I have spent close to two decades helping Western brands enter China, and few things have changed as fast as the way Chinese companies market around the World Cup. Ten years ago the strategy was simple and expensive. You paid for the logo, you paid for the boards around the pitch, you paid for the thirty second spot, and you hoped people remembered your name. Today the best Chinese brands do something completely different. They build value with fans instead of buying attention from them.
A recent piece on Meihua, one of China’s main marketing case libraries, put it well. It traced the history of Chinese World Cup marketing as a move “from spending money to buy exposure” to “value co-creation.” That single line explains most of what a foreign brand needs to understand before it spends a yuan on football in China.
The old playbook: pay, appear, hope
For years the Chinese approach to global sports looked a lot like the Western one. A brand with a big budget bought official rights, placed its name next to the tournament, and treated exposure as the goal. The logic was that being seen next to something people love would transfer some of that love to you. It sometimes worked, but it was passive. The fan watched. The brand was decoration. And the price kept climbing while the payoff stayed flat.
The problem in China is sharper than in most markets. Chinese consumers scroll during the match. They live on Douyin, Xiaohongshu and WeChat, not only on the broadcast. A logo on a stadium board reaches a distracted eye. It does not start a conversation, and conversation is the currency that moves product in China.
What changed: from audience to participant
The shift the Meihua article describes is a shift in who does the work. In the old model the brand did everything and the fan received it. In the value co-creation model the fan does part of the work, because the brand gives them something worth acting on. A meme they want to remix. A challenge they want to join. A small piece of national pride they want to share. The brand supplies the spark and the audience supplies the reach.
This is why Chinese brands with no FIFA rights at all now generate more noise than official sponsors. They are not trying to own the tournament. They are trying to own a feeling around it, and feelings travel for free. If you want the specific tactics brands used this year to do exactly that, I covered them in detail here: how smart brands won the World Cup in China without spending millions.
How value co-creation actually looks
Three patterns show up again and again in the strong 2026 campaigns.
1. Give fans a role, not a message. Instead of telling people the brand loves football, the campaign invites them to do something. Predict a score, film a trick shot, dress up for the match. The brand becomes the host of a party rather than the sponsor of a screen.
2. Tie the brand to national emotion, carefully. Chinese football fans carry a complicated pride. They love the global game and they want their own country to matter in it. Brands that touch that feeling with respect, without forcing it, earn real warmth. Brands that fake it get mocked within hours.
3. Use athletes as stories, not billboards. A player endorsement in China works when the athlete carries a narrative the audience already cares about. The Messi wave of 2023 is the clearest recent example of how one athlete can move an entire market. I broke that down here: why the Messi mania started in China. And if you are weighing an athlete deal in general, this guide is a good place to start: celebrity athlete endorsement in China.
What Western brands get wrong
Most foreign brands I talk to still think about football in China as a media buy. They ask what it costs to appear. That is the wrong question. The right question is what you can give a Chinese fan that they will want to pass on. If you cannot answer that, buying exposure will only make an expensive silence louder.
The second mistake is treating China like a copy of the home market. A campaign that lands in Paris or London can feel flat or tone deaf in Shanghai. Chinese fans have their own humour, their own idols, their own platforms. Value co-creation only works when the value is built for them, in their language, on their apps.
Five practical steps for your next campaign
1. Decide the emotion first, the logo second. Pick one feeling you can honestly own around the tournament.
2. Build for Douyin and Xiaohongshu, not for the broadcast. That is where the match actually lives in China.
3. Give fans an action that takes ten seconds and feels fun to share.
4. If you use an athlete, use their story, not just their face.
5. Move fast. Chinese social conversation around a match rises and dies within hours, so pre approve your reactions before kickoff.
The takeaway
The Chinese World Cup market rewards brands that treat fans as partners, not as eyeballs. Buying exposure is the easy part and the weak part. Creating something fans want to carry is harder, and it is the whole game now. Foreign brands that understand this can compete with far bigger official sponsors, because in China reach is earned in the feed, not rented on the pitch.
Source (Chinese): ζ’ θ±η½, “δΈε½εηδΈηζ―θ₯ιθΏεε²οΌδ»η Έι±δΉ°ζε ε°δ»·εΌε ±η.” The article traces how Chinese brands moved from paying for raw exposure to co-creating value with fans, and argues that shared emotion now beats paid visibility.
About the author. Philip Chen is CEO of GMA (Gentlemen Marketing Agency), a digital marketing agency focused on the Chinese market. GMA has helped more than 1,000 brands grow in China across Baidu, WeChat, Douyin, Xiaohongshu and cross border e-commerce. Connect with Philip on LinkedIn.
