The whistle has gone, and the invoices have cleared. If you sponsored the World Cup, you’ve likely got your numbers by now — a deck of impressions, reach, sentiment and share of voice, delivered fast and beautifully. FIFA had its own the day before the final, and expects to top $15 billion across the 2023-26 cycle, $2 billion more than it budgeted, largely on World Cup ticketing and hospitality.

What none of it tells you is what the month built. Attention was the cheap part, and it leaked anyway. YouGov tracked more than 2,000 brands across the tournament and put Pepsi on top for advertising impact, ahead of Coca-Cola, the official partner, in 10th. Levi’s gained from FIFA’s own clean-venue rules when it shrouded its name on the stadium that carries it, and Heinz ran the same play with its taped-over condiment logos. The rights bought guaranteed placement. Relevance had to be earned separately, and plenty of brands earned it without paying. What you were actually buying was trust.

That trust is getting scarcer and more valuable every year. As belief drains out of the institutions around us, sport is one of the last places it holds, and Nielsen puts 81% of consumers as trusting sponsorship at sporting events. A number like that doesn’t come from advertising. It comes from afternoons like the one I had last month, when South Africa, my home country, reached the........

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