Super Subs: A Typological Reading of Visual Rhetoric in 2026 FIFA World Cup Advertising

Abstract

The FIFA World Cup generates one of the largest concentrated arenas of commercial visual persuasion in global culture, yet the advertising that surrounds a single tournament has rarely been treated as a corpus in its own right, and analyses that do exist tend to isolate metaphor rather than the wider repertoire of visual figures. This study offers a systematic typological reading of visual rhetoric in World Cup advertising through a qualitative, interpretive analysis of 19 campaigns released for the 2026 tournament, the first hosted across three nations and the first expanded to 48 teams. Each campaign is coded for eight visual tropes and classified through the design rhetoric frameworks of Durand and of Phillips and McQuarrie, supported by procedures for identifying pictorial and multimodal metaphor. Across the corpus, metaphor and metonymy are co-dominant, hyperbole and irony are frequent, and no case of visual simile was identified, consistent with a genre that fuses and replaces rather than compares side by side. The analysis argues that national and fan belonging is constructed chiefly through part-whole figures, metonymy and synecdoche, while metaphor carries emotional and temporal meaning. It further identifies an emergent temporal axis in which campaigns oscillate between digitally resurrected pasts and staged futures, a tension intensified by artificial intelligence image-making. The paper contributes a replicable analytic protocol for figuration in mega-event advertising and a design-oriented reading that links rhetorical theory to visual communication practice.