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I've spent the past week travelling through Sardinia with Lucia. The Gulf of Orosei is the kind of place that resets your standards for what a coastline is allowed to look like, but what stayed with me wasn't the views — it was how completely the island belongs to itself. Towns where the language isn't Italian, food that exists nowhere else because the recipe never needed to travel, and not a single global brand in sight.

Now back in the real world, the World Cup kicked off this afternoon with Mexico against South Africa — and the next six weeks are going to feel like one extended Super Bowl for the advertising industry. The opening exchanges are already live: Nike and Adidas going head to head with two completely different theories of what a football ad should be. But underneath the campaigns, something bigger is happening with FIFA itself. The tournament has become the most sophisticated commercial machine in the history of sport, and the more you look at how it's built, the clearer it gets that there's only one loser in the whole arrangement: the fans.

Enjoy the issue, and enjoy the football. And if you missed last week's piece on the NBA playoffs, it's worth a read — the Finals have been pure entertainment.

In today’s issue:

— Tom Mackay, Founder & Editor

In 1984, the Olympic swimming finals were held in a venue called the McDonald's Olympic Swim Stadium, because McDonald's had paid to build it. 7-Eleven built the velodrome. Los Angeles was the only city on earth willing to host those Games, and the private money that rescued them invented the commercial model every major sporting event has run on since. FIFA was among the first to copy it.

Today, forty-two years later, the World Cup kicks off on American soil — and the model is coming home for its most ambitious upgrade yet. The tournament that opens at the Estadio Azteca this afternoon will generate between $11 and $15 billion, nearly double Qatar. Every global sponsorship slot sold out for the first time in history. The final ticket that cost $1,600 four years ago now sits at $32,970 — and with 500 million requests for 7 million seats, FIFA didn't blink when Congress started asking questions.

Behind those numbers sits a decade of FIFA rebuilding what a World Cup actually sells. An expansion that multiplied the surface area available for sale. A premium experience FIFA stopped renting out and started owning — a 216% jump on a single revenue line. A tournament spread across sixteen cities that was engineered, in the contracts, to feel local in every one. The football starts today, but it stopped being about the sport some time ago. This is a money machine decades in the making and it's starting to feel like there's only one loser here: the fans.

👉 Read the full piece

The road down to Cala Gonone has no shoulder. It coils back on itself as if someone designed it to slow you down on purpose — to make you look at the Gulf of Orosei before you're allowed to reach it. From above, the water is a color that photographs never capture, the kind that makes you reach for a word and come up empty. At the port, three wooden boats are tied to the dock and an older man is repairing a net with the focus of someone who has been doing exactly this for decades. He doesn't look up.

I'm in Sardinia almost by accident. Someone recommended the Gulf of Orosei with that specific urgency people reserve for places they think of as their own secret. I'd landed in Olbia first — the airport, the main drag, the familiar geometry of chain hotels and duty-free shops — and felt the particular flatness of arriving somewhere and recognizing everything. The island from the plane had looked ancient and specific. The airport looked like every other airport.

The road to Cala Gonone is where that changes.

By the time I reach the port, I understand the hushed tones. Sardinian is a language that doesn't resemble Italian the way Galician doesn't resemble Spanish. The cultural codes here are so dense and so specific that after a few days I still feel like I've only touched the surface. The Phoenicians, the Romans, the Aragonese — all passed through, and the island absorbed them or expelled them, but remained recognizably itself. There is no global brand outpost in Cala Gonone. Not because it's hidden. Because there's no gap for one to fill.

👉 Read the full piece

In 2016, Dominic Wilcox opened an art exhibition in London called Play More. The audience couldn't read the wall text, had no opinions about typographic hierarchy, and didn't care whether the identity system was cohesive. They were dogs. And the show was, by most measures, brilliant.

Yes, we're doing this. An article about a dog art show. Stay with it.

Play More wasn't a PR stunt — or rather, it wasn't only a PR stunt. Wilcox redesigned every spatial assumption from scratch: paintings and sculptures hung at nose height, surfaces built to be sniffed and pawed through, red and green stripped from the palette entirely because dogs are dichromats — they see in blues, yellows, and a lot of grey. He commissioned original work from 45 artists, each briefed to think about what a dog might actually respond to. One piece was a tunnel of hanging ropes. Another, a wall of different-textured panels. A fire hydrant cast in bronze, positioned as sculpture. The show toured. It got written up everywhere. Dogs reportedly loved it.

He didn't simplify the exhibition — he displaced the designer's assumed user, and rebuilt from there.

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The last time a football ad felt like this, Brazil were dancing samba in the changing room. That was 2006.

Then Adidas dropped "Backyard Legends" — Timothée Chalamet on a street corner with Messi and Bad Bunny — and the football world figured the World Cup ad war was already settled. It wasn't. Nike answered with a five-minute short film where footballers play actors and actors play footballers: Channing Tatum as Erling Haaland's stunt double, the whole studio falling apart the second a real ball enters the scene.

Why it matters: The World Cup ad is the biggest canvas in global advertising, and this year it turned into a referendum on a single question: do you bring the superstars down to street level the way Adidas did, or pull everyone — Ronaldo, Kim Kardashian, Ted Lasso — under one roof the way Nike did? The line between advertising, sport, and pop culture has effectively dissolved, and Nike's bet is that the audience for a football campaign is no longer the football fan. For anyone building a brand around culture, that's the move worth studying.

👉 Watch the campaign