Nike Antes Que Nada Champions Female Football in Argentina
Nike's Antes Que Nada is a 2019 Argentine sports campaign created by R/GA Buenos Aires that uses reverse chronology to reveal the systemic barriers female football players must overcome before reaching their ambitions, released ahead of the 2019 FIFA Women's World Cup in France.
Nike launched the campaign on 16 May 2019 in Argentina, according to Clapboard's editorial records. Pre-launch coverage had begun circulating across Argentine and international advertising media as early as 4 May 2019, according to ReasonWhy, positioning the work as a culturally significant moment for women in sports before the tournament's 7 June opening. The campaign's scope extended well beyond a single film. According to MarketingNews, the full release included a hero film, digital pieces, print, out-of-home executions, and athlete interviews distributed through Nike.com, giving the narrative multiple points of contact across Argentina's media landscape.
The strategic timing was deliberate. The 2019 FIFA Women's World Cup represented a rare period of concentrated global attention on female football, and Nike, as a principal sponsor of the Argentine national team, used that window to speak directly to the experience of women in the sport across Argentina. The campaign did not manufacture aspirational protagonists. According to Ads of the World, all athletes featured in the campaign were real football players, not actors — a creative decision that grounded the work in lived experience rather than idealized performance. More than 200 women participated in the campaign process, including Nike athletes and amateur players, a scale of inclusion that the creative team used to reinforce the argument that the barriers shown on screen were systemic, not individual. Clapboard scores Antes Que Nada at 71 out of 100, reflecting strong cultural alignment and creative craft tempered by limited verifiable performance data.
Nike built Antes Que Nada on a single, concrete cultural tension: in Argentina, female athletes face institutional and social barriers that male athletes do not, and those barriers begin in childhood. The campaign narrative centred on Candelaria Cabrera, an eight-year-old girl challenging local restrictions that prevented her from playing mixed football, according to Ads of the World. That story was not a metaphor. It was a documented reality that gave the broader campaign its emotional and argumentative foundation.
The Argentine sports market in 2019 existed within a global sportswear industry generating approximately 181 billion dollars that year, according to Footwear News. Nike held a commanding position in that market. Nike's fiscal 2019 revenue reached approximately 39.1 billion dollars, according to Brand Minds, compared with approximately 28.0 billion dollars for Adidas, its nearest competitor, and approximately 6.5 billion dollars for Puma, according to the same source. In Argentina specifically, Nike and Adidas competed directly for both commercial dominance and cultural authority in football — a sport that functions as a national identity marker rather than simply a recreational activity. By anchoring Antes Que Nada in female football at a moment when Argentina's women's national team was preparing for its first World Cup appearance in twelve years, Nike staked a position Adidas had not yet claimed with equivalent creative depth in that market.
The reverse-chronology structure was itself a strategic instrument. As Adweek reported in May 2019, the film begins with the aspiration of becoming a champion and moves backward through the obstacles female athletes encounter along the way, inverting the conventional sports narrative of struggle followed by triumph. That inversion forced viewers to reckon with the weight of what precedes achievement — making the case that the journey for female athletes in Argentina is qualitatively different from that of their male counterparts.
Julieta Cabrera and Nicolás Pérez Veiga directed Antes Que Nada, according to ReasonWhy. The production company was Primo, with Nicolás Pérez Veiga and Soledad Pérez Veiga serving as executive producers and Germán Lentini as producer, also according to ReasonWhy. The creative leadership came from Mariano Jeger, who served as VP and Executive Creative Director at SS LATAM, R/GA Buenos Aires, according to Clapboard's editorial records.
The directorial choice to work with co-directors — one of whom shares a surname with the campaign's central eight-year-old subject — brought an additional layer of biographical proximity to the material, though the precise nature of that relationship is not publicly documented. What is documented is the structural ambition of the film itself. The reverse-chronology format, as identified by Adweek in its May 2019 coverage, required the creative team to construct emotional logic that runs counter to conventional narrative momentum. The audience encounters the dream first, then the cost of pursuing it, then the earliest and often most painful points of exclusion — reversing the sequence through which most sports advertising builds feeling.
MarketingNews reported in May 2019 that the film's principal protagonists were real Argentine female footballers: Estefanía Banini, Ruth Bravo, and Belén Potassa. Their presence as authentic athletes rather than cast performers gave the film a texture of documentary credibility that scripted performance rarely achieves. According to Clapboard's records, more than 200 women participated in the campaign process overall. That scale of real-world participation shaped not only the film's visual authenticity but also the out-of-home and digital components, where individual athlete stories were distributed across Argentina through Nike.com and print placements, according to MarketingNews. The cumulative effect was a campaign that felt reported rather than constructed — a quality that aligned precisely with Nike's stated creative intent for the work in the Argentine market.
No verified performance data for Antes Que Nada — including view counts, engagement rates, or sales lift figures — is publicly available at the time of this analysis. What can be assessed is the structural effectiveness of the campaign's design and the market conditions into which it was released.
The campaign entered the Argentine market at a moment of unusually high cultural receptivity. The 2019 FIFA Women's World Cup, which began on 7 June 2019 in France according to Ads of the World, concentrated media attention on women's football in a way that amplified any pre-existing creative work tied to the subject. Nike's decision to launch on 16 May 2019 — more than three weeks before the tournament opened — gave Antes Que Nada time to accumulate cultural presence before the competitive noise of the tournament itself arrived.
The campaign's multi-format structure, spanning film, out-of-home, print, digital, and athlete interviews on Nike.com, according to MarketingNews, created multiple independent opportunities for audience contact across Argentina. That distribution logic reduces dependence on any single format performing above expectations and increases the probability of reaching distinct audience segments: passive consumers through out-of-home, active searchers through Nike.com, and socially connected audiences through digital distribution. The use of more than 200 real women, as documented by Clapboard, also created an organic network of personal connection to the campaign within Argentine football communities. Campaigns built on real participants rather than cast talent carry an inherent amplification mechanism through those participants' own social and community networks — a structural advantage that paid media alone cannot replicate. Clapboard scores Antes Que Nada at 71 out of 100.
Antes Que Nada is a Nike campaign about the barriers female football players face in Argentina. Created by R/GA Buenos Aires and launched on 16 May 2019, the film uses reverse chronology to move from athletic ambition backward through the obstacles women encounter before achieving it, featuring real Argentine footballers including Estefanía Banini, Ruth Bravo, and Belén Potassa.
Julieta Cabrera and Nicolás Pérez Veiga directed the Antes Que Nada film. Production was handled by Primo, with Nicolás Pérez Veiga and Soledad Pérez Veiga as executive producers. Creative leadership came from Mariano Jeger, VP and Executive Creative Director at SS LATAM, R/GA Buenos Aires, according to ReasonWhy and Clapboard's editorial records.
Nike timed the campaign to build cultural momentum before the 2019 FIFA Women's World Cup, which opened on 7 June 2019 in France. Launching on 16 May gave the campaign over three weeks to establish presence in Argentina before tournament noise intensified, according to Ads of the World and pre-launch coverage identified by ReasonWhy.
All athletes in Antes Que Nada were real football players, not actors, according to Clapboard's editorial records. More than 200 women participated across the campaign process, including Nike athletes and amateur players. Principal protagonists Estefanía Banini, Ruth Bravo, and Belén Potassa are documented Argentine female footballers, as reported by MarketingNews in May 2019.
R/GA Buenos Aires created Antes Que Nada for Nike. The campaign was developed under the creative direction of Mariano Jeger, VP and Executive Creative Director at SS LATAM, R/GA Buenos Aires, according to Clapboard. The production company was Primo, and the campaign ran across film, out-of-home, print, and digital formats throughout Argentina.
Antes Que Nada receives a Clapboard Score of 71 out of 100. The score reflects strong cultural alignment with Argentina's women's football moment and credible creative craft, including authentic athlete casting and a structurally distinctive reverse-chronology narrative, tempered by the absence of publicly verified campaign performance metrics for the Argentine market.
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