2021 brought the return of the Euros – the prestige stage of global football. But as with so many things returning after Covid, we had to ask, how can it return better than it used to be? In a sport mired in political corruption, deeply rooted homophobia, and toxic masculinity, how can we renew football for the next generation of athletes?

Nike’s Land of New Football celebrates the power of everyday footballers and their way of pushing football forward by playing on their own terms. It describes a new vision for global football: inclusive, open to all for finding joy in the sport, and it’s aware of the power of collective work against systemic obstacles. As a part of this campaign, we created New Football News, a reactive weekly news show that ran during the 2021 Euros on Nike’s Instagram.

Each episode was an antidote to traditional football reporting: instead of major stars stealing the show, we featured real young footballers from around the globe. We mixed in their backyard goals with highlights from the tournament in order to create a kind of equity between the two. We enlisted artists from around the globe to remix our logo and worked with content creators who were already redefining the way football appears online. What resulted was a quirky, inclusive, and fundamentally un-ad-like series that championed the real players of new football around the world.