Why Industry and Nike Took Soccer to the Streets During a World Cup Year
The Toma tournament and campaign shortened the U.S. pitch for players and teams in U.S. cities
There are corners of the United States where soccer looks more like the game played throughout the rest of the world, but Nike and its partners are going beyond multiple World Cup cycles to make that street style the national standard.
During the tournament’s first stateside appearance in 1994, the U.S. team pulled players from pickup games at The Courts in Harrison, N.J., and the Hoyt Street and Washington School playgrounds in Kearny, N.J., aka Soccertown USA. But by the World Cup’s return to North America this year, the soccer played in that urban corner of New Jersey—as well as St. Louis, Chicago, Miami, Los Angeles, and elsewhere—was still overshadowed by a more rigid, formal, and costly competitor in the suburbs.
Oved Valadez, co-founder and executive creative director of Portland, Oregon-based creative agency INDUSTRY, noted that three elements of U.S. soccer development have differentiated it from the world’s game—to its detriment.
“One, soccer has always stayed in the suburbs: It’s orange slices and pay to play, which is a huge barrier,” he said. “Two, the kid here isn’t inspired or doesn’t know to play on the street—3-on-3, 2-on-2, 1-on-1—it’s just not part of the culture. Three, America inspires the world in culture, expression, music, fashion, but that energy hasn’t crossed over to soccer.”
According to the Aspen Institute’s 2025 Youth Athlete Survey, though 53.4% of U.S. youth athletes have played organized soccer at some point—a higher percentage than any other sport—an overwhelming majority drop out by age 13. About 29% believe they aren’t good enough to reach the next level—typically travel teams or academy programs—and nearly 19% say the sport becomes cost prohibitive.
Soccer has always stayed in the suburbs. It’s orange slices and pay to play, which is a huge barrier.
Oved Valadez, executive creative director, INDUSTRY
Of those who keep playing soccer through high school, the NCAA says just 6% of boys and 8% of girls will play competitively in college.
With Nike already working with Wieden+Kennedy on its star-studded “Rip the Script” campaign for the World Cup, Industry and Nike began discussing a street tournament specifically for the 14- to 18-year-olds being sidelined by U.S. soccer culture. They spent six months speaking to organizers of local small-team street soccer tournaments and decided to run a pilot program in “88 cities in one” Los Angeles.
The Industry team identified eight districts, eight unique styles of play, and “facilitators” including a semi-pro player in El Sereno who organized pickup games on tennis courts, a Brazilian-influenced head of a turf-based league in the Valley, the founder of the Barcelona-informed Tiki-Taka Futbol league, and the beach-community vibes of Venice Beach Football Club (VBFC) leadership. They created uniforms that expressed the identity of each team, played neighborhood tournaments with neighborhood rules (with team sizes and playing surfaces varying by location), and staged a 4-on-4 city championship tournament on a hardtop surface. Originally called “The Takeover,” the event took the name Toma after months of debate over whether the word’s meaning in Latin soccer culture (“take it”) would overcome Nike’s fears about its other definitions (“to drink”) and whether it would land as well as the Brazilian term it had tied to soccer in the past—”joga bonito” (“play beautifully”).
The first Toma tournament resulted not only in a final between Tiki-Taka and VCFC that drew thousands—including Vinicius Jr., Young Miko, and Industry partner and tournament supporter Travis Scott—but 100 other Toma tournaments around the globe. Leading into the men’s World Cup events, Toma took over Toronto, Miami, Atlanta, New York, Paris, Barcelona, London, Seoul, Mexico City and other hotspots while transforming Industry from a creative partner into a sports event architect.
“What was interesting is that it’s been a bit of a comedown coming back into the office and working on projects that are more like traditional pay,” said Pete Hoppins, Industry’s art director. “There were obviously budgets, but making money off this was never a conversation for the whole project, which was a total enablement platform.”
All sides of the ball
While Nike and Wieden+Kennedy attempted to capture the world’s imagination by loading their “Rip The Script” World Cup leadup campaign with broadly recognized soccer and cultural icons, Travis Scott donned a Nike T90 Toma jersey during flagship ad as a nod to the work both Nike and Industry had been doing all over the globe.
Bringing in Amazon and Twitch as broadcast partners for the Toma events, INDUSTRY worked with the teams and Nike to build elaborate courts and pitches specific to each city and neighborhood. In Los Angeles, they worked on “The Lawn” with Compton FC, “The Bridge”with clothing label Paisaboys, “The Beach” with VBFC and “The Hill” with apparel brand Kids of Immigrants. The final took place in an abandoned pool with Kids of Immigrants-designed kits, a performance from Compton rapper YG, and trophies by local artisan Georgina Treviño.
A “Toma la Noche” event had teams playing under makeshift lighting rigs beneath the Sixth Street Viaduct.
The pattern repeated around the world, with Toma’s Miami tournament played on an island just beyond the Paris Museum during Art Basel, Atlanta hosting players inside music venue The Eastern, and New York City holding the North American Finals in Bryant Park. In Guadalajara, the tournament was played on clay in a charrilla that typically hosts rodeo, while Mexico City put the pitch right in front of the The Diego Rivera Anahuacalli Museum. In Barcelona, Toma was honored with space beside F.C. Barcelona’s Camp Nou.
“The final product is never the same as we imagine,” said Ricardo d’Avila, INDUSTRY’s senior designer. “Atlanta was one where we started to push ideas and embrace the culture of the city, so that was the one that we decided to do in a music venue and create a crest for each team based on a music label vibe—that’s how we try to get the essence of each city.”
In Bryant Park, for example, Valadez said Travis Scott suggested an environment more like the Rucker Park street ball tournaments and achieved something more akin to “Rucker Park meets the US Open”—with Scott, Nike leadership, 12 members of the INDUSTRY team, and nearly two dozen production staff running both the event and broadcast.
Just as vital, however, were efforts to connect with the 150 teams taking part in each of the tournaments. With New York’s Youth 4 Youth program, for example, INDUSTRY not only designed Italian-style kits and held an event in an abandoned Wall Street bank, but gave that La Famiglia event its own fake restaurant website as a leadup. When Bamba Sports in the Bronx took part in Toma’s The Kingdom event in its backyard, Valadez noted that they awarded winning teams with crowns brought over by the Senegal World Cup team.
Some neighborhoods preferred leather jackets as trophies, others wanted wrestling belts—still others preferred a token made from cement. While it’s often difficult for a brand to meet both the larger expectations of a World Cup campaign and the more local, long-term benefits of a community-based tournament, the fact that Erling Haaland goes flying over the head of an actual Toma player at the end of the “Rip the Script” ad suggests a greater point to the games, music, food, and trophies.
“Out of this whole tournament, about 100 kids got signed with Nike deals,” said Valadez, noting the impact of name, image, and likeness rights deals on even lower levels of soccer. “The spotlight of inspiration is getting younger—it used to be your Jordan—so let’s begin to hero some of these kids.”
Who’s got next
The INDUSTRY team is already taking what it’s learned from the first series of Toma tournaments and applying them to a second season of the series with Nike ahead of the Women’s World Cup in 2027.
It hasn’t been lost on INDUSTRY’s hometown that both Toma and “Rip the Script” were created in Portland, Oregon, but didn’t include a stop in the city during the tournament’s run to the World Cup in 2026. Valadez said he received contact from kids in the Portland Timbers’ soccer academy asking if the MLS host city would eventually get a Toma tournament of its own. Also home to the NWSL’s Portland Thorns and USL’s Portland Bangers and Cherry Bombs, Portland didn’t lack the soccer enthusiasm for Toma—just the market size for this stage of the project.
Noting that the INDUSTRY team would still love to see Toma in cities including Kansas City, Houston, and Milwaukee, Valadez said they tried to address the dearth of Midwest tournaments by sending soccer influencers out to cities that didn’t get events of their own and recruiting talent for two teams that played in the North American final. But Hoppins noted that a project of this scale needs to make an impact beyond its immediate community if it’s going to secure the long-term commitment of the brand partner behind it, which made investing in the Los Angeles neighborhood approach and holding a final that brought out the likes of Vini Jr. and Travis Scott all the more important—it had to get people beyond the sport talking, and in a cross-cultural language that Nike understood clearly.
“A lot of us have worked either with Nike or at Nike, and so we understand the dynamics of corporate American culture and how to navigate that system and convince people,” Hoppins said. “I think everybody has that, and then everybody has their unique point of view of football.”
Born in Mexico City, raised in Atotonilco el Alto in the highlands of Jalisco, and moved to Chicago in the ‘90s, Valadez co-founded INDUSTRY and has helped shape its brand work connecting soccer and culture—working with partners including Nike, U.S. Soccer, and the MLS/Liga MX Leagues Cup. A high school soccer All-American in Connecticut and a letterwinner at Rutgers before eventually ascending to head of digital for North America and Nike, Industry’s Executive Creative Director Jacy Weyer pitched his former company on Toma and let them know exactly who to contact to make the tournament possible.
Originally from Liverpool, Hoppins was a product and apparel designer at Nike behind some of the most iconic kits of the last 25 years and not only runs the Portland brewery and pub Away Days in his off hours, but turned an abandoned Portland bank into a World Cup viewing party venue. D’Avila, meanwhile, draws a line right to Toma from Nike’s 2002 Secret Tournament ad that he used to emulate as a child in São Paulo.
As Nike continues coaxing soccer kids in the U.S. to take to the streets like their global counterparts, the soccer-savvy team working in front of a Diego Maradona mural at INDUSTRY’s Portland offices is still considering its strategy and benefitting from the few fortunate bounces that brought them together.
“I just think it was a kind of crazy law of attraction,” D’Avila said. “In Brazil, when we didn’t have a ball, we’d just mash a can and play with a can, so when I joined industry and they’re explaining Toma, I was like, ‘this is the easiest project of my life… know this by heart.”
Out of this whole tournament, about 100 kids got signed with Nike deals. The spotlight of inspiration is getting younger.
Oved Valadez
