Ep 183: What Happens to Football Brands When the World Cup Ends

On this episode I’m talking to Nico Willson, co-founder of Futsol, about what it looks like to build a brand around the world’s most popular sport when that sport has never had a brand ecosystem worth belonging to and what they’ve learned by actually doing it.

Futsol started with an observation Nico made in New York: cycling had Rapha, running had Tracksmith, boxing had a dozen cool gyms with cold brew on tap. Football had club kits and whoever Nike was paying that season. He’d spent time in the Rapha store on Broadway watching a community form around a sport, and found himself asking why nothing like that existed for the game with the most passionate audience on earth. That question became the brand.

The assumption they started with turned out to be wrong. Futsol was built for players - people who wanted football aesthetics they could wear on the pitch without showing up in a Premier League replica. What they found was that the vast majority of their customers wear Futsol to watch the game, not play it. To the pub, the terrace, the beach. Football has always had that lifestyle dimension - a shirt with jeans is what fans have worn for fifty years - but nobody had built a brand that took it seriously. That’s the gap Futsol sits in.

We get into the jersey moment they had to navigate. Jerseys were the founding product - graphic, referential, football culture distilled into a garment. Then the jersey became a trend. Palace, Gap, Nike, Adidas, Reebok - every brand woke up to retro football at the same time. Nico’s read on what to do next is worth your attention: don’t compete louder. Recognise that trends have a shelf life, and shift toward something more durable - menswear silhouettes with football references, linen drill tops, knitwear with contrast collars. Things that outlast a tournament.

Then the AI conversation, where Nico draws a clear line. Operational use: fully on board. Creative output - design, product, graphics - they won’t. The brand is built on sun-faded fabrics, block printing, references to 1930s football programmes. You can’t generate that feeling through AI and still call it authentic. He’d rather do it badly by hand than do it cleanly by machine. It’s one of the more useful framings I’ve heard on where the line actually sits - and a reminder that the most interesting AI decisions right now aren’t about adoption, they’re about where to stop.

If you’re building a brand in a crowded category and working out how craft, community, and cultural timing fit together, this conversation is worth your time.