Standing out in football is not easy in Brazil. Games are on TV all the time, shows comment on the performance of players throughout their careers, but a single goal can change everything: it can change a game, a championship and even a life. That is why no goal should go unrecognized; given a goal’s importance, each goal deserves to be recorded, announced and celebrated.

Nike Brazil developed a championship for young football players in which they had to prove how well they could really play.

Our challenge was to increase awareness of these young players in the football universe and record every goal they scored in the championship. So we decided to reinvent the traditional way of following football on the Internet, making commentary on a soccer ticker more social by allowing interactions between fans and players via Facebook.

Before the championship began, all players connected their Facebook accounts to an app that centralized the concept and authorized automatic posts to be made on their timelines anytime they stood out during a particular play.

During the games, a team of 3 commentators typed in what was happening minute-by-minute, broadcasting the game via a site that could be viewed by anyone, with only relevant plays, such as penalty saves, victories, and especially, goals being highlighted and posted in real time on the players’ timelines.

All the athletes were connected to their Facebook accounts beforehand so that the highlights of the matches could be automatically posted to their timelines. The commentary of the matches was centralized on a website, where people could monitor matches and cheer by using a button that connected them to a player or team. The connection acted like a subscription to the player’s feed, ensuring that major news about the player reached his fans. In this way, by recording on Facebook every goal that was scored, we were able to create a unique relationship between the brand, the players and their friends.

Through the posts on Facebook, we were able to reach a significant number of people who were then directed to the app and, as a result, began not only following the goals that were scored, but also the other plays that were posted on the soccer ticker.

In the 4 days of the championship, we had over 120,077 unique visitors to the site and over 10.3 million stories published on Facebook by players’ friends and friends of friends and, in addition to not letting any play go unrecognized, we recorded each and every moment in the players’ histories.