Soccer.com
Everything Soccer
With the World Cup approaching, Soccer.com came to Athletics with an ambition to stand tall and visualize its place in soccer with a striking brand campaign. As longtime customers and brand loyalists, we jumped at the chance to help tell that story. Soccer.com is the heart and soul of soccer in America, a brand that broke onto the scene a decade before the ’94 World Cup, when soccer was still, for many people, a European import—or a “Eurosport” as their catalog was called then. In the more than forty years since, Soccer.com has helped the sport take root here, where it has developed its own uniquely American culture that powers how the game is played and lived. What do you call that all-encompassing culture? Everything Soccer.
Our Role:
Research
Creative Strategy
Campaign Concept
Video Storyboarding
Campaign Identity
Art Direction
Brand Voice
Motion Graphics
Collaborators:
Dress Code, Autumn Line
Heart and Soul of Soccer
Everything Soccer doesn’t live in the rarefied air of elite professional football. It lives where Soccer.com has made a name for itself and become indispensable—at weekend youth tournaments and five-a-side pickup games. While deeper-pocketed global apparel brands vie for supremacy of the top-tier pro game, Soccer.com wanted to cement its legacy on the ground level, where its constant support and involvement have made the biggest difference.
The Color of Everything
Since our campaign speaks to the game’s range and many kinds of fandom, we designed a punchy color palette that can shift across various geographic and team contexts, as well as draw from product photography. The core colors are saturated takes on classic Olympic colors: blue, yellow, black, green, and red. With these, we can speak to most teams and players in the world. For an especially tailored treatment (such as a new product launch on the website), we developed a system to sample color hues from product photography.
The Many Sides of Soccer
Soccer has many sides that extend beyond the game into culture. You have kit collectors who might not even play the game. There are armchair tacticians, weekend warriors, halftime orange-slice providers, youth academy stars, and more. To equip all of these customers, Soccer.com supplies a wide array of different products: cleats and jerseys, but also goals and pinnies and vintage World Cup apparel. To illustrate this range, we developed a kit (no pun intended) of simple copy constructs and a library of headlines that speak to the variety of products available on Soccer.com.
Campaign as Brand World
As a brand innovation studio, we approach campaigns more holistically than a traditional ad agency might. We don’t just create custom assets to run for a limited period of time. We also build the systems and tools to recreate, scale, and build on those assets. For Soccer.com, this means our Everything Soccer campaign extends beyond digital banners and CTV spots to the brand identity, website, and tools that make creating these branded assets more seamless.
