Integrated Campaign: Campaign Strategy, Art Direction, Experience Design, UX/UI, Print, Interactive OOH, Mobile Gaming
Campaign hero: FC Barcelona and Real Madrid fans split one frame under “The Rivalry Is Live” and “Pick A Side.”
The world’s great football rivalries don’t live only on the pitch. They live in divided households, packed bars, group chats and city streets thousands of miles from the stadium. The Rivalry Is Live is the campaign I created and sold to ESPN as a creative director at GlobalHue: a platform that turns El Clásico from a match fans watch into a rivalry they can enter. Developed for ESPN, LaLiga and ESPN Deportes around the most-watched club fixture in world football, every touchpoint asks one thing. Pick a side.
Fans don’t just watch El Clásico. They choose, argue, predict and defend their club in the group chat and at the dinner table. That behavior already exists everywhere. It just never had a platform. So instead of treating fans as an audience, The Rivalry Is Live treats every expression of allegiance as part of the experience. The match happens in Spain. The rivalry happens anywhere.
I designed the platform as one identity system expressed across three connected layers: mass spectacle (print built to be tilted and torn, live interactive billboards, transit takeovers and public installations), shared participation (watch parties, projected matches and a sports-bar takeover that claims every surface in the room) and personal play (FanPulse, the live Fan Feed and the Mano A Mano mobile game). Every scan, vote, kick and swipe feeds one shared signal of support, and one visual grammar holds the system together from a Times Square screen to a phone screen.
Print that proves the premise. The lenticular spread shifts with the reader’s angle: tilt one way and Messi faces Ronaldo; tilt the other and Lamine Yamal faces Mbappé. The generations change. Barça stays left, Madrid stays right, and the dividing line never moves, because El Clásico is bigger than any one era. QR codes on each side let readers back their club on the spot and feed FanPulse, the campaign’s live measure of fan support. A static ad becomes a changing rivalry, and the reader picks where they stand.
Drag the line to change eras. Notice what doesn’t move.
A print ad that refuses to stay neutral. Built as a perforated magazine spread, Pick A Side turns the campaign’s central command into a physical act: tear the page down the middle and separate Barça from Madrid. Intact, the spread reads as one bold invitation. Split, each half still works as its own declaration of loyalty: keep the one you’d never betray, or toss the one you’d never switch to. QR codes on both halves let fans back their club instantly, feeding FanPulse and extending the rivalry beyond the page. The ad doesn’t just ask fans to choose. It makes them do it.
Pick A Side perforated spread: Messi and Ronaldo split by a tearable seam; “Scan. Pick. Rep your side.”
The scalable projection platform. A blank wall becomes a giant screen; a parking lot becomes a venue. Using portable projection and a lightweight activation kit, the live match travels to unexpected spaces and underserved fan communities, no stadium infrastructure required. One match, hundreds of temporary stadiums.
Rivalry Anywhere: a pop-up night pitch with projected Barça and Madrid crests, neon goals and a city skyline.
A traditional billboard tells people what’s happening. This one shows what fans are making happen. The Tug Board is live interactive out-of-home that visualizes support for Barcelona and Real Madrid in real time: fans scan to vote, and every vote shifts the balance of the board. The dominant club claims more of the screen while live percentages track momentum at city scale. Surrounding screens carry the match itself, making the installation both a viewing destination and a public scoreboard for allegiance. It’s a billboard that never looks the same twice, because the fans control it.
The Rivalry Tug Board: a live scan-to-vote billboard tallying FC Barcelona at 67% against Real Madrid at 33%.
The community experience built on the projection platform. Local food, music and culture root each gathering in its neighborhood (Spanish street food alongside the match) while a simple Pick Your Side moment links every local crowd to the global campaign. This is how a global rivalry becomes locally meaningful.
Rivalry Watch Party: the match projected on a building wall beside a Spanish street-food truck, fans in club jerseys.
What if the commute became part of El Clásico? High-traffic corridors like the Times Square subway and airport walkways become full ESPN x LaLiga environments where anyone can step in against a virtual player. Floor graphics define the pitch; screens, pillars and surrounding media extend the world; the score of the real match runs overhead. Designed as a true media takeover rather than a standalone installation, it converts a space people move through into a place they stop, and the crowd filming it into the campaign’s next media channel.
The Rivalry Takes Over: a commuter faces a virtual footballer on a floor pitch in the Times Square subway.
The rivalry starts before the first whistle, sometimes with something as small as where you set down your drink. The Dividing Line turns the bar coaster into a physical declaration of allegiance: Barcelona on one side, Real Madrid on the other, joined at a perforated seam, the print campaign’s tear brought down to coaster size. It’s the only time all season Barça and Madrid fans stick together. And it rarely survives the first round. Each torn half carries its own QR code, turning the split into a digital entry point that feeds the larger campaign. A low-tech object wired into a high-participation ecosystem. Scan it. Choose a side. Tear the rivalry apart.
The Dividing Line coaster: Barça and Real Madrid halves, each with its own QR code, torn at the seam.
Sports bars are where rivalries already live; the Virtual Kick gives that energy something to do. Between live moments, fans take a real penalty against a virtual keeper, with shot speed and accuracy scored for their club. One fan shoots, the whole bar reacts. The bar doesn’t just show the match anymore; it’s part of it.
The Virtual Kick: a fan shoots against a virtual keeper in a sports bar; shot speed reads 63 mph.
Some rivalries follow you everywhere. Rival Urinals takes the campaign into the most unexpected room in the sports bar, placing jersey decals of Barcelona and Real Madrid inside opposing fixtures and inviting fans to choose exactly whom they’d like to answer nature’s call to. Surrounding signage links the guerrilla installation back to the platform: scan, pick a side, keep playing beyond the bar. Irreverent, culturally fluent and impossible not to talk about: an overlooked space turned into earned media for the rivalry.
Rival Urinals: Barça and Real Madrid jersey decals inside opposing fixtures under “Pick Your Rival.”
FanPulse is the digital home of the rivalry, a desktop and mobile experience that unifies the entire ecosystem. Fans follow the match, track live stats, watch highlights, find nearby watch parties, upload reactions and cast their vote. At the center: a live visualization of fan sentiment, city by city, revealing which club is winning the rivalry beyond the scoreboard. Every physical activation feeds it; every fan who never attends one still has a way in. The match has a score. The rivalry has a pulse.
FanPulse on desktop and mobile: live score, a 67 to 33 percent fan vote and city-by-city stats.
FanPulse tells you who’s winning the rivalry. The Fan Feed shows you. A live global grid of watch parties streams the celebrations themselves, from Barcelona to Bogotá and Tokyo to New York, filterable by club and ranked by what’s trending. Fans at home can jump from crowd to crowd, borrow the energy of a bar in Mexico City, and keep their competitive spirit fully lit from the couch, the office or the mother-in-law’s bathroom. One match. Two sides. Everywhere.
The Fan Feed: a live global grid of watch parties, from Barcelona to Bogotá, filterable by club.
For fans who want more than a vote, Mano A Mano turns the rivalry into a mobile game. Swipe to aim, release to shoot, score for your side. Quick, repeatable penalty duels with challenges, leaderboards and club-versus-club scoring keep players coming back before, during and after matchday. One phone. One shot. Two sides.
Mano A Mano mobile game: “One shot. Your legacy.” and a swipe-to-aim penalty screen.
One magazine spread turns Messi into Yamal in a fan’s hands; another dares them to tear out the side they’d never betray. Both end the same way, with a scan to back their club. That vote moves the Tug Board downtown and feeds FanPulse. FanPulse points them to a watch party; at the bar they tear a coaster in half, take the Virtual Kick and pick a rival on the restroom wall; back home the Fan Feed drops them into crowds from Tokyo to Bogotá; on the train the next morning they’re playing Mano A Mano. Every interaction is another door into the same idea.
That’s the point of the platform: one insight, one identity system, one interaction, expressed across print, broadcast, out-of-home, experiential, guerrilla, digital product and gaming without losing its shape. The game ends. The rivalry keeps moving.
The Rivalry Is Live is an integrated fan-engagement campaign that Husani Barnwell, a New York-based creative and innovation leader, created and sold to ESPN while a creative director at GlobalHue. Developed for ESPN, LaLiga and ESPN Deportes, it reimagines El Clásico as a connected fan ecosystem spanning a generation-shifting lenticular print spread, a perforated tear-apart print ad, an interactive voting billboard, projected community watch parties, a transit media takeover, a tear-apart rivalry coaster, an in-bar penalty game, a guerrilla restroom takeover, the FanPulse live platform, a global watch-party Fan Feed and the Mano A Mano mobile game, all unified by a single interaction: pick a side. Barnwell led the campaign as its creative director.
Is The Rivalry Is Live a real ESPN campaign?
Yes. I created the campaign as a creative director at GlobalHue and sold it to ESPN. It was developed for ESPN, LaLiga and ESPN Deportes.
What does The Rivalry Is Live campaign include?
Thirteen connected executions: a campaign hero identity, a lenticular print spread (Legends Change. Sides Don’t.), a perforated tear-apart print spread (Pick A Side), a scalable projection platform, community watch parties, a live interactive voting billboard (the Rivalry Tug Board), a transit media takeover with playable interactive OOH, a tear-apart rivalry coaster (The Dividing Line), an in-bar Virtual Kick game, a Rival Urinals guerrilla installation, the FanPulse desktop and mobile platform, a live global Fan Feed of watch parties, and the Mano A Mano mobile game.
CD Art: Husani Barnwell · CD Copywriter: Jason Lambert · CCO: Michael Jacobs · ACD Art: Arnaud Giroux