Italian sports brand Lotto has launched its biggest global campaign in years – a World Cup-timed film that serves as the public face of a four-year, methodical relaunch.
Lotto launched its 2026 global brand campaign, “Legends Begin with LOTTO,” on May 7, timed to football’s biggest summer. The 90-second film – directed by Anthony Mandler and shot in Mexico City, one of the host cities for the 2026 FIFA World Cup – brings together a cross-generational cast spanning soccer, hip-hop, media and fashion, with US rapper and cultural figure Flavor Flav as its most visible face. A Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee and Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award recipient as a member of Public Enemy, Flav is among the more recognizable faces in American popular culture.
The photography and settings carry an unmistakable 1990s reference – warm interiors, street textures, a palette that feels analogue rather than algorithmic. It calls to mind Adidas Backyard Legends, another campaign that launched this week. But this is not imitation: these are the themes the 2026 FIFA World Cup inevitably carries for American audiences – the memory of 1994, of the first World Cup on US soil, and the particular street feel that football, as distinct from college sports, has always had. Mexico City’s exteriors and interiors are almost the more interesting visual choice, and some details – a Vespa threading through traffic – wink quietly at the Italian origins of this brand: once iconic, then faded, and now… carefully relaunched.
The campaign’s ambition, however, goes well beyond a World Cup activation. It is the public arrival of a relaunch strategy that has been advancing quietly since 2021, when New York-based brand management firm WHP Global acquired Lotto’s global trademarks from Lotto Sport Italia. Under the terms of that deal, LSI and its leadership team – including President and CEO Andrea Tomat – retained operational control of the brand across Italy, Europe, the Middle East and Africa. WHP took responsibility for expanding Lotto’s footprint everywhere else, with particular focus on North America and high-growth markets in Asia.
LOTTO: a brand with deep roots and a long absence
Few European sporting goods brands carry the heritage density that Lotto does. Founded in 1973 in Montebelluna – the footwear district in the Veneto region that also produced Nordica and Tecnica – Lotto built its identity around a double diamond logo drawn from an overlapping tennis court and football field. Through the 1980s and 1990s, the brand reached the elite of European football: AC Milan, Napoli and Juventus all wore Lotto kits at the height of Serie A’s global prestige. Its tennis roster ran from Martina Navratilova and Boris Becker to Francesca Schiavone and Marion Bartoli. Its golden period ran roughly from 1990 to 2003, recalling Umbro’s role as a national reference brand in England.
That peak was followed by a long retrenchment. By the time WHP moved, Lotto’s retail footprint had shrunk considerably in key markets – particularly North America, where the brand had been a visible presence in the 1980s and 1990s but had faded from mainstream retail.
The relaunch architecture: a step-by-step licensing playbook
WHP’s approach has been methodical rather than spectacular. The firm built a licensing framework market by market. A partnership with MAP Active for Southeast Asia – covering Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Thailand and Singapore – came in July 2022. Germany and Poland followed in December 2023, via Fashioncenter GmbH. In 2024, Agilitas Sports secured rights across India, Australia and South Africa, with a stated plan to launch multi-category product by early 2025.
North America, the strategically most visible market given the approaching World Cup, came last. In December 2025, WHP signed Pure Cotton Global Group – a vertically integrated apparel company combining Portuguese manufacturing expertise with US retail relationships – to design, manufacture and distribute a lifestyle apparel line across the US and Canada. The debut capsule, dubbed the “Starting 11,” launched directly on lottosport.com. Broader distribution – covering specialty retailers, sporting goods chains and department stores – is planned across 2026. On the creative side, WHP brought in Dustin Canalin, a former Nike Basketball art director, to lead US lifestyle creative direction.
The return to English club football also came in 2025, when AFC Wimbledon signed a kit deal with Lotto – a small but symbolically charged move for a brand that once dressed the peak of European football.
Speaking to trade publication The Spin-Off at Pitti Uomo in June 2025, Tomat put 2024 Lotto brand sales at over €400 million across more than 120 countries, attributing the growth directly to distribution partnerships built over the preceding 12 to 18 months. India had already begun making a meaningful contribution, Tomat said, while the brand’s presence in Eastern Europe, Turkey and the Middle East had reached over 1,000 stores.
A cultural relay: connecting sport, street and NIL
“Legends Begin with LOTTO” is structured as a cinematic relay, with a football passed between cast members across generations, geographies and disciplines. Beyond Flav, the film features US soccer figures including defender Sofia Huerta (Seattle Reign FC) and Fox Sports analyst Stu Holden, alongside Canadian DJ and producer Eva Shaw, food culture figure Mark Iacono (owner of Brooklyn and Miami pizzeria Lucali) and fashion model Khristian Jasper.
Perhaps the most strategically notable inclusion is Loradana Paletta, a US women’s youth international born in 2011, who becomes Lotto’s first US NIL (Name, Image, Likeness) athlete, positioning the brand in the growing market for youth athlete endorsements.
Campaign product will be available through DICK’S Sporting Goods, Amazon and the lottosport.com shop.
Today, Lotto is distributed across more than 100 countries and associated with over 40 football teams and more than 300 professional soccer players. For WHP – which manages more than $8.5 billion in annual retail sales across a portfolio of more than 15 consumer brands – this World Cup-anchored campaign completes, for now, the public phase of a relaunch years in the making.
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