Rip the Script | Nike Football

Team Behind the Design

Agency:  Wieden+Kennedy
Client: Nike
Category: Video Design — Commercial
Director: Dan Streit
Creative Director: Enrico Balleri, VP Global Brand Voice, Nike
Brand Lead: Helena Thornton, VP Brand Management, Nike
Project Brief: Create a flagship World Cup film that positions football as instinctive and joyful, assembles a cross-industry cast with authentic ties to the sport, and launches a content ecosystem designed to extend across social platforms for the duration of the tournament.

Nike's last genuinely untouchable World Cup commercial put the 1998 Brazilian national team in an airport terminal and let them play keep-away through metal detectors. "Rip the Script" by Wieden+Kennedy is openly an heir to that formula: same logic, different era, and a cast list that has expanded from one country's squad to more than 30 names across sport, music, and film.

The film opens on a director trying to keep Kylian Mbappé on script. He complains about Mbappé's "theatrics" while other stars mill about waiting for things to progress.

The players rebel, take the ball, and the rest of the six minutes is the production falling apart around them. The conceit is self-aware to the point of being almost too clever: a scripted film about rejecting scripts. It earns the irony by committing to it without winking at the camera.

The casting is the distribution strategy. Sports, music, and entertainment each bring their own algorithm and each serving a different audience:

• Current players carry the present tense of the sport.
• Legends carry the mythology.
• Entertainment figures including LeBron James, Kim Kardashian, Travis Scott, and Channing Tatum carry cultural permission to care about football even if you never have.

The six-minute runtime requires the film to function as a film, with pacing, character arcs, and escalating comic setpieces rather than an extended product spot. Dan Streit's direction earns it.

The backlot has physical scale, the action sequences have choreographic specificity, and the tonal shifts between chaos and character moments are controlled.

Nike buried an unreleased music track in the audio. The PSG 2026-27 away kit shows up before its official release. Germany and Portugal appear in blank national team kits their federation never approved. None of this is accidental. The film is designed to reward a second watch.

The 185 additional shorts are not bonus content. They are the infrastructure.

"Rip the Script" is not a World Cup commercial. It is the first episode of something Nike intends to run for 12 weeks, and the World Cup is just the broadcast window.