The 20 best sports adverts ever made, ranked

Sport is the one category where the product does the acting. A trainer cannot emote, but Eric Cantona can, and a broadcaster’s trail for the Paralympics can change how a country looks at a wheelchair. That is why the best sports adverts are so often the best adverts full stop: the brands are selling a feeling they did not invent, and the good ones know it.

This is Ad Ranking’s list of the twenty best sports adverts ever made, judged on the four questions we put to everything we score: is there one idea a stranger could retell, does the craft survive a second viewing, did the brand risk anything, and is there published evidence it worked. Agency, year and director credits have been checked for every entry, and where a credit could not be stood up it has been left out.

Five campaigns are missing on purpose, because each already has its own review on this site: Nike’s Dream Crazy and Write the Future, Guinness, Volvo’s Epic Split and Always Like a Girl. Take those as read. What follows is everything else, from the Premier League’s first trail to the film that made the Paralympics a hot ticket.

20 to 16: the cult entries

20. Sky Sports: A Whole New Ball Game (1992)

The Premier League launched in August 1992 and Sky, which had paid for it, announced the fact with an extended promotional film of players from every club posing, sprinting and mugging to Simple Minds’ Alive and Kicking. The line was a whole new ball game, and for once the hyperbole was accurate: the film is the moment English football stopped being a Saturday afternoon and became a television product. No agency credit for it could be verified, so none is given.

It is not subtle, and the haircuts are a problem, but it did precisely what the broadcaster needed, which was to make the same old clubs look like something you would pay for. Crown verdict: the advert that sold football as television, and the reason your subscription exists.

19. Puma: Hardchorus (2010)

Droga5 New York noticed that a run of FA Cup ties fell on Valentine’s Day 2010 and built the campaign around the apology. A terrace full of hard-faced supporters sings Savage Garden’s Truly Madly Deeply as a football chant, and a website let fans send the film to a partner with a personal message. An Italian version had the same men performing Umberto Tozzi’s Ti Amo.

It won two Gold Lions at Cannes and passed five million views in a fortnight, at a time when that still counted as a phenomenon. The joke is one joke, but it is a good one, and it understands the product’s customer better than most sportswear advertising. Crown verdict: the first football film built to be forwarded rather than broadcast, and still funnier than most that followed.

18. Reebok: Terry Tate, Office Linebacker (2003)

Rawson Marshall Thurber made a short film in 2000 about a linebacker hired to enforce office etiquette by tackling people. Peter Arnell’s Arnell Group turned it into a Reebok campaign, Lester Speight played Terrible Terry Tate, and it aired at Super Bowl XXXVII in 2003 before spreading across a series of web episodes. It remains one of the most quoted Super Bowl spots ever made.

It is also a warning: only 55 per cent of respondents in one online poll knew which brand it was for, which is a poor return on a joke that good. Crown verdict: a perfect comic premise attached to the wrong logo, and a lesson in the difference between fame and branding.

17. Adidas: José +10 (2006)

Two Spanish boys chalk a pitch on waste ground, pick teams, and the players they name walk on: Zidane, Beckham, Kaká, Beckenbauer, Platini, Defoe, Cissé. It is a playground fantasy filmed straight, and Adidas released it under the Impossible is Nothing banner in the run-up to the 2006 World Cup in Germany. The idea is so simple that every child watching had already had it, which is the point.

The casting is the budget, and the budget was clearly enormous. Adidas has since revisited the film to encourage girls into the game, which tells you the format still has life in it. Crown verdict: the World Cup advert most adults can still describe scene by scene, twenty years on.

16. Nike: The Last Game (2014)

Wieden+Kennedy Portland and Passion Pictures spent eight months on a five-minute animated film in which a villain called The Scientist replaces footballers with risk-free clones, and Ronaldo, Neymar, Rooney, Ibrahimović, Ribéry and Iniesta come out of retirement to beat them. Jon Saunders directed for Passion. It ran online with television trailers ahead of the 2014 World Cup, and the argument, that safe football is not football, was Nike’s Risk Everything platform turned into plot.

It is too long, and it knows it, but the character animation of the players is the best ever done for a brand. Crown verdict: the most expensive cartoon about a shoe ever commissioned, and one of the few that repays its running time.

15 to 11: the British classics

15. Carlsberg: Old Lions (2006)

Saatchi & Saatchi and director Chris Palmer put Sir Bobby Robson in charge of a pub team made up of Bobby Charlton, Jack Charlton, Alan Ball, Bryan Robson, Stuart Pearce, Peter Shilton, Chris Waddle and the rest, and filmed them beating a real pub side 8-0. The three-minute cinema version won a D&AD Pencil in 2007. The line was the brand’s usual construction, Carlsberg don’t do pub teams, but if they did they’d probably be the best pub team in the world, and the pleasure is watching men in their sixties still able to hit a pass.

It is a beer advert, strictly, but it is a football advert in every way that matters. Crown verdict: the warmest use of 1966 in any campaign, and the only one to make the winners play again.

14. Lucozade: Daley Thompson (1985)

Until 1985 Lucozade was a convalescent’s drink sold in an orange cellophane wrapper with the line Lucozade aids recovery. Ogilvy & Mather put the Olympic decathlon champion in a tracksuit, ran him against Iron Maiden’s Phantom of the Opera, gave Des Lynam the voiceover and changed the line to Lucozade replaces lost energy. The product did not change; the customer did.

Sales tripled between 1984 and 1989, and the brand has been a sports drink ever since. It is the cleanest repositioning in British advertising history, and it was done with one athlete and one guitar riff. Crown verdict: the advert that moved a brand from the sickbed to the running track without touching the bottle.

13. BBC: Stadium UK (2012)

RKCR/Y&R’s idea for the BBC’s London 2012 coverage was that the whole country was the stadium: animated athletes sail past the white cliffs of Dover and tumble across the Millennium Bridge, to First Steps, a track Elbow wrote for the purpose. Passion Pictures animated it, Red Bee Media produced it, and Damon Collins was executive creative director. It ran as the title sequence and the trail for every hour of the BBC’s Games, which meant the nation heard it several hundred times and did not tire of it.

That is the rarest quality in a broadcast ident. Crown verdict: the piece of London 2012 branding people still hum, which is more than the official logo managed.

12. Nike: Nothing Beats a Londoner (2018)

Wieden+Kennedy London, with Paddy Treacy and Mark Shanley writing, made a three-minute argument between London teenagers about whose sporting life is hardest, escalating from a bus journey to a boxing gym with cameos from Mo Farah, Harry Kane and Skepta, whose Shutdown scores it. Megaforce directed through Riff Raff. It went viral on launch day after Sadiq Khan shared it, and at Cannes 2018 it took the first Grand Prix in the new Social and Influencer category along with a Titanium Lion and three Golds.

The craft is in the rhythm: every kid gets one line and every line tops the last. Crown verdict: the most accurate portrait of a city’s teenagers any brand has bought, and the funniest.

11. Under Armour: Rule Yourself, Michael Phelps (2016)

Droga5 filmed Phelps training for Rio in the dark: a single lit lane, ice baths, cupping, vomit, a bedroom at dawn, all to The Kills’ Last Goodbye and the line it’s what you do in the dark that puts you in the light. It launched in March 2016 and won the Film Craft Grand Prix at Cannes that June, plus a Gold in Film. Then Phelps went to Rio and won five golds, which is the kind of media plan money cannot buy.

It is the anti-Nike sports advert: no crowd, no anthem, no slogan about greatness, just work. Crown verdict: the best training montage since Rocky, and the only one shot like a documentary.

10 to 6: the ones that changed a market

10. Nike: You Can’t Stop Us (2020)

Wieden+Kennedy Portland answered the pandemic summer with a split screen: pairs of athletes from different sports and continents cut so that a gymnast’s dismount becomes a footballer’s landing and a surfer’s turn becomes a wheelchair racer’s. Peter Wiedensmith and Jessica Baclesse edited it at Joint, Megan Rapinoe narrated, and it won the Cannes Film Grand Prix in 2021 and the Emmy for outstanding commercial. There is no story and no product, only an editing idea pushed until it becomes an argument about unity.

It is also the last Nike film that everyone in advertising watched twice. Crown verdict: an edit as the idea, and the proof that craft alone can carry a brand position.

9. Gatorade: Be Like Mike (1991)

Bernie Pitzel at Bayer Bess Vanderwarker wanted The Jungle Book’s I Wanna Be Like You, Disney wanted 350,000 dollars for five weeks, so Pitzel wrote new lyrics on a napkin in four hours and Ira Antelis and Steve Shafer set them. The result, which first aired on 8 August 1991, is children and adults playing basketball with Michael Jordan while a choir sings that they wish they could be like Mike. It is a jingle, which advertising had already decided was embarrassing, and it is one of the most loved sports adverts ever made, which suggests advertising was wrong. Crown verdict: the last great American jingle, and the reason a sports drink has a personality.

8. Adidas: Impossible is Nothing (2004)

180 Amsterdam and TBWAChiatDay took three words from a Muhammad Ali speech and built a 50 million dollar global platform on them, launched in Harlem in February 2004. The opening film, The Long Run, spliced archive Ali into a training run with Zidane, Beckham, Ian Thorpe, Tracy McGrady and Haile Gebrselassie, and a companion spot put Laila Ali in the ring against her father at his peak. The line has since outlived the campaign, the agency and several chief executives, which is the test of a line.

It gave Adidas a purpose statement to stand against Just Do It, and for a decade it held. Crown verdict: the only rival to Nike’s slogan that ever sounded like it might win.

7. Nike: Good vs Evil (1996)

Before Euro 96, Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam and director Tarsem staged a match in a Roman amphitheatre between Cantona, Figo, Maldini, Ronaldo and Ian Wright and a team of devils, with Paul Laufer shooting and Michael Prieve and Glenn Cole creative directing. The devil keeps goal, Cantona pulls his collar up, and the ball goes through him in flames. It is absurd, operatic and, according to the people who made it, the film that made Nike a credible football brand in Europe.

The craft is Tarsem’s, the swagger is Cantona’s, and the nerve to put Ian Wright in the same frame as Maldini is the agency’s. Crown verdict: the film that invented the cinematic football advert, and every one since is a footnote.

6. Channel 4: We’re the Superhumans (2016)

The sequel had the harder job, because the first film had already changed the conversation, so 4creative and Dougal Wilson through Blink changed the register: a big band of disabled musicians plays Sammy Davis Jr’s Yes I Can while 140 people fly planes, tap dance, raise children, and drive a wheelchair through a wall. It premiered on 15 July 2016, was watched 23 million times online in four days, was Campaign’s Campaign of the Year, and won the Film Grand Prix at Cannes in 2017. The tone is joy rather than grit, which is a riskier choice than it looks and the correct one. Crown verdict: the rare sequel that stands next to the original rather than behind it.

5 to 1: the canon

5. Sport England: This Girl Can (2015)

Sport England’s research said two million fewer women than men played sport and the main reason was fear of judgement. FCB Inferno and director Kim Gehrig answered with 90 seconds of real women sweating, jiggling and grinning through swimming, kickboxing, football and cycling to Missy Elliott’s Get Ur Freak On, which she licensed for advertising for the first time. It first aired on 12 January 2015 and by the following year Sport England credited it with getting 1.6 million women exercising.

It won a Glass Lion at Cannes. No athlete, no product, no brand to speak of, and a measurable change in behaviour: that is as good as the job gets. Crown verdict: the most effective sports advert ever made in Britain, on the evidence rather than the applause.

4. Nike: Airport (1998)

Brazil are delayed at the airport on the way to France 98, so Ronaldo, Romário, Roberto Carlos and Denílson play keepy-uppy through security, along the travelators and out onto the runway to Mas Que Nada. John Boiler and Glenn Cole at Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam wrote it, and John Woo, whom the players idolised, directed his first advert with Gale Tattersall shooting. FourFourTwo has called it the greatest advert ever made, and among football supporters that is close to consensus.

Its trick is to make the best team in the world look like bored children, which is exactly how they played. Crown verdict: pure joy on film, and the only sports advert whose ending, Ronaldo hitting the post, everyone remembers.

3. Nike: Tag (2001)

Mike Byrne at Wieden+Kennedy wrote it after watching a documentary about play: a man leaves his flat, gets tapped on the shoulder, and realises the whole of downtown has emptied to get away from him. Frank Budgen directed for Gorgeous on blocked-off Toronto streets with 400 extras, and it premiered on 25 June 2001 with the single word Play as its endline.

It won the Cannes Grand Prix in 2002, made Budgen the most-awarded director in the world that year, and was voted one of the ten best adverts of the decade by Campaign in 2010. There is no athlete in it and no product shot worth the name. What there is, is a definition of sport that includes everyone, delivered as a chase scene. Crown verdict: the best film Nike ever made about why people move, and it never mentions a shoe.

2. Nike: Just Do It, Walt Stack (1988)

An 80-year-old man runs across the Golden Gate Bridge at dawn and says he does 17 miles every morning; asked how he stops his teeth chattering, he says he leaves them in his locker. Then three words appear that Dan Wieden adapted, by his own account, from the last words of a condemned man. The July 1988 film was the first to carry Just Do It.

Between 1988 and 1998 Nike’s share of the North American sports shoe market rose from 18 to 43 per cent, and the line is on the wall of every agency that wishes it had written it. The film is modest, which is the point: the slogan lands because it is addressed to Walt Stack rather than to Michael Jordan. Crown verdict: three words that turned a shoe company into a philosophy, introduced by a pensioner with his teeth in a locker.

1. Channel 4: Meet the Superhumans (2012)

Tom Tagholm conceived and directed it for 4creative, Channel 4’s in-house agency, and it went out at 9pm simultaneously across 78 channels, including ITV1, Five and Sky One, the broadcaster’s rivals. Ninety seconds of Paralympians training, cut to Public Enemy’s Harder Than You Think, with a car crash, a scan and a battlefield as the backstory.

It won the Film Craft Grand Prix at Cannes in 2013 and a D&AD Pencil, and it made the London Paralympics a prime-time event rather than an afterthought. Nike sells shoes with attitude; this sold a fortnight of sport most of the audience had never watched, by refusing to ask for sympathy. It is the only entry here that changed how a country sees a group of people. Crown verdict: the best sports advert ever made, because it made the sport, not just the brand.

How we ranked these

Four tests, in the order we apply them to every campaign. Idea first: can a stranger retell it in a sentence. Craft second: does the direction, casting and cut still hold when you know what is coming.

Bravery third: did the brand risk money, taste or a rival’s attention, which is why a broadcaster airing its trail on ITV outranks a shoe company airing its on its own channels. Effectiveness last, and only on published evidence, which is why This Girl Can sits above films that are more beautiful and why Terry Tate, loved as it is, sits at 18.

Nike takes six of the twenty places because Nike has spent forty years treating sport as a subject rather than a backdrop, and no rival has kept that up for more than a decade. The two Channel 4 films rank as high as they do because they sold sport itself rather than kit, and the country bought it. Credits were checked individually and anything unverifiable was omitted, which is why some entries name a director and others do not.