Five minutes of Messi and Chalamet in a backyard

Most football campaigns announce themselves. A crowd roars, a boot strikes leather, a logo holds on black. Done in thirty seconds. The brief is awareness; the craft is optional.

Adidas just made a different call.

Ahead of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, the brand released a long-form film that runs close to five minutes. It is set almost entirely in a backyard. The two leads are Lionel Messi and Timothée Chalamet. The director is Xavier Dolan. There is no voiceover explaining what adidas stands for. There is no product demo. There is barely a logo.

It is one of the more confident pieces of brand filmmaking to come out of sport in years, and it is worth thinking through what that confidence actually costs.

Why five minutes is harder than it sounds

A thirty-second spot is a controlled detonation. You know exactly where the attention is. The entire structure is engineered around a single moment of recognition or feeling, and every frame is load-bearing.

Five minutes is a different contract. You are asking someone to stay. And in 2025, that ask is not trivial. Scroll behaviour on social feeds has compressed the average viewing window for brand content to somewhere between two and eight seconds before a decision to stop or continue. Holding an audience past the one-minute mark, without a pre-roll lock on a paid placement, requires the film to actually earn it.

Adidas earns it here with casting and with restraint. Messi is the most recognisable footballer alive. Chalamet is arguably the most culturally present actor of his generation. Put them in an intimate setting and let them play, and the film does not need a plot. The audience leans in because the chemistry is genuinely watchable.

That sounds simple. It is not. Restraint in brand filmmaking is the hardest discipline to get a client to approve.

The craft argument

Xavier Dolan has a particular visual register. His films favour close framing, ambient light, and a kind of suspended emotional tension where the conversation happening on screen and the conversation the characters are avoiding are not the same thing. That register translates well here. The backyard setting keeps everything grounded. Two people, a ball, an afternoon. The production design is busy doing very little, which is expensive to pull off.

The choice of director is itself a signal. Dolan is not a commercial director. He is a filmmaker with a body of work that carries aesthetic weight. Bringing someone like that into a campaign is a statement about whose sensibility is leading the project. It tells the audience, and the industry, that adidas wanted something that could sit alongside editorial content rather than interrupt it.

That distinction matters more than it did five years ago. Audiences increasingly move between contexts without friction. A piece of brand content now competes not with other ads but with the short film a festival programmer just surfaced on Letterboxd. The bar is not the brand reel. The bar is cinema.

What this costs and who pays

Long-form brand film is not a budget decision. It is a distribution decision, and that is where most brands stall.

A thirty-second spot has a clear media plan behind it. You know the GRPs, the platform split, the frequency cap. The ROI model is uncomfortable but familiar. A five-minute film has no comparable playbook. You release it, you seed it, you hope the earned media carries it. That hope requires the film to be genuinely good, which requires giving the director actual authority, which requires the brand team to let go of approval instincts that exist for good historical reasons.

The brands that do this well have one thing in common. There is a single senior decision-maker on the client side who has decided to protect the work from the committee. That person is taking a professional risk. If the film lands, the credit diffuses across the org. If it does not, the accountability is personal.

Adidas has been in this territory before. The 1995 Eric Cantona film, directed in a single unbroken take with no dialogue except a child asking for an autograph, was a long-form bet for its era. The brand has a track record of trusting the frame. That track record does not make the decision easier. It makes the bar higher.

What the 2026 moment makes possible

The World Cup is the largest single advertising occasion in sport. The 2022 Qatar tournament drew a cumulative global audience of around five billion across all matches, according to FIFA figures. Every major sponsor faces the same problem: how do you say something that does not get lost in the noise of every other sponsor saying something at the same time?

One answer is scale. Spend more, place more, show up in more channels. This is the default and it produces the wallpaper effect. Audiences tune it out at the category level, not the brand level.

The other answer is salience. Make something specific enough and good enough that people choose to watch it and share it and talk about it. The media budget becomes secondary because the content generates its own distribution.

Adidas is betting on salience. The five-minute runtime is not inefficiency. It is a deliberate signal that the film is not trying to catch you; it is trying to deserve you. That is a harder position to hold under deadline and budget pressure. It is also the position more likely to produce something people remember in February 2027.

For agencies working in sport and culture, the film is a useful reference point. Not as a template, but as evidence of what is still possible when the craft gets protected. The question worth asking is not whether your client would greenlight something like this. The question is what would have to be true in your process for that conversation to even happen.

The implication for anyone making brand content

There is a version of this article that ends with a framework. Five steps to long-form brand film. A matrix. A checklist.

That would miss the point.

The adidas film works because someone decided that the experience of watching two remarkable people share a frame for five minutes was enough. No framework produces that decision. Taste does. Nerve does. A client relationship built on enough trust that the agency can say: we want to make something you cannot fully control, and we need you to believe that is worth it.

That conversation is hard to have. It is also the only conversation that produces work that lasts past the campaign flight.

The 2026 World Cup starts in June 2026. The brands that will be remembered in its aftermath are already in production. The ones still optimising for CPM will be invisible by July.