I don't know about you, but the final whistle is never the end of the match for me.
The real game starts when I unlock my phone.
One minute, I'm arguing in a WhatsApp group that the referee bottled the decision. The next minute, I'm on TikTok watching the same goal from six different angles. Then I jump to X to see who football Twitter has decided to blame today. Before I know it, Instagram is showing me celebration photos, AI edits of the winning goal, and someone trying to sell me a “World Cup” jersey for half the price of the official one.
Sound familiar?
Now here's the funny part.
While everyone else is debating football, my law-student brain is asking completely different questions.
Can that page legally post that highlight? Is that jersey actually official? Can that business use the World Cup logo to advertise its products? Who owns that viral clip everyone keeps reposting? Can someone use an AI-generated image of a player to sell merchandise?
Those aren't random questions anymore. They're becoming more relevant every tournament.
Just this week, FIFA revealed that online abuse during the World Cup has exploded compared with the last tournament. The football isn't just happening in the stadium anymore—it's happening on our phones. Every controversial decision, every unbelievable goal, every celebration becomes content within seconds. People clip it, remix it, meme it, repost it and, sometimes, make money from it.
That's where things get interesting.
Because your World Cup feed isn't just made up of football. It's made up of intellectual property.
The match highlights are protected. The tournament branding is protected. The logos are protected. The official merchandise is licensed. The trophy design is protected. Even the difference between an official jersey and the suspiciously cheap one being advertised on your timeline is an intellectual property story.
As fans, we usually don't notice any of this. We're too busy debating whether VAR got it wrong.
But hidden between the memes, the hot takes, the TikToks and the transfer rumours is one of the biggest intellectual property operations in the world.
So, over the next few minutes, let's scroll through a typical World Cup feed together—not as lawyers looking for legal jargon, but as football fans discovering that almost every post we interact with has a legal story hiding behind it.