The FIFA World Cup is here. Tickets command eye-watering prices; hospitality packages verge on the surreal. Football has never been more valuable – or more distant from the people who once defined it.
And yet, something is pushing back.
In a recent piece by The Guardian on the rise of football ultras—a club’s most vocal and passionate fanbase—one idea stands out: ultra culture thrives precisely because it supplies what contemporary society lacks —belonging, ritual and identity. In a fragmented world of atomisation, it offers collectivism. In a culture of rootlessness, it offers a sense of home. Strip away the flares and chants, and what remains is devotion.
That distinction matters for brands.
Because what football ultras reveal – perhaps more starkly than any focus group ever could—is that loyalty isn’t a rational contract. People don’t merely choose; they belong.
This is where branding, at its most potent, begins to resemble tribalism.
Consider the rise of running culture. What was once a solitary pursuit has become a social movement. Independent running clubs now draw crowds across cities, turning pavements into meeting points and training into a ritual.
Brands like Hoka and On Running have embedded themselves within it. Their success owes as much to product innovation as to community building: sponsoring crews, showing up at grassroots events and creating touchpoints where runners connect with each other as much as with the brand. In doing so, they’ve become badges of identity—subtly encroaching on territory long dominated by Nike.
Gymshark scaled in a similar way, empowering fitness creators to organise meetups and host neighbourhood training sessions—taking a page from Lululemon’s early playbook. When Gymshark stages its large-scale events, they function less like retail environments and more like congregations: queues that stretch for hours, strangers who become teammates and a shared sense of occasion.
These examples signal a shift from transactions to tribes—and it matters commercially. Tribal brands command higher lifetime value not because they lock people in, but because people choose to stay. They justify premiums by operating beyond functional comparison. And crucially, they generate their own momentum: advocacy replaces acquisition.
In contrast, much of the market drifts in the other way. As inflation bites, consumers “trade down”; as AI proliferates, differentiation erodes. The result is a sea of competent, interchangeable offerings—products that are easy to make, and just as easy to copy. Brands that are easy to buy, and just as easy to forget.
This is the real risk: not competition, but indifference.
Football ultras offer a provocative counterpoint. As The Guardian notes, modern football has become increasingly sanitised and globalised – players, owners and audiences untethered from local roots. Ultras, in response, act as “the only vociferous link to the soil”. They restore meaning where the system has stripped it away.
Brands face a similar tension. As they scale, optimise and globalise, they risk losing the very texture that made them matter.
The lesson is not to romanticise tribalism, but to understand its mechanics. Tribes are built on shared symbols and rituals, not just rewards and consumption. They create a sense of mutual recognition: I see myself in this, and I see others like me.
For brands, this requires a different posture: less persuasion, more presence. The question is no longer “Why should people buy us?” but “Why should people belong to us?”
Because in a world where almost everything is available, what people increasingly seek is somewhere to belong.
And that’s where loyalty begins.
