China's World Cup 2026: How Chinese Shoppers Spent Before the June Kickoff

It analyses how Chinese shoppers spent on football gear, drinks and snacks in the months before the 11 June kickoff — notably without the national team competing. That absence is what makes the case interesting: it separates event-driven consumption from national-team loyalty, and shows which categories move on the event itself rather than on the prospect of a home side progressing.

Because it isolates the variable. When a home team competes, event spending and patriotic spending are entangled and cannot be separated from outside. Without that, what remains is demand attributable to the event as entertainment and social occasion — which is the portion a brand can plan for in any tournament year, in any market, regardless of who qualifies. It is a cleaner natural experiment than a home-team tournament would have been.

Chinese e-commerce category data across football equipment, beverages and snacks, read alongside social conversation, analysed by Moojing. The report reports the pre-event build-up window explicitly rather than a single total, since the commercial question is when demand forms, not how large the event was in aggregate.

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