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Putting Lionel Messi and Alexia Putellas in a Lay’s commercial is tricky enough, but having them pop into soccer bars in Miami and Barcelona unrecognized requires Ballon d’Or skills.
PepsiCo first sent French soccer legend Theirry Henry door-to-door in Barcelona during the UEFA Champions League tournament in 2023, offering to watch a match with fans if they had a bag of Lay’s potato chips in the house. The spot kicked off the brand’s “No Lay’s, No Game” campaign and eventually brought English soccer icon David Beckham as Henry’s sidekick.
The two crashed a UEFA Champions League match between Paris Saint-Germain and AC Milan in 2024, searching for chips before translating “No Lay’s, No Game” into subsequent ads for Frito-Lay’s U.K. brand Walkers. This year, amid the men’s Champions League matches and just before the start of the women’s tournament in March, PepsiCo surrounded Henry with even more star power.
In the latest spot kicking off the third year of the “No Lay’s, No Game” campaign, Henry is joined by Barcelona striker, three-time women’s UCL champion, World Cup champion, and two-time Ballon d’Or winner Alexia Putellas as they leave a live interview with football journalist Guillem Balagué to find a bar showing the game and carrying Lay’s.
The two go bar-to-bar in Putellas’ hometown looking for the right combination, leaving appropriately freaked-out fans dejected and bar owners befuddled when the pair leave for lack of proper chips (and no, a plastic sleeve of restaurant-grade potato chips doesn’t count, as one publican discovered).
Not satisfied with having two of the greatest players of all time on this quest, PepsiCo took the second half of the campaign to Miami and had former FC Barcelona star and current Inter Miami player Luis Suárez join four-time UCL champion, World Cup champion, and eight-time Ballon d’Or winner Lionel Messi on its “Lay’s Crawl.”
The spot, created with help from Slap Global and directed by Andrew Lane, is part of a larger campaign that’s installed neon-style Lay’s Lights at bars in Spain, Portugal, Germany, Ukraine, and South Africa, giving fans eating Lay’s at each spot during the tournament a chance to have Putellas or Henry cover their bar tab.
