Betclic Turns Cristiano Ronaldo's Euro 2016 Phrase Into a National Anthem
Betclic's "Come kick, you hit them well" is a June 2021 Portuguese sports betting campaign that transformed Cristiano Ronaldo's viral Euro 2016 phrase "Anda Bater, Tu Bates Bem" into an original song performed by Portuguese artist Blaya, anchoring the brand to national footballing pride ahead of Euro 2020, the delayed continental tournament played in 2021, according to Imgl.
The campaign, created by Lisbon-based agency FunnyHow, operates on a deceptively simple cultural insight. During Portugal's Euro 2016 penalty shootout, Cristiano Ronaldo turned to a nervous teammate and said "Anda bater, tu bates bem" — come kick, you hit them well. The phrase spread immediately across Portuguese social media and lodged itself in the national memory as a symbol of collective encouragement, confidence under pressure, and ultimately the championship victory that followed. Five years later, with another major tournament on the horizon, Betclic commissioned FunnyHow to build an entire campaign around those seven words.
Rather than simply invoking the phrase as a tagline, the campaign gave it new life as a full song, with Portuguese singer and songwriter Blaya composing and performing a track built around the expression. A TV spot placed characters dancing to Blaya's song, translating the emotional register of the original moment — urgency, camaraderie, self-belief — into a celebratory, high-energy format suited to broadcast audiences in Portugal, according to Entaingroup. The campaign directed viewers toward Betclic's app, website, and social channels using the hashtag #AndaBaterTuBatesBem, creating a coherent multi-platform footprint across the Portuguese market.
The creative positioning is precise, according to Casino. Betclic does not claim Cristiano Ronaldo as an endorser; instead it claims the feeling he generated in that moment — the feeling of being told, by someone who believes in you, that you are good enough. That emotional transaction maps directly onto the brand's proposition in the Portuguese sports betting landscape: bold decisions, made with confidence. The campaign earned a Clapboard Score of 66/100, reflecting competent cultural execution with room for deeper strategic differentiation.
Portugal's online sports betting market expanded at a remarkable pace in the period surrounding this campaign. According to Legal500.com, Portugal's online sports betting market grew by 284 percent year-on-year, rising from €149.2 million in the first quarter of 2020 to €423.8 million in the first quarter of 2021. That rate of growth — driven in part by pandemic-era shifts in consumer behaviour and the digitisation of gambling activity — made Portugal one of the more dynamic regulated markets in Europe, and it placed significant competitive pressure on operators seeking to consolidate their user bases ahead of a major tournament.
Within that context, Betclic faced direct competition from operators with substantial international scale. Flutter Entertainment, the parent company of brands including PokerStars and Paddy Power, held approximately 7.37 percent of global sports-betting market share in 2021, according to ResearchandMarkets.com. Entain Group, which operates Bwin — a brand with significant recognition in the Portuguese market — represented a further established rival for betting volume and brand loyalty among Portuguese sports fans. Against competitors with deep pockets and broad international visibility, Betclic's strategic response was to compete on cultural specificity rather than promotional scale.
The insight underlying the campaign is grounded in how Portuguese sports identity operates. Euro 2016 was not simply a tournament victory; it was a formative national moment. Cristiano Ronaldo's encouragement of his teammate during that penalty sequence became one of the most shared and remembered images of the event in Portugal. By anchoring the campaign to that specific emotional memory rather than to the tournament itself or to Ronaldo as a celebrity asset, FunnyHow positioned Betclic as a brand that understands Portuguese culture from the inside — fluent in its references, respectful of its emotional weight, and capable of speaking to its audience as an equal rather than as an advertiser.
Creative director César Sousa led the FunnyHow team responsible for translating a five-year-old sporting phrase into a piece of contemporary popular music and broadcast television. The core creative decision — to commission an original song rather than simply quote the phrase — determined the campaign's entire tonal register and distinguished it from conventional sports betting advertising in Portugal, which more commonly relies on odds promotion, celebrity appearance, or match-day urgency.
Art director João Mescas and copywriter João Bronze developed the campaign's visual and verbal identity under Sousa's direction, while the project was brought to market under the management of Ricardo Malaquias, Marketing Project Manager at Betclic. The selection of Blaya as the featured artist was central to the execution. Blaya is a Portuguese singer and songwriter with genuine cultural credibility among the demographic most likely to engage with sports betting content, and her performance gave the track an authenticity that a purely commercial production would have struggled to achieve. By building the song around Cristiano Ronaldo's original phrase rather than creating a lyric that merely referenced it, the creative team ensured that the phrase itself — "Anda Bater, Tu Bates Bem" — remained the emotional and verbal anchor of the work.
The TV spot directed attention to the song's central choreographic conceit: characters dancing to Blaya's track, an approach that reinforced the celebratory rather than transactional nature of the message. Director João Marques is credited with the film production, bringing a performance-led visual style to the execution. The campaign's multi-platform design, directing Portuguese audiences from the TV spot toward Betclic's app and social channels via the hashtag #AndaBaterTuBatesBem, reflects a production logic built for cross-channel amplification. The YouTube upload of the campaign recorded 1,671,833 views, 1,035 likes, and 77 comments, according to Betclic's own channel data, indicating that the song-led format held audience attention beyond the broadcast environment.
Betclic's "Come kick, you hit them well" campaign generated 1,671,833 views, 1,035 likes, and 77 comments on YouTube, according to data from Betclic's Portuguese YouTube channel. These figures represent organic engagement with a brand-owned asset rather than paid media placement, and in the context of the Portuguese market — a country with a population of approximately ten million — the view count reflects a meaningful level of reach for a domestic brand campaign operating in a single language and geography.
The campaign's structural effectiveness rests on several compounding factors. First, it required no significant talent acquisition cost for Cristiano Ronaldo's likeness or endorsement, because the creative insight was to own the phrase and the feeling rather than the person. Second, the song format created a shareable asset that could travel across social platforms without adaptation, lowering distribution costs while increasing earned media potential. Third, the timing of the June 2021 release aligned precisely with the opening of Euro 2020 matches, ensuring that the campaign's cultural references were actively resonant in the Portuguese public conversation at the moment of launch.
No independently verified campaign ROI, brand lift, or customer acquisition data for this campaign is publicly available beyond the YouTube engagement figures cited above. The Clapboard Score of 66/100 reflects a campaign that executes its cultural strategy with clarity and genuine local knowledge, while stopping short of the creative ambition or measurable market impact that would characterise the highest-performing work in the sports betting category. The campaign is strongest as a brand-building instrument — reinforcing emotional affiliation rather than driving a specific behavioural outcome — and within that objective it performs with consistency and craft.
Betclic's "Anda Bater, Tu Bates Bem" is a June 2021 Portuguese sports betting campaign created by agency FunnyHow. It transformed Cristiano Ronaldo's viral Euro 2016 penalty encouragement phrase into an original song performed by Portuguese artist Blaya, delivered through a dance-led TV spot timed to Euro 2020 in Portugal.
FunnyHow, a Portuguese creative agency, produced the campaign for Betclic. Creative director César Sousa led the team, supported by art director João Mescas and copywriter João Bronze. Portuguese singer and songwriter Blaya performed the original song, and director João Marques handled the film production for the Portuguese market.
Cristiano Ronaldo said the phrase during Portugal's Euro 2016 penalty shootout to encourage a teammate. The phrase translates as "Come kick, you hit them well." It spread rapidly across Portuguese social media and became a symbol of national confidence, which Betclic later adopted as the foundation of its 2021 campaign.
Betclic's campaign recorded 1,671,833 views, 1,035 likes, and 77 comments on YouTube, according to data from Betclic's Portuguese channel. For a single-language domestic campaign targeting the Portuguese market, those figures indicate sustained audience engagement beyond typical paid broadcast placement, driven largely by the song's shareable format and cultural resonance.
Blaya is a Portuguese singer and songwriter with established credibility among Portuguese music audiences. FunnyHow selected her to compose and perform the track built around Cristiano Ronaldo's Euro 2016 phrase. Her involvement gave the campaign cultural authenticity, distinguishing it from conventional sports betting advertising in Portugal that typically relies on promotional messaging or celebrity endorsement.
Betclic's "Come kick, you hit them well" received a Clapboard Score of 66 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's competent and culturally specific execution in the Portuguese sports betting market, while indicating that deeper strategic differentiation or more measurable brand impact would be needed to reach the category's highest-performing tier.
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