Paddy Power · BBH London · August 2026
Why care this much about football? Paddy Power answers by showing all the evidence that says perhaps you shouldn’t: shrine-like bedrooms, ridiculous costumes, VAR tattoos, questionable baby names and obsessive rituals. None of it explains fandom rationally. That is exactly why fans recognise themselves in it.
The Challenge
Football advertising rarely struggles to show passion. The harder job is making that passion feel specific. Paddy Power wanted to celebrate the new season in a way that felt written from inside football culture, not like another brand borrowing its stars and spectacle.
The Strategy
Don’t explain why people love football. Hold up a mirror to what that love makes them do.
The campaign starts with an outsider’s reasonable question: why care this much? Paddy Power answers with behaviours only football fans could produce.
The more irrational the examples become, the stronger the proof of devotion. Paddy Power doesn't ask fans to prove their passion. It simply shows them enough evidence to recognise themselves.
The Execution
Danny Dyer is asked why he cares so much about football, triggering a parade of fan behaviour: a Brighton supporter dressed as a seagull, a Newcastle shrine-bedroom, a baby named Jürgen, Haaland-inspired hair, a VAR tattoo and a nod to football’s infamous Spygate. Peter Crouch and Danny Murphy also appear. The film never arrives at a sensible explanation. Football simply matters.
Campaigns That Used Similar Tactics
Celebrate Extraordinary Devotion: Turn acts of excessive commitment into evidence of what loving something can make people do.
It Has to Be Heinz (Heinz, Wieden+Kennedy, 2023) searched for real examples of irrational brand love, including tattoos, smuggled Beanz and people carrying Heinz into restaurants, then turned those acts into advertising.
The useful move is to stop inventing demonstrations of love and look for what devotion is already making people do.
Represent the Community’s Distinctive Codes: Portray the fandom through the rituals, references and aesthetics that distinguish it from every other audience.
Fan Life: Global Fandoms (Spotify, 2025) portrayed communities around artists including Oasis, ROSALÍA and Turnstile through their own particular visual codes, behaviours and references rather than treating music fans as one interchangeable audience.
Satirise the Contradiction: Reflect the hypocrisy, inconsistency or irrational logic fans already recognise in themselves.
There is no sensible reason to care this much.
And yet people care enormously.
Paddy Power never tries to resolve it. The contradiction is the joke. They illustrated this beautifully in a campaign where this tactic drove the work.
Football. You Gotta Love It. (Paddy Power, BBH, 2023) showed supporters condemning football’s questionable money until that same money promised success for their own club. The humour came from articulating a contradiction fans had already noticed in themselves.
That gives Paddy Power a useful position inside football culture: close enough to understand the madness, and confident enough to tease it.
The Question That Could Get You There
What does our most devoted audience do that looks completely irrational to everyone else — but instantly recognisable to them?
