people who had a real reason to care, tune in for the matches, or even travel to a Fan Festival.
This works because anticipation compounds. A Cornell University study found that people anticipating an experiential purchase reported significantly more pleasant feelings during the wait than people anticipating a material one. In other words, the wait for an experience can already feel like a (part of the) reward. A separate line of research from the same authors identified anticipation as one of the primary reasons live experiences generate more lasting happiness than material purchases.
IRL doesn’t just create lasting connection the day of. It can be used to manufacture anticipation and kick-start a sense of fandom long before the event happens, increasing the likelihood of a positive outcome during showtime.
A fan who waited in line to see the trophy in March, in their own city, is not the same fan who reads about the tournament in June. The former has a story and a personal memory with the organization. They have an emotional investment in the summer, and it was created before the summer even arrived.
How the summer was built in sequence
Solomon Group was lucky enough to be front and center to produce, design, and witness the benefits of FIFA’s lengthy campaign in action:
Fanatics Fest 2025, New York. — We produced FIFA's 2025 activation at Fanatics Fest more than a year before the tournament. That activation — for an event that grew from 70,000 to 125,000 attendees in a single year —introduced the FIFA brand to sports fans who maybe hadn't been thinking about soccer. It was the earliest signal that FIFA was treating the pre-tournament window as a strategic asset.
The result: 55,000 attendees at FIFA’s booth, placing it in the top three activations at the festival.
The Trophy Tour across North America. — We also led the activation for the FIFA World Cup Trophy Tour across North America, designing FanMart: a portable “shop” offering exclusive World Cup merch in exchange for joining FIFA’s social media or online communities.
The result: 256,048 people joined three FIFA WhatsApp channels; 34,129 registered for FIFA ID.
Atlanta FIFA Fan Festival. Selected from a highly competitive pool of over 60 agencies, we co-produced the 19-day festival at Centennial Olympic Park, which served as a culmination of a relationship and a strategy that had been building for over a year.
The result: A tour de force with over 500,000 total visitors, including 45,000 on the most-attended day. One of the most visited Fan Festivals in the US.
Takeaway
When does the audience building start? Not the promotion or the initial announcement, but the physical, in-person work of turning people who are vaguely aware into people who feel connected before the event begins. Possibly earlier than most brands currently think is necessary. It’s an investment that may be invisible in the final recap deck. But if the 2026 World Cup is any indication, it’s also a big reason why the final deck will look as impressive as it does.
This is exactly the work that the world’s biggest brands trust us to deliver. If you want to know what success might look like for your business, we’d love to talk.
