How Lay’s Pulled Off Miami and Barcelona Pub Crawls With Messi and Alexia Putellas

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.

While filming, the spot came with a unique set of logistical difficulties—as PepsiCo described during an exclusive behind-the-scenes look with ADWEEK—adding Putellas to Lay’s roster of all-time soccer greats wasn’t among them.

“Alexia was an obvious choice for us because she is the best in the sport … and when you see the passion behind the fans in Barcelona, [they] were sometimes rushing past Thierry to go to Alexia,” said Alexis Porter, global vp of Lay’s, of the campaign’s newest member. “Alexia is kind of breathing this passion into the sport, and the momentum of currently playing the game and having the fans on her side is unreal.”

The challenge behind the chips

The “No Lay’s, No Game” campaign has routinely tested both the brand’s concept and the public and production team’s capacity for its execution. Porter points out that the first two legs took international soccer superstars through neighborhoods and a packed stadium, but bouncing from pub to pub provided its own challenges.

In Barcelona alone, this latest Lay’s ad required 175 crew members and 13 vans to carry equipment and capture the pub denizens’ reactions on the first shot. 

“You have all the cameras because you only get one chance. The surprise is only one time when you walk into the bar, and you saw how many bars and pubs we went into,” Porter said. “I spent a lot of time in a van behind them trying to see what the cameras were seeing, and it was coordinated. There were no do-overs.”

PepsiCo informed pubs that the Lay’s brand was coming and that a celebrity could potentially be coming along with them, but that was the only information they were given. As a result, in Miami, even the large accompanying crew occasionally dealt with fans running to catch up with Messi and Suárez after their pub visit. 

That dearth of advance notice also meant that Lay’s was relying heavily on pubs for one portion of the spot: actually supplying Lay’s to customers. Lay’s did see pubs with product beforehand, so the spot captured familiar scenes from the campaign to that point: Fans darting around looking for a stray bag of Lay’s or bargaining with soccer legends to accept a big screen or other form of chip instead.

Bars that didn’t have Lay’s were a quick visit. However, if they did, the soccer heroes stayed.

“The bars where they had Lay’s, there were signings—’sign my shirt that I’m wearing, please sit down and watch with me,’” Porter said. “Sometimes they’re so surprised that it takes a minute to register. ‘What, this is actually him, this is actually her … how am I going to manage myself?’ It’s kind of fun.”

Beyond the bowl

With Lay’s already signed on as an official sponsor of the men’s World Cup in 2026 and the women’s tournament in 2027, the brand is incrementally extending its “No Lays, No Game” campaign to include more than ads.

The Lay’s Lights and accompanying contest expand the Champions League campaign’s physical reach beyond Europe and into pockets of passionate fandom. By bringing Putellas aboard, Lay’s not only emphasizes its previous support of women’s soccer but also looks ahead to future events as women’s sports fandom grows globally.

Finally, the brand has built elements of the campaign into a single-player running game—the Lay’s Dash. In certain markets, fans who scan a QR code or visit nolaysnogame.com can play as Putellas, Henry, or Messi as they sprint through obstacle-laden cities collecting Lay’s chips and attempting to win prizes.

“There are only so many campaigns where you don’t repeat it if it’s doing amazing things for your brand,” Porter said. “The fact that we’ve taken this from homes to stadiums to now [the pub] … there’s something really beautiful about a pub or a bar because it’s communal. You don’t expect your football hero to walk into the pub.”