Paddy Power has put Danny Dyer and Rob Lowe at the center of a new World Cup ad that turns football into a cultural scrap between Britain and America. The spot leans into the argument over what the game should be called, and Lowe says he will be sitting in Los Angeles on June 12 for the first match.
The timing is the point. The World Cup is only weeks away, and the campaign is built to catch viewers before the tournament starts, when arguments over football, soccer and everything wrapped around the game are already beginning to sharpen. In the ad, Dyer is shown getting topless as the row escalates, while he shouts, “It can’t go on like this, can it?” Mick McCarthy cuts through the noise with a flat “it can,” and Peter Crouch appears glumly as people chant around him.
The ad also pushes the joke beyond a simple transatlantic misunderstanding. It throws in American halftime shows, fireworks above stadiums and other U.S. sports cues, then contrasts them with British football culture as if the sport itself were part of the national identity test. Lowe, though, complicates that setup in a way that lands harder than the gag. “If I’m in America, I call it soccer, but if I’m anywhere other than America, I call it football. Football becomes American Football when I’m abroad too,” he said.
That is the friction inside the campaign: it sells football as a British-versus-American identity issue, yet Lowe refuses to sit neatly on one side of the line. He said he has been to a Chelsea game at Stamford Bridge and called it “a great old stadium,” adding that “nothing compares to a home game in the Premier League” and that “it’s pretty hard to top that.”
Lowe also made clear the ad was not just a publicity exercise for him. He said he had never seen Dyer in anything before, then described him as “really funny, genuine, and a very good actor,” with “this energy and presence about him” when he walked on set. “Completely magnetic,” Lowe said. On Crouch, he said the pair’s scenes were done separately, so they did not get much time to talk, though he still called the former Tottenham striker “a giant of the game.”
What happens next is plain enough. The World Cup countdown is now entering its final stretch, and Lowe has already said where he will be when the first match kicks off: Los Angeles on June 12. Whether the Paddy Power spot becomes a widely seen part of the buildup is not stated, but the ad has already done what it set out to do — turn a football promotion into a conversation about who gets to own the language around the game.
