Ben Essen, global chief strategy officer at Iris London, looks at a different way of positioning a sport brand
The World Cup has seen a wall of campaigns built to travel across the largest audience in the tournament’s history. The playbook: borderless, glossy, common denominator campaigns designed to mean roughly the same thing in hundreds of countries at once. It’s the logic that runs through most modern global brand-building, in clubs and sport brands as much as in fashion or tech. Smooth out the edges, premiumise, sign the global talent, make the work land cleanly everywhere.
When designing for global mass appeal, the instinct is to strip out specificity; seeing focus as a friction that limits how far you can reach. The trouble is that this often produces work that feels interchangeable. When those campaigns appear wall to wall around a World Cup, that sameness gets quickly exposed.
Which is why Arsenal’s first league title in 22 years is interesting beyond the football itself.
The celebrations around the world were a reminder that Arsenal are a genuine global super brand, but the narrative surrounding the brand has gone a different route to other modern megabrands in sport. Rather than adopt a culturally androgynous identity that can travel smoothly from Dubai to Denver, they’ve leaned deeply into their North London roots and created a very clear sense of place around the brand.
This sense of local identity was brought to life when 1.5 million people came together in North London for the biggest football parade in English history. Standing on the streets that day I realised people weren’t there simply for the glory. They were there because the club had become part of how they thought about where they’re from.
That kind of emotional connection is incredibly difficult to manufacture, and increasingly valuable in a global sports market competing for fans’ attention.
This strategic focus on Arsenal’s local roots has been a deliberate and long-term strategy. Its most iconic highlight was the creation of its modern club anthem, North London Forever. Fans around the world now sing about Islington landmarks and declare ‘these streets are our own’ - expressing belonging to a place many have never even visited.
It’s there in how the club has woven itself into the cultural life of black communities in North London. In 2022, they created a Jamaica-themed jersey celebrating, “those who call North London and Jamaica home”, while collaborations with designers including Labrum and Maharishi have taken that local identity to audiences around the world. Arsenal’s credibility has come from connecting deeply with the communities around the club.
Iris has helped reinforce this strategy through two campaigns over the past five years. This Is Home gave Arsenal’s globally diverse stars unmistakably North London voices, while No More Red has evolved from a fourth-kit brief into a long-term commitment tackling youth violence through community programmes.
This is where Arsenal split from the standard model. Most clubs, and most companies for that matter, try to scale by sanding off the rough edges - adding celebrity, international polish and a vaguer identity. The result is that they increasingly end up looking alike. Arsenal have largely held their nerve, betting that where you’re from isn’t something to outgrow but something to build on.
Since doubling down on this strategy ten years ago, Arsenal’s revenues have doubled. This shows there is a different way that global brands can grow, not getting bigger by becoming blander, but by going deeper.
Our creative chief Menno Kluin has a set of creative principles of which the first is “create for your number one fan”. Not the average audience, but the person who already cares the most, because they’re the one who carries it to everyone else.
The second lesson Arsenal demonstrates is that scale is built from the bottom up.
Community work, fashion, content and storytelling all reinforce one another. The brand isn’t built through one glossy deal or star player, but through years of showing up.
It will be interesting to see which clubs, sponsors and governing bodies choose to follow this blueprint. Ones that shun the common denominator and embrace specificity. Who build from the ground up and embrace a sense of place over borderless gloss. Let’s see what happens.
Ben Essen is global chief strategy officer at Iris London
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