Worldwide
The case
When the Kansas City Chiefs faced the Los Angeles Chargers in São Paulo, they wanted more than the NFL’s first regular-season game in Brazil – they wanted a real home advantage for Chiefs Kingdom. Tracks & Fields were brought in to design a music-led collaboration that would connect the franchise with Brazilian fans.
American football is still growing in Brazil, but music culture is huge. Most existing NFL fans skew older, with above‑average income and strong ties to MPB, electronic, rock and local genres such as sertanejo, while the Chiefs also wanted to reach Gen Z and protect their Christian brand values. Many high‑profile trap and funk artists carry explicit content, creating a clear brand-safety challenge.
Tracks & Fields’ brief: find an artist with massive cultural reach, rooted in Brazilian popular music, globally relevant and aligned with the Chiefs’ values. Luísa Sonza became the perfect fit: Brazil’s leading mainstream pop artist, a Billboard Women in Music “Global Force” and a crossover star. At the centre of the idea sat Tech N9ne’s “Red Kingdom”, the Chiefs’ anthem since 2019. Instead of simply licensing it, the plan was to reimagine it as an official Portuguese‑language version, rooted in Brazilian funk while staying true to the original’s energy and pride.
What the industry playbook suggested
Normally, a campaign like this would be scoped as a long, multi-phase project: extended artist scouting, several rounds of brand‑safety vetting, lengthy rights negotiations, content reviews and complex cross‑territory coordination. Tight timing plus strict value constraints would usually push the advice towards scaling down the ambition (reuse existing music, avoid a superstar) or accepting a much longer timeline.
What our infrastructure unlocked
Tracks & Fields treated the brief as an infrastructure challenge, not a one‑off stunt. A rights and collaboration backbone allowed the team to move from idea to execution in weeks, not months, while staying precise and brand‑safe.
Key elements:
- A dedicated label, Kansas City Chiefs Football Club Records, created in just two weeks to host the release and future music assets.
- Structured brand‑safety and values alignment, screening Brazilian artists not only for reach and musical fit but also for lyrical and reputational compatibility with the Chiefs’ Christian identity.
- A pre‑cleared legal framework with clear expectations and consequences, compressing negotiation time without increasing risk.
- Chemistry meetings before lock‑in, so both artist and club could test creative and cultural fit in real conversations.
- End‑to‑end ownership: commissioning and clearing Luísa Sonza’s Portuguese “Red Kingdom”, coordinating recording and production, clearing publishing and international licensing, and building the game-week activation around the release and her live performance in São Paulo.
Because artist selection, brand safety, rights, label setup and campaign architecture all ran on the same rails, decisions stayed fast without losing robustness. The localized anthem became the anchor of a wider cultural moment, not just a campaign asset.
The result
Within weeks, “Red Kingdom BR” turned the team anthem into a Brazilian hit and cultural bridge. Premiering around YouTube’s first exclusive NFL live broadcast – Chiefs vs Chargers in São Paulo – it helped create a genuine home‑field feel in a sold‑out Corinthians Arena and for a global online audience.
- 204 million campaign views and more than 500 million social reach turned a club song into a mainstream Brazilian pop event.
- Coverage in outlets like Ad Age, Sports Illustrated and Billboard positioned the Chiefs as a franchise that thinks about fandom and international expansion in genuinely local terms.
- The Chiefs now have a label and rights infrastructure they can reuse for future collaborations rather than a one‑off workaround.
And for the client, it landed exactly as intended. As Mark Donovan, Kansas City Chiefs Owner & President, put it:
The coolest thing we’ve ever done.
If this story feels close to your own ambitions – bigger fandom, local culture, global scale – let’s talk about how music and rights infrastructure can get you there.