“I know about football, Benito, football,” growls Timothée Chalamet, speaking so fast into his phone that you’d almost miss it. Later, he says, “Tell Leo, this whole thing ends today.”
The identities of Leo and Benito become clear at the end of a five-and-a-half-minute film that became one of the standout commercials of the Fifa World Cup 2026. They are, of course, Lionel Messi and Bad Bunny, just two of a glittering cast of stars and world-class athletes that also includes Jude Bellingham, Lamine Yamal and Trinity Rodman.
By the magic of post-production, David Beckham, Zidane and Alessandro del Piero also appear, looking just as they did in the 1990s. Sharp-eyed viewers might also catch cameo appearances from Ousmane Dembélé, Raphinha, Pedri, Florian Wirtz and Santiago Giménez.
“It really was a special one for us,” says JD Jurentkuff, chief creative officer of Lola USA, speaking from the agency’s new Los Angeles office. Launched earlier this year, Lola USA brings together parts of 180 US and Adam&EveDDB New York as the North American arm of the Madrid-born creative agency. ‘Backyard Legends’ was its first major piece of work.
“We were working on it for over 20 months. Credit to Adidas for really trying to bring its partners in and expose us to as much of the Adidas philosophy as possible. It took us to factories and flew us to Herzogenaurach, Germany, to see the climate-controlled archive.
“It’s a white-glove experience. There are rows and rows of jerseys and bags and cleats. We saw all the old balls, the iconic US kits from 1994. All sorts of great little bits of Adidas history that we’ve sprinkled throughout that film.”
Adidas’s team of football experts also gave vital insight into some of the archetypes that appear, such as the tekkers, the bruisers, the skins and the guys in jeans.
Before going any further, Jurentkuff is keen to fill in the backstory behind Adidas’s ‘You Got This’ positioning. Research shows that a lot of young people are dropping out of sport at an early age. From parents giving lectures on the way home from a game to social media images and private coaches for children as young as seven or eight, many just feel it’s no fun any more.
The backyard – or, as Chalamet calls it, “a patch of concrete between apartment buildings” – is the one place where there is no pressure and no rules. That became the central idea for the new ad, a revolutionary approach given that Adidas has a roster of some of the biggest and best football stars in the world to put in the spotlight.
This “thing” that “ends today” turns out to be a three-on-three match against a legendary group of anonymous players – Ruthie, Isaac and Clive – who have been unbeaten under street rules for more than 30 years. Chalamet plays a highly strung superfan-manager who has assembled his dream team to try to end their winning streak.
He’s clearly stressed after promising that they’re on the way, but not everyone has turned up. Only Rodman and Bellingham are squeezed into his beat-up old car. We see him tapping the battered steering wheel in frustration as they wait for Yamal.
Snapping tetchily at the superstars who would normally be treated with fawning admiration, Chalamet relates the history of the legendary “local crew.”
Cut to flashback (“1996 or maybe 1995, I don’t argue about it,” according to Chalamet), the camera points to the sky to show a ball falling to earth and landing beneath Clive’s boot. In one of many Easter eggs for diehard football fans, it’s the black-and-white USA 1994 World Cup ball. Other designs from different years can be spotted throughout the film.
Chalamet relates how Isaac, Ruthie and Clive took down all comers, year after year, including Beckham, Del Piero and Zidane in 2002, all told in breathless awe as though every word is true.
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Jurentkuff tells The Drum: “It was so bold of Adidas to say, ‘We’re not going to make the spot about how great they are, but about a group of kids who have been playing in the backyard and haven’t been beaten in 30 years.’ Once we had that nugget and built around that, it just opened up so many things for us.”
Central to the spot is Chalamet’s “unreliable narrator” who tells these outrageously exaggerated stories. There’s one in every state and every town – urban legends about a crew who could beat the best in the world, if only they had the chance.
“It felt like a big unlock for us,” says Jurentkuff. “You take that pressure off the athletes to carry the whole story. You allow them to show up as themselves.”
It’s hard to imagine the film without Chalamet as the superfan-manager setting up the final showdown – and, indeed, he was the first choice for the part. “Authenticity is so important to Adidas and Timothée Chalamet has so much credibility as a fan. He gave us even more than we could have hoped for,” says Jurentkuff.
At one point, Chalamet starts riffing in French and English about Zizou. “That was him,” says Jurentkuff. “He was like, ‘Hey, I’ve got an idea about this Zidane thing. I’m gonna crank it up’ and, of course, we just let him run with it.”
Securing Chalamet and director Mark Molloy was only possible because of the exceptionally long lead time on a shoot that spanned four cities and two continents. “The majority of the film was shot in Spain, in Madrid and Barcelona,” says Jurentkuff. “Everybody is busy and it’s hard to get them in the same place. We did shoot Messi and Bad Bunny down in Miami, then Timothée, we ended up shooting in Los Angeles.”
Award-winning director Mark Molloy was the natural choice to handle the challenges. Not only could he handle dialogue and long-form storytelling, as shown by his Apple Underdogs films, which won a Cannes Film Grand Prix, but he also had experience placing people in scenes they were never actually in, thanks to his work on Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, which is set in Detroit and shot largely in Los Angeles.
That extended to characters who weren’t even on set at all, such as ‘Buzzcut Beckham,’ ‘Blonde Beckham’ and ‘Mohawk Beckham,’ who look convincingly real. Molloy brought in Untold Studios, where Ben Hampshire led the work of building the younger David Beckham.
Jurentkuff is candid about how much of that effect was manufactured: “A little bit of wizardry, or maybe a lot of wizardry, from some of our partners.”
Beckham himself was involved throughout, but not in the way viewers might assume. “We had his oversight, we had his buy-in, we had his approval, but we didn’t actually have him on set for those scenes.”
Molloy also came up with one of the funniest moments. The game is about to start, Clive shouts “Auntie” and the film cuts to a living room full of footballs, with a middle-aged woman sitting in a comfy chair, wearing a pair of slippers. She looks up from her phone and nonchalantly kicks a ball out of the window. We then realize that the balls falling from the sky have been coming from her top-floor apartment.
And that’s when the film ends, with the strapline ‘You Got This.’ Rodman, Yamal and Bellingham are now carrying the torch from Zidane, Beckham and Del Piero, who appeared in iconic Adidas ads of the 1990s. But we don’t get to see whether the 21st-century stars can beat the crew.
Acclaim for the ad has been stratospheric. On Instagram, it was the most-liked post Adidas has ever released. Sales are reportedly strong, too. But for Jurentkuff, the validation that meant the most was a message from his old client and good friend Tor Myhren, Apple’s vice-president of marketing communications.
“I got a text from Tor and he said, ‘Hey, man, I haven’t been this jealous of a piece of work in a long, long time.’ And that felt just so good because I know his creative bar is so high.”
The message carried particular weight because Jurentkuff had spent years learning what that creative bar looked like at TBWA\Media Arts Lab, where he worked as creative director alongside global chief creative officer Brett Anderson.
“I went there to have the opportunity to work with the highest-level creatives on the planet. It was one of the best decisions I ever made. There’s such a dedication to craft there and I was lucky enough to see what great looks like. Kudos to my team at Lola and my ECD, Mike Bachman, who brought that same mentality to spending the time to mold and craft this film.”
‘Backyard Legends’ was the first major work released by Lola USA, the agency’s newly formed US operation, arriving just two weeks after its launch was announced. “That was intentional,” says Jurentkuff. “We wanted to launch with something to share with the world and get our name out there.”
That strategy certainly paid off, bringing a lot of awareness to the newly formed agency.
“We’ve made a lot of new friends, talked to a lot of different brands and generated a lot of new business,” says Jurentkuff. “We have a very clear focus with this idea of ‘Crazy Ambition Makes Serious Things Happen.’ It’s our North Star, where we always want to be pushing creatively, but we know you’ve got to move the needle.”
It sounds like we’ll be seeing a lot more legendary work from Lola in the seasons to come.