Google joined FIFA for the 2026 World Cup. They wanted a campaign about AI Mode showing up in the biggest football stage. The job was to lead the motion side.

In order to show AI Mode, place it in the World Cup, and celebrate football, two worlds needed to align.

Google is white space, search bars and text blocks, while football is colour, motion and drama. The point was not mix them together all the time, but to find the moments where one transitions into the other.

I drove the team through multiple rounds of exploration, both internal and client facing. The concept:

Search results drawn on a tactics board. Words placed in strategy plays. Football helps us show the thinking.

I ran daily direction across the team on the StudyHall side. Concept, design, motion. Made decisions on tone, pacing, arc. And our share of the client calls.

Google took the project in-house before we finished, so I made my "director's cut".

I wrote a script built around two queries:

First one is universal ("what's at stake at the World Cup?"), celebrates football at large. The format, the history, the players. Modric and Messi, two famous number 10s, lead us into,

The second query ("what does it take to be a number 10"), which celebrates Google AI and the interactive diagrams. We show Google's "best moves".

Before landing on the "tactics" oncept, we explored multiple territories, mapped around literal, expressive, on-brand, and abstract.

Below are some of the motion tests from the round of explorations.