AI-Generated Memes Are Taking Over the 2026 World Cup

Generative AI gives audiences new ways to portray real sporting figures through familiar fictional worlds. Expanded opportunities to create, however, need not broaden cultural representation or distribute attention evenly. We examine this tension through the supply, demand, and circulation of anime style football videos on Instagram.

Using 2,021 posts and associated video and account data, we combine caption entity extraction, human-reviewed visual identity clustering, engagement analysis, and content-reuse networks. Representation is uneven across athletes, while Blue Lock, Naruto, and One Piece account for 60.1% of explicit franchise mentions. Among posts referencing generative tools, rankings by total engagement differ from rankings by average engagement per video, distinguishing aggregate visibility from response to individual posts.

Reuse is extensive: 772 of 1,548 evaluated videos belong to 124 detected groups, including 71 spanning multiple known accounts. Shared material connects a large account component alongside smaller groups, and later observed uploads receive lower median normalized engagement than first observed appearances. These findings characterize generative cultural crossover as a practice organized around concentrated cultural resources, uneven attention, and extensive recirculation. More broadly, they distinguish opportunities for visual authorship from the processes through which particular representations become widely visible.