New report with Sensor Tower and M+C Saatchi Performance reveals how brands can turn the world’s biggest soccer tournament into measurable growth, before, during, and long after the final whistle
Sarah Maina, Regional Manager, France and Middle East at AppsFlyer
Dubai, United Arab Emirates — March 02, 2026 –AppsFlyer, the Modern Marketing Cloud, today announced the release of Scoring Big: The Complete Marketer’s Guide to the World’s Biggest Soccer Event, a new report created in collaboration with Sensor Tower and M+C Saatchi Performance.
Drawing on billions of installs and remarketing conversions, the report provides a data-backed framework, based on insights from the 2022 edition of the tournament, to uncover untapped opportunities and help brands transform short-term spikes in attention into sustained growth, retention, and lifetime value (LTV) across streaming, CTV, mobile, retail, and digital ecosystems.
“With 104 football matches across three countries and 16 cities, the world’s biggest football event will be the largest edition to date, creating a rare five-week window of sustained global attention and commercial intensity. What Scoring Big makes clear is that brands can’t treat 2026 as a five-week sprint – it’s a marketing stress test and an amplifier,” said Sarah Maina, Regional Manager, Middle East & France, AppsFlyer. “Winning requires the ability to localize at scale, orchestrate every touchpoint across streaming, CTV, mobile, and retail, and measure it all with clarity and confidence.”
Key findings: Mobile demand spikes during football matches, but sustained growth comes from strategy
Across the tournament window, the report highlights clear “micro-windows” of high intent and where brands can turn them into LTV:
- Streaming surged at kickoff: Streaming app installs jumped 46% on opening day and stayed 41% higher throughout the first week, demonstrating how live moments can accelerate acquisition when access and onboarding are frictionless.
- Retail saw 2–3x YoY growth: Shopping app installs grew 2–3x compared to 2021, as the tournament overlapped with Black Friday and Cyber Week – amplifying competition and accelerating discovery and short-term purchase intent.
- Food delivery grew fastest in South America: Food delivery installs rose 15% globally on opening day overall, with South America posting the strongest growth (+6.7%) during the entire tournament, showing how football culture can drive incremental adoption, not just amplified usage.
- News and gaming became must-watch categories: Sports news installs rose 72% on opening day and remained 56% above average in week one, while sports gaming installs climbed 18% above November averages (holding 9% above average in week one) as fans moved from passive viewing to interactive participation.
The 2026 playbook: A three-phase campaign built for measurement and retention
Beyond the numbers, Scoring Big outlines a practical framework for marketers to maximize impact across the full funnel:
- Pre-event: Invest early while costs are lower and attention is building. Treat this phase as the foundation, not a warm-up.
- During the event: Activate in real time around key matches, when attention peaks in predictable waves.
- Post-event: Sustain engagement after the final whistle with a clear retention plan, turning short-term attention into long-term growth.
The report also emphasizes the importance of connecting every physical and digital touchpoint and validating performance using a “measurement trifecta” of attribution, incrementality testing, and media mix modeling (MMM).
Jonathan Briskman, Director of Market Insights at Sensor Tower, added, “Sports fans don’t experience major tournaments on one screen. They move between TV, mobile, and web, and that changes how brands should plan. Additionally, the biggest opportunities are often adjacent to fandom: ordering food, placing a bet, booking travel, or following real-time scores. Winning strategies connect those moments into one seamless journey.”
Jonathan Yantz, Managing Partner at M+C Saatchi Performance, said, “Tournament periods bring intense competition and creative fatigue. The brands that perform best are the ones that plan ahead, test localized creative, and activate in ways that feel authentic to fans, especially through language nuance, community-led messaging, and creators who can produce content natively for each platform.”
Read the report
Scoring Big: The Complete Marketer’s Guide to the World’s Top Soccer Event is available now:
https://www.appsflyer.com/resources/reports/global-soccer-marketing/
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Methodology
Built on fully anonymous and aggregated AppsFlyer measurement data, the report analyzes performance across 19,000 apps, 4.8 billion installs, and 4 billion remarketing conversions during a 91-day window surrounding the 2022 men’s tournament (31 days pre-event, during matches, and 31 days post-event). The findings show that mobile becomes the always-on companion to live viewing, driving spikes in installs, sessions, and revenue across categories, with meaningful variation by market and vertical.
Additional mobile app and digital advertising insights were sourced from Sensor Tower. Mobile app data was drawn from Sensor Tower’s Mobile App Insights platform, covering iOS App Store and Google Play downloads, in-app purchase (IAP) revenue, and active users from December 2021 through August 2024. U.S. digital ad impression data was sourced from Pathmatics by Sensor Tower, spanning select digital channels including desktop, mobile, social, and OTT. Apps were classified using Sensor Tower’s App IQ taxonomy, with coverage spanning 100+ countries.
About AppsFlyer
AppsFlyer is the Modern Marketing Cloud that helps businesses transform complex data into clarity and growth. A foundation for unified, measurable, autonomous marketing, AppsFlyer breaks down silos across measurement, deep linking, data collaboration, and autonomous AI workflows. For more than a decade, AppsFlyer has been the leader in mobile attribution, trusted by over 15,000 businesses worldwide. To learn more, visit www.appsflyer.com.
About Sensor Tower
Sensor Tower is a global provider of digital intelligence solutions, empowering companies to understand consumer behavior and market performance across mobile apps, digital platforms, and gaming ecosystems. Headquartered in San Francisco, Sensor Tower’s insights are trusted by more than 2,500 enterprises worldwide.