Picture Cristiano Ronaldo celebrating in a Burger King shirt. Or Lionel Messi. Neymar. Kylian Mbappé. That would’ve been the stuff of dreams for the fast-food chain, but not so easy through the guise of FIFA or any sports game.
Burger King could have spent an astronomical amount of money trying to make any one of those things happen in real life. Instead, the company sponsored Stevenage FC, waited for their shirt to appear in FIFA and let millions of football fans do the rest.
What followed was one of the cleverest football sponsorships of the modern era, turning an unfashionable League Two club into the most-used Career Mode team on FIFA 20 and creating a Stevenage shirt that remains instantly recognisable years later.
It all started with a very simple observation.
Why Did Burger King Sponsor Stevenage?
In June 2019, Stevenage announced Burger King as their new principal shirt sponsor.
It was an unusual pairing. Stevenage were a modest fourth-tier club competing for attention in a part of the country surrounded by significantly bigger teams, while Burger King was one of the world’s largest fast-food brands.
Stevenage chief executive Alex Tunbridge later explained that attracting new supporters could be difficult with clubs including Arsenal, Tottenham, West Ham and Watford nearby. Burger King, meanwhile, wanted to do considerably more with football than simply stick its logo on another shirt.
The real opportunity existed somewhere else entirely.
Stevenage were a fully licensed club in EA Sports’ FIFA series.
That meant their real shirts were recreated in the game. Put the Burger King logo on Stevenage’s shirt in Hertfordshire and, when FIFA 20 arrived, the Burger King logo would also appear inside one of the biggest sports video games in the world.
Very clever. Very clever indeed…
This isn’t our usual gaming piece on Hobby FC, but I’m having a lot of fun remembering and writing this. For more traditional gaming-related pieces, go ahead and check out the Hobby FC Gaming Archive.
Then Came the Stevenage Challenge
Apparently, simply appearing in FIFA wasn’t enough.
Burger King and creative agencies DAVID Madrid and DAVID Miami launched the Stevenage Challenge in October 2019, actively encouraging FIFA players to start using the club.
The concept was wonderfully simple. Play as Stevenage, complete particular challenges and share footage of your goals online. Players could earn Burger King rewards including free Whoppers and delivery by completing tasks such as scoring goals, free-kicks and even direct corners.
But there was another ingredient that made the whole thing work.
FIFA Career Mode allowed you to sign players.
So gamers could take control of little Stevenage FC and gradually start bringing the world’s greatest footballers to Broadhall Way. Suddenly social media was filling with clips of Messi, Ronaldo, Neymar and other superstars wearing a Stevenage shirt with Burger King emblazoned across the front.
Burger King had found a way of getting some of the most marketable footballers on Earth into its branded kit without actually sponsoring any of them. Not bad for a League Two shirt deal.
How FIFA 20 Transformed Stevenage FC
The campaign worked because it understood how people already played FIFA.
Taking Manchester City to the Champions League wasn’t particularly difficult. Taking Stevenage from League Two to European champions, filling the team with superstars along the way, was exactly the sort of long-term Career Mode project FIFA players had been doing for years.
Now there were free burgers involved.
During the campaign, more than 25,000 goals wearing the Stevenage kit were shared online, and Stevenage became the most-played team in FIFA 20 Career Mode.
The club’s chief executive later said the campaign generated around 1.2 billion impressions, describing the exposure as something Stevenage simply couldn’t have bought through conventional football coverage.
There was something inherently funny about it too.
One minute Stevenage were playing Morecambe on a Saturday afternoon. The next, somebody in Brazil was leading them to the Champions League with Cristiano Ronaldo up front.
That’s exactly why people wanted to participate.
How Good Was Burger King’s Return?
This is where the campaign becomes fascinating from a business perspective.
Reliable public figures for Burger King’s exact financial return aren’t available, so it would be misleading to slap a neat ROI percentage onto the campaign. What we can measure is the extraordinary amount of exposure generated from the sponsorship.
Contemporary reports placed the value of the Stevenage shirt sponsorship at roughly £50,000, although this figure was reported rather than officially disclosed by the club or Burger King.
Compare that with the reported 1.2 billion campaign impressions and you begin to understand the scale of the idea.
More importantly, the advertising wasn’t simply Burger King buying impressions. FIFA players were voluntarily creating branded content and sharing it themselves.
Stevenage benefited too. The club sold out of shirts for the first time in its history, with Tunbridge recalling his surprise at the number of overseas orders arriving following the campaign.
For a League Two football club, that’s an extraordinary result from a shirt sponsor..
Critical Acclaim of the Advertising Campaign
The Stevenage Challenge didn’t disappear once FIFA 20 was replaced by the next game.
The campaign became heavily celebrated within advertising, including recognition at The One Show, where the project collected awards across categories including social media, branded entertainment and interactive work.
It later received major recognition at Cannes Lions, including the Direct Grand Prix, while the campaign continues to appear in marketing case studies years later.
There’s a reason for that.
Burger King didn’t interrupt what football fans were doing and demand their attention. It found something they already enjoyed doing – taking obscure clubs to glory on FIFA – and made itself part of the joke.
The supporters created the advertising.
Why We Still Remember Stevenage and Burger King
Football sponsorships change constantly. Most disappear without leaving much behind.
Try remembering the front-of-shirt sponsor of a random League Two club from 2019 and you’ll probably struggle. Yet mention Stevenage and Burger King to somebody who spent far too much time playing FIFA 20 and there’s a decent chance they’ll know exactly what you’re talking about.
That’s the legacy of the campaign.
It also captures a particular period of football gaming rather nicely. Career Mode could still turn obscure clubs and players into genuine cult favourites, while the increasing crossover between football, social media and gaming was beginning to give smaller clubs access to audiences that would previously have been unimaginable.
Stevenage were never really supposed to become one of the biggest clubs on FIFA. But the players made it so.
Did you ever play with Stevenage FC on FIFA 20?
(The below video has nothing to do with this campaign, but if you look closely, you can see me in it trying my own version of the Burger King Challenge – trying ketchup for the 1st time in 10 years. Enjoy! And ignore the hair…)