Yasmine Koujou
FIFA 2026 arrives in days. Billions will be watching. The real question is: can brands show up for all of them?
To help brands move beyond broad assumptions, Webedia Arabia is sharing four Saudi World Cup profiles: The Super Fan, The Social Fan, The Hosting Mother, and The Sideliner. Built on research and insights from Webedia Arabia’s 52M-strong social media audience, these profiles offer a distinct opportunity for brands ready to engage with intention.
The global sports market is currently valued at $417 billion and growing, and football sits at the centre of it. According to Nielsen’s 2025 Global Sports Report, football leads with 51% global fandom, outpacing all other sports, making it the world’s most popular one. The FIFA World Cup, the world’s largest sporting event, is its ultimate expression. The Qatar 2022 tournament drew a cumulative global audience of over five billion people, which makes around two-third of the global population.
FIFA 2026 is expected to surpass that.
But the World Cup’s power for brands goes beyond sheer numbers. Sports content drives some of the highest content satisfaction scores of any category. This is one of the biggest advertising moment, perfectly primed to change how people see brands.
And yet, most brands will spend this entire tournament talking to the same person. They will chase the passionate fans, building campaigns around their excitement, their loyalty and their willingness to spend during this important moment.
In Saudi Arabia, this means leaving significant other audiences, and a real opportunity, untapped.
Born Into It
Saudi Arabia is fast becoming one of football’s most important stages. As the country hosts major international tournaments and local leagues, and with the influx of international stars, live sports attendance has doubled in recent years. And with the selection of Saudi Arabia as host of the 2034 FIFA World Cup, that trajectory is accelerating.
But behind the infrastructure and the investment are the people. Saudis are known for their unwavering passion for football. To fans, football is more than simply a sport, it is a cultural phenomenon present in every aspect of their everyday lives, with club allegiances passed down from fathers to sons like inheritance. The World Cup for them is not just an event they watch, it is an identity they inhabit fully, physically, emotionally, and socially.
But not every Saudi experiences the World Cup in the same way.
To help brands move beyond broad assumptions, Webedia Arabia is sharing four Saudi World Cup profiles: The Super Fan, The Social Fan, The Hosting Mother and the Sideliner.
These profiles have been built on research and insights from Webedia Arabia’s 52M-strong social media audience, spanning Atyab Tabkha, 3a2ilati, Yasmina, Saudi Gamer, and Uturn.”Each profile reflects a distinct relationship to the tournament, and a distinct opportunity for brands ready to engage with intention.
Meet the Four Saudi World Cup Profiles
The Superfan
When it comes to the World Cup, there is one audience every brand instinctively chases: the Superfan. Saudi fans are active participants. Their passion shows in everything they do. The rituals: face paint, bandanas, flags; the habits: reading every post-game comment, screaming during goals, living and dying with every decision on the pitch; and the sacrifices: needing the room to themselves, needing no one nearby when the tension peaks. According to a survey by Dantsu MENA, 87% of Saudi Gen Z describe themselves as sports fans, and when it comes to football specifically, that passion intensifies. According to an Instagram poll by Webedia Arabia’s Saudi Gamer, more than half (56%) of respondents describe themselves as superfans during the FIFA World Cup season. Young, male, and heavily concentrated in the 13-to-34 age group, their fandom reaches into every part of life. Among the most engaged fans, 43% decrease their gaming time when real matches are on, they put down the controller to watch the real thing. And when they do game, nearly 70% choose FIFA and EA FC as their preferred football content, according to the same Saudi Gamer poll. For this audience, the World Cup is both a lived event and an extended season of the game they already play every day.
And while Saudi fandom has long been male-dominated, female fans are a growing and vocal force. Since women were first allowed into Saudi stadiums in 2018, their presence in football culture has expanded rapidly, including at the World Cup itself. At Qatar 2022, Saudi female fans travelled in significant numbers, many attending their first ever match, a shift captured also globally, where women now make up 42% of men’s sports fans worldwide.
The Social Fan
Not everyone in the room is there by conviction. Around a third of Saudis surveyed through Webedia Instagram polls on Atyab Tabkha say they watch the World Cup simply because everyone around them does. They are present, engaged enough to follow along, and happy to be part of the occasion. But the football itself is not the event, the gathering is. The Social Fan is neither obsessed nor indifferent. The majority (61%) prefer to watch the matches at home with friends or the family. They are participatory without being passionate. They show up, they share content, they engage socially around the game even if the football itself doesn’t move them, which makes them an interesting audience for brands. Reach them with the right content at the right moment and they are fully in the room.
The Hosting Mother
Present throughout the season but rarely counted in it. According to a Webedia Instagram poll on 3a2ilati, only 19% of mothers follow the World Cup closely, 31% watch because everyone else does, and 39% simply do not care. Yet nearly half (49%) consider it family time, they show up, for the family, for the occasion, for the shared moment, managing the gathering, organizing the food, making the season run smoothly for everyone around them. They are not always watching the match. But they are making real purchasing decisions throughout: snacks, delivery, household items, outings, experiences. They are active consumers during the World Cup even if they are passive viewers. Their spending does not stop because the match is on. If anything, it accelerates.
The Sideliner
And then there are those who would rather be anywhere else. Through a Webedia Instagram poll on Atyab Tabkha, a quarter admitted that during a big match, they would most likely be hiding somewhere to escape it entirely and cannot wait for it to end. These are the sideliners. According to GWI Core data, Sideliners represent 9.6 million Saudi internet users aged 16 to 64, around 36% of that population, who do not follow the World Cup closely and engage with it only because complete disengagement is socially impossible. More than half (54%) are women, almost equally split between Gen Z (38.3%) and Millennials (36.3%) and a quarter are Gen X.
GWI’s global segmentation of World Cup audiences, based on a 13-market attitudinal study, captures something similar at a global level. They identify what they call “reluctant fans”. Mostly Gen X (34%) and women (55%), they are drawn to the stories, the culture, and the social experience around the event. They connect through social media, following the tournament not through matches but through the content it generates.
The Opportunity Brands Are Missing
Every World Cup, the advertising conversation gravitates toward the passionate fan. Nielsen’s 2025 Global Sports Report finds that football fans are significantly more receptive to brand sponsorship than the general population, making them a genuinely high-value audience. They are easy to find and easy to excite. But in chasing them exclusively, brands leave an entire audience on the sideline.
The Sideliners, the Social Fans and the Hosting Mothers are not passive. During the World Cup, they are still online, still consuming content, still making purchasing decisions, just consuming different content. According to Webedia polls, fans lean heavily toward match summaries and player stories while memes and teasing content ranks second. Hosting Mothers and Sideliners gravitate toward non-football content, but around a third also follow match summaries. They are the second screen while the fan watches the first, scrolling through their phones during the match, looking up products, responding to content that speaks to their actual experience of the season. GWI’s data on reluctant fans globally shows they are 13% more likely to use social media, 18% more likely to search for products to buy and 18% more likely to look up information related to what they are watching while viewing TV.
For brands, this represents a real opportunity to reach them in real time, turning a moment of casual presence into an engaging or shoppable one. The brands that will make the most of FIFA 2026 in Saudi Arabia are not necessarily the ones with the biggest football sponsorships or the loudest fan-targeted campaigns. They are the ones smart enough to speak to all four profiles: the Superfan with passion and the language of obsession; the Social Fan with shareable, social moments; the Hosting Mothers with relevance and purchasing power; and the Sideliner with the quiet acknowledgment that their experience of this season is just as real.
(Yasmine Koujou is a Senior Data and Research Specialist at Webedia Arabia)
