With 289 million football fans, China is one of the largest fan bases globally, surpassing any single European market. That cultural reality is the compelling backdrop for Adidas’ 2026 Lunar New Year film.
Crafted
by TBWA Shanghai, the 1:24 film is a quietly confident homage to China’s
enduring relationship with football. While the sport still plays second fiddle
to basketball in traditional popularity rankings, its upward curve is hard to
ignore. Football’s penetration among Chinese sports fans has steadily crept
closer to basketball’s, with hundreds of millions now identifying as fans
across age groups and platforms. Not all of them buy jerseys or match tickets but
at this scale, football has long graduated from niche obsession to mainstream
cultural force, and a serious commercial arena for global sports brands.
Titled
‘Happy New Year’, the spot is a subtle emotional thesis on what football
already means to the next-gen talent who carry the love for this sport forward.
Featuring young footballers from Xu Genbao Football Base and Tsinghua
University High School Football Team, the film depicts how the kids pause their
festive celebrations to unite with their football family—coaches and teammates—during
Chinese New Year.
Scenes of players training in the snow are intercut with casual and very real moments like dumplings around a table, spontaneous dancing and the small pockets of joy squeezed between drills.
Ad
Nut appreciates that TBWA resists the usual Chinese New Year tropes. There’s no
grand narrative about China as an inevitable football superpower, no
sentimental overreach masquerading as cultural insight. In a season famous for
emotional inflation, the restraint is refreshing. The film trusts its audience
to feel something without being told what that something should be.
The film concludes with beautiful bytes of young players sharing their personal football hopes. Again, no grand gestures or over-the-top declarations. The ambition is both human and inspiring.
In China, Adidas has invested in the football ecosystem through youth development initiatives, partnerships and leagues. Happy New Year is available across Adidas’ social platforms like WeChat, Rednote, Douyin and Weibo.
 Ad Nut is a surprisingly literate woodland creature that for unknown reasons has an unhealthy obsession with advertising. Ad Nut gathers ads from all over Asia and the world for your viewing pleasure, because Ad Nut loves you. You can also check out Ad Nut's Advertising Hall of Fame, or read about Ad Nut's strange obsession with 'murderous beasts'. |
Source: Campaign Asia-Pacific
