Case study
Grow your audience
Building a rivalry that fans follow all year
Leagues Cup
Leagues Cup is a CONCACAF-sanctioned tournament that puts every Major League Soccer club against every team from Mexico's Liga MX. Content CO runs its digital content operation end-to-end, across three languages — English, Spanish, and French. The goal was to make a young tournament feel unmissable, all year round, on both sides of the border.
Goal
Leagues Cup needed year-round relevance across fan bases spread between the US, Canada, and Mexico, each with its own loyalties. Being seen was never the hard part. The real work was turning casual awareness into fans who show up, engage, and come back for the next edition. Content CO set out to position Leagues Cup as the region's most thrilling tournament, educating fans and clubs on the rivalries taking shape and writing the narratives that turn a new competition into history in the making.
Strategy
- One team, every front: we own the entire operation — from strategy, creative development, content planning, and production to on-the-ground image capture, editing, and publishing across every platform, delivering content for both organic and paid media.
- Spanglish by demand: pioneered Leagues Cup's groundbreaking Spanglish tone of voice by treating content as a product — listening to fans, testing creative, measuring performance, and iterating continuously. We created a unique North American soccer language that authentically unites fans across the U.S., Mexico, and Canada.
- Rivalry from day one: restructured the content mix around Inform, Explain, Delight, and a new Newsjacking pillar, weighted toward education and deeper storytelling.
- Full funnel by design: built content for every stage, from awareness to consideration to conversion, so casual viewers became committed fans.
- Collabs and influencers: partnered with creators and voices close to both leagues to carry the rivalry into communities we could not reach alone.
- New channels: launched TikTok to create demand at scale through speed and experimentation, and WhatsApp to turn fan intent into action in a high-trust, algorithm-free space.
Results
The approach grew the audience fast and pushed reach well beyond the existing follower base.
- Leagues Cup is now the fastest-growing channel across the MLS, outpacing every other property in the league on audience growth over the past two years.
- +139% in net followers and +185% unique users reached, growth that stuck across every platform as the account kept the people it drew in rather than churning through one-time visitors.
- +171% in organic engagements, as fans stopped watching from the sidelines and started spreading the rivalry themselves and turning our content into their own conversations.
- Spanglish content generates 61% higher engagement on Instagram than English and delivers the highest average engagement on X across all languages.