Not even in the superstar-driven world of football is there an athlete big enough to carry an entire World Cup campaign, so in planning Adidas' effort for the 2006 event, the creatives at 180, Amsterdam went in the opposite direction. Rather than celebrate the game's biggest stars, the agency put the focus on team play, and in the process sparked the idea behind the brand's largest-ever campaign.

"You can be a superstar, but if you're not playing with the rest of your team, you're not going to win," explains executive agency producer Cedric Gairard. "That was proven by Greece in Euro 2005, where out of nowhere, these guys won the European championship... we took the idea of being a team and made it into the truth of Adidas."

Along with liberal sprinklings of reality TV, guerilla filmmaking, vicarious daydream fulfillment and good old fashioned patriotism, this team concept is at the heart of Adidas' 10+ campaign. In it, 12 professional footballers are enlisted to lead their respective nations in a series of amateur pickup matches. The catch? Each player has only two hours in which to recruit a surrounding team of nationals.

Told in vérité style, the resulting recruitment films comprise a tour of the world's soccer pitches, shopping malls and neighborhood streets as luminaries like Ricardo Kakŕ (Brazil), Djibril Cissé (France) and Kevin Kuranyi (Germany) audition disbelieving gatherers for the chance to represent their country. 180 ECD Andy Fackrell says the recruits' genuinely stunned reactions made for some great film. "On one of the few shoots I went to, I sat next to a kid on a bus and he was like, 'Is this for real or am I gonna be busted on a prank video show?'"

Directed by Stink's James Brown, the material for the campaign's 12 spots (six :120 shorts setting up each match and six :90 game summaries) was filmed in various locations around the world over a two-and-a-half-month period last autumn. With matches slated to take place in cities ranging from Los Angeles to Glasgow, the ambitious schedule was further complicated by limited player access and a dizzying array of mother tongues. "We did everything in each player's language," says agency producer Claire Finn. "So when we shot with [Argentina's Juan Román] Riquelme and Kakŕ's teams playing in Milan, we basically had four languages operating - Portugeuse, Spanish, Italian and English. That made the edit quite interesting."

With some players only available for concurrent windows of time, Brown was occasionally forced to "write down a list of bullet points and send a unit" to film certain recruitment sequences for him. Although it wasn't his ideal way of working, the director found some creative ways to get the most of those particular situations. "I got some really good footage by giving cameras to people," he recalls. "In Brazil, we left a camera with a team and got some really nice video diary footage."

For his part, Fackrell notes spontaneity was always a key part of the brief. "It seemed better that we had these tight deadlines - it felt more immediate," he says. "If you're working with athletes, they do get bored pretty quickly. You have to keep them going and entertained, so it was good that we had the discipline of 2-3 hours and the game was the result of the day."

In many ways, says Finn, the absence of an overly protracted production schedule helped bring out the matches' various plot arcs and distinguishing characteristics. "A lot of the players aren't actors and they don't like to do a lot of shoots, so I think they enjoyed this concept because it was about their own personality," she explains. "They're actually just talking about football... that's how we got a lot of their natural personality to come forth."

Building on the recruitment concepts seen in the films, 180 has expanded the campaign to include Adidas branded events held all over the world, where kids can turn up to play in organized 10+ tournaments. "The whole notion was that you don't have to be a lone kid to play football - you've got 10 guys around," Fackrell says. "The numbers are phenomenal. In Mexico City we had 65,000 kids turn up in one day to play an event."

In another extension of the inclusive philosophy of 10+, 180 worked with Amsterdam's Massive Music to create a base track for the campaign, which was then dispersed to different DJs around the world who competed for the right to soundtrack their respective nation's films. Such adaptability, says Fackrell, is something 180 envisioned from the start. "We've really tried to create all these little paths for it to go," he says. "Having the events, having the DJs at the events, having it all locked in as a big idea has made all these things work really well."

Next up from 10+ are a couple of spots from Stink's Ivan Zacharias, which were filmed concurrently with Brown's films and promise to provide the campaign's "logical conclusion." Their release will put the lid on what 180 is billing as Adidas' largest campaign. "It's definitely been the longest as well," jokes Finn. "I feel like I've done a feature film."

180 Amsterdam> http://www.180amsterdam.com
Stink> http://www.stink.tv
Adidas Football> http://www.adidas.com/football