Scoring the Sound
of the World Cup
Before a ball is kicked at the FIFA World Cup 26™, six notes announce one of the world's most watched sporting events.
At Universal Music Publishing Group, our Audio Branding team created the sonic identity for FIFA World Cup 26™. Sometimes it's front and centre. Sometimes a quick percussive hit. Either way, it's doing exactly what it was designed to do: turning a global sporting event into a memorable brand experience.
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Building on our team's work for FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022™, the brief for 2026 was to create an identity that could become synonymous with the tournament for generations to come.
The Qatar 2022™ theme generated more than 30 million YouTube views and 26,000 comments. Many express genuine joy, nostalgia and appreciation for the music. Such heartfelt reactions are rare on YouTube, but they speak to something much bigger than a successful composition: they demonstrate the emotional power of sound.
Music and memory are joined at the hip, and brands that care about creating lasting emotional connections know this. Research proves that music activates the parts of the brain responsible for both memory and emotion. Sounds remain in our memory around eight times longer than images, while sonic brand cues can be more than eight times as effective for brand recall as visual assets alone.
As consumers increasingly experience brands through creators, streaming, social media, podcasts and connected TV, sound has become one of the most underutilised strategic assets in brand building.
For a project as important as the FIFA World Cup 26™, creating a memorable piece of music wasn't enough. We needed to create a sonic identity that felt unmistakably FIFA.
Developed in collaboration with Universal Music for Brands, the project combined UMPG's strategic audio branding methodology, refined over 45 years, with the creative expertise of our Audio Branding team. Creative Director Zach Golden led the composition as we set out to define not just how the tournament should sound, but how audiences should feel when they experienced it.
To the outside world, there can be a tendency to think creative brand assets are developed solely through market research, focus groups and data analysis. On the inside, you know that great creative is led by passionate people trying to communicate a feeling.
For us, that feeling was the sheer gravitas of the event.
The FIFA World Cup 26™ is football's biggest stage: where club allegiances are set aside in favour of national pride and more than half the world's population comes together to celebrate the beautiful game.
Throughout the creative process, the same words kept resurfacing:
Epic. Scale. Prestige. Vitality. Inclusivity. Authenticity.
Each one became the emotional blueprint for everything that followed.
Authenticity became one of the defining principles of the project. We recognised that "football is life" isn't simply a memorable television quote, it reflects the reality for millions of fans around the world, who laugh, celebrate, suffer, hope and believe alongside their teams every season.
Translating that passion into music on a global stage offered extraordinary creative territory, but also an enormous responsibility.
Once we understood the emotional positioning, we used our audio moodboard methodology to translate those ideas into musical direction, identifying the textures, instrumentation, tempo and genre references that best expressed those emotions before a single note of the final composition was written.
For us, this is what separates strategic audio branding from simply commissioning music. Every creative decision begins with the brand strategy and ends with the composition, not the other way around.
With the strategic framework established, Creative Director Zach Golden reflects:
"I never wanted this piece to exist simply as a theme for the World Cup. It had to feel like an experience - something that places the listener in the centre of the pitch, suspended in that breath before kick-off, when an entire stadium is alive with anticipation. From the beginning, I imagined the music as a journey through the game itself. The composition moves with the rhythm and emotion of football, while the sound design evolves from children playing on a neighbourhood pitch to the roar of a stadium celebrating a goal."
One of the most important moments in the piece is the "collective hush" - that split second between a decisive shot and the eruption of an entire stadium. We recreated that tension through moments of complete silence followed by an emotional release.
Even elements of the percussion were created using recordings of footballs being kicked - another example of our commitment to building the sonic identity from the game itself.
Too often, sonic branding is treated as a campaign asset rather than a long-term brand asset. FIFA took the opposite approach, extending the identity through 16 remixes by artists from each of the 16 host cities across North America, including DJ Jazzy Jeff, Sango, Bombón, Tech N9ne, Dan the Automator, Take A Daytrip and Mr. Naisgai.
Each remix reflects the character of its local market while remaining rooted in the same sonic DNA, a powerful example of how a strong sonic identity can flex locally without losing global consistency.
Ultimately, that's what the best audio branding achieves. It doesn't simply support a brand, it becomes inseparable from the experience of it.
Whether it's the world's biggest sporting event or a global brand, the principle is the same: distinctive sonic identities don't just increase recognition; they shape perception, deepen emotional connection and become woven into the memories people carry long after the moment has passed.