I did not expect to become this invested in the World Cup.
My children played soccer when they were little, so I spent plenty of years on the sidelines. I have supported Nashville SC and loved watching the sport find such an enthusiastic home in our city. But after my children outgrew the game, I never became someone who followed FIFA or rearranged my day around international soccer.
In fact, the negative headlines surrounding FIFA over the years made it fairly easy not to.
And yet, this summer, I found myself watching.
At first, it was the U.S. team. The fever was contagious, and there was something powerful about seeing people who may agree on very little suddenly referring to the players as “our boys.”
Then the U.S. was eliminated, and I kept watching.
This week, it was Spain and France—two teams I probably would not have stopped to watch a month ago.
That may be one of the most impressive things this tournament accomplished. It invited people who were not already devoted soccer fans into the story and gave us reasons to stay.
But it was not only the competition that held my attention.
It was the humanity surrounding it.
The faces of children standing beside players they had only seen on screens. The respect between opponents. The heartbreak that was allowed to be heartbreak without immediately becoming humiliation. The small gestures that reminded us that beneath the uniforms, expectations and enormous global stage were human beings carrying the hopes of entire countries.
And then there was Norway.
After Norway’s historic run ended in a quarterfinal loss, more than 100,000 people reportedly filled the streets of Oslo to welcome the team home. There was a royal reception, an open-top bus and one final celebration of what the team had given the country—not simply what it had failed to win.
They had lost the match.
But watching that homecoming, it was difficult to call them losers.
They had awakened something. They had brought people together. They had given their country an experience it wanted to honor.
They had won what mattered most.
It made me wonder whether American fans responded to our own team with the same generosity.
I am not sure we did—not at the scale Norway did, at least.
Maybe we should have.
The U.S. team did not leave the tournament the way it had hoped. There were mistakes and moments they will undoubtedly replay in their minds. But my reaction was not anger or embarrassment.
It was, “Someone needs to give them a hug.”
How disappointed must they have been after carrying so much expectation?
For a few weeks, they had given people across a deeply divided country a common jersey. They reminded us that national pride does not always have to arrive through politics or argument. Sometimes it arrives through a group of young men standing together while an anthem plays.
The tournament also arrived during the year of America’s 250th anniversary, at a moment when the country’s identity is debated almost daily. Hosting the world gave us another opportunity to see ourselves through the eyes of people encountering our cities, communities and people.
That does not mean every part of the experience was flawless.
It was not.
There have been legitimate concerns about ticket prices and transparency, punishing heat, weather disruptions, scheduling decisions and whether the tournament remained accessible to the ordinary supporters who give the game its energy. FIFA’s institutional reputation did not suddenly become spotless because the matches were compelling.
Nor should the humanity of the tournament make us forget the criticism that came before it.
But perhaps it added something to the story.
New evidence.
That is different from erasing the past.
Watching all of this unfold, I found myself thinking less about soccer and more about brands. Not marketing campaigns. Not sponsorships. Trust. How it's earned. How it's lost. And how sometimes one genuine human moment can begin changing a story people thought they already knew. I've spent much of my career watching organizations go through that same process.
Personal brands and organizational brands are rarely defined by one pristine narrative. They are the accumulation of what people experience, observe and come to believe over time.
A meaningful new experience does not make an old failure disappear.
It can, however, make the complete story more complicated—and sometimes more hopeful.
That is what happened for me this summer.
I did not suddenly decide that FIFA, the institution, was beyond criticism.
I saw something larger emerge around it.
The FIFA brand, the World Cup brand, the host-country brand and the individual brands of the players are connected, but they are not identical.
In many ways, the players became more trusted than the institution whose name appeared on the tournament.
Their conduct became its most persuasive message.
That happens inside companies, too.
A corporate brand may carry years of baggage, but one leader can begin changing how people experience it. An employee can create a moment of trust no campaign could manufacture. A team can demonstrate more character in a loss than an organization communicates through months of carefully developed messaging.
The people closest to the experience often become the most credible evidence of what the brand really is.
That is why the winner of the final matters enormously to the teams competing—but perhaps less to this particular brand analysis.
One country will lift the trophy.
But many of the tournament’s brand winners have already been decided.
Norway won when its supporters celebrated the people before the result.
The U.S. team earned something bigger than a place in the standings when Americans who had never cared much about soccer began carrying those players on their phone screens and calling them their own.
The host cities left an impression when visitors encountered a version of America that was warmer and more human than the one they may have expected from a distance.
The players reminded us that their smallest, most instinctive gestures traveled farther than any formal campaign.
And soccer won with people like me.
People who arrived because the hometown team caught their attention, stayed to watch Spain and France, and may now find themselves in the Nashville SC stands a little more often after this summer.
That is not the kind of outcome that appears on the scoreboard.
But it may be the kind that lasts.
Trust does not require us to forget what came before.
It asks whether what we are experiencing now gives us a reason to look again.
This summer, I did.
And before anyone lifts the trophy, that already feels like a win.
