The World Cup During Pride Month Has Given Me a Front Row Seat to Queer Erasure

A Haaland meme pops up in my WhatsApp group chat as Madonna's new record blares in my kitchen. As a queer brand strategist, this is a fairly typical, if not embarrassingly stereotypical, glimpse into my life.

Except this year, something's different. For the first time in over 5 years, I don't have a single bit of Pride work going live. World Cup briefs have been pouring in all year. Pride in June is normally when some of my biggest work drops and this year** checks feed ** crickets.

In the US, only 131 Fortune 500 companies participated in the HRC's Corporate Equality Index in 2026, down 65% from 377 the year before. Phoenix Pride declared bankruptcy. Tampa Pride went on hiatus. NYC Pride reported a 25% drop in corporate sponsorships. I don't need to name drop the big orange elephant in the room to explain why.

The World Cup coinciding with Pride month in the States has been a painful lesson in how easily our identities can be erased. Post BLM, Pride briefs became a cornerstone of client marketing calendars.

From that era came genuinely transformative work. The Lesbian Bar Project, backed by Jägermeister's Save the Night initiative, raised nearly $300,000 for the last remaining lesbian bars in America. When the campaign launched in 2020, just 16 were left in the country. Today there are more than double that. Not one of the featured bars closed during covid, and the documentary born of the project was presented at the Library of Congress for the US Congress Equity Caucus. Pretty iconic stuff.

But in the years since, that energy has soured into open hostility toward queer people, and FIFA has erased us from its celebration altogether.

And for sure, those four years of Pride fever were laughably rainbow-filled, often misguided and memeworthy (shout out to the Target Pride Collection, we love you girl). But beneath all that, it felt genuinely incredible to have our identity properly considered. To unmask at work and name the homophobia that had been lurking beneath our brand platforms for decades.

Fast forward to today, if you only watch the Men's World Cup, you wouldn't even know queer people existed, let alone Pride. FIFA has confirmed that neither the ‘OneLove’ armband nor the ‘Unite for Inclusion’ armband has been permitted at the tournament. There are no openly out male players competing.

Writing a World Cup brief as a queer person, when the World Cup has actively erased us, is a dystopian exercise at best. What makes it stranger is that football is how I've made nearly all of my friends. I grew up playing football in the States, and when I moved to Amsterdam 11 years ago, the first thing I did to make friends was join a recreational football team.

In sharp contrast to men's football, women's football is extremely gay. Eye-wateringly gay. You could easily film season three of ‘I Kissed A Girl’ (RIP) in the terraces at pretty much any Arsenal Women's match.

And the thing is, when the queer community turns up for football, the sport gets so much more fun. We have a knack for creativity, style and banter. We're great at anthems. We can make a kit look sickening. We will dress down your rival with the most devastating insult you've ever heard, and they might even mistake it for a compliment. (The government may have invented psy ops, but the gay community perfected them.)

Here's what the brands sitting Pride out are missing: diversity makes for more interesting stories, and the World Cup's flagrant erasure will make for worse entertainment. The tournament will be exponentially less iconic without our commentary, our style, our music and our parties.

There are clear, exciting takeaways here for future briefs. And in fact, I would argue the opportunity for brands now is far greater than it was in 2021. Nobody’s going to accuse you of performative participation, and every dollar and inch of visibility is genuinely vital.

First, anything brands can do to fund the infrastructure fueling queer communities and sport is the single clearest opportunity. The pubs, the leagues, and the watch parties where the community actually gathers. These are some of the richest cultural engines and they’re rapidly disappearing. Support them even in small ways and you unlock the right to activate flexibly as a credible leader in the space, from product to content to experience and beyond.

Second, telling the stories of the ways queer culture is infiltrating sports culture. ‘Heated Rivalry’ is just one example of how much people love queer storytelling around sports. Especially since nearly nobody has been telling our stories for the last few years, there's so many incredible ones to find if you look for them.

And lastly, get in early and do it consistently, because every brand that retreats this cycle makes visibility cheaper for those who stay. The Lesbian Bar project is just one example of how much impact it can make if you do.

Pride budgets may be gone, but the community is thriving. The brands that remember that first will have the most stunning earned media money can buy. In the meantime, may the homoerotic obsession our male friends have with Jude Bellingham light the way.