The biggest storyline of the 2026 World Cup wasn’t the players on the field. Rather, it was the player who would likely be leaving the field forever and retiring from international play at the end of the tournament: Lionel Messi. Fanatics is the home of jerseys and the brand of the fan. And we knew it wouldn’t be easy for the millions of Messi fans around the world to say goodbye. Rather than use Messi to pitch our product to fans, like many other brands were doing, we set out to give our voice to the fans and give them the chance to use his jersey to tell him they weren’t ready to say goodbye. Still Wearing It fomented the first-ever revolt against an athlete’s retirement. Mere hours before his final World Cup match, we launched our campaign with a social film showing fans in Buenos Aires pulling a giant Messi jersey off a retirement billboard. The tribute film was cast entirely with real Messi fans from Argentina and was chock full of nods to Messi fan social accounts that had been with him since the beginning. The film incited a fan rebellion across the world. From Messi’s birthplace in Rosario, Argentina to the home of a 70ft Messi statue in Lake Town, India and to every other corner of the globe where Messi fans reside, we placed interactive out of home that let fans reveal a message to Messi by un-hanging his jersey. In Miami, where Messi currently plays club football, hundreds of fans on the ground, and thousands more on a livestream, banded together to pull his 40ft jersey off a billboard so they could tell him they weren’t ready for him to retire. Online, legends of sport like Rob Gronkowski, Alexander Ovechkin, and Diana Taurasi smashed their framed Messi jerseys so they could never be hung up. Fans who didn’t have Messi jerseys even found a way to turn any jersey into Messi’s. Fans made their voice heard. The campaign drew 576M impressions. And the 2nd highest jersey sales for a retiring player in company history. But most importantly, Messi heard his fans loud and clear. In the week following the campaign, it was reported that he’d be delaying his retirement.