Watch the full ad here:

David's thoughts:

"I love this ad for its strategy, its insight, its location, its music, its art direction, its audacity and its details. Apart from that it’s rubbish. Shall we take these one at a time?

The strategy - Cast your mind back to 1997 if you can. Americans were lovely and that but they really didn’t understand football and to most UK footballers, Nike was seen as a US basketball or lifestyle brand. If Nike didn't really get proper football then footballers weren't going to get their football boots. Sure Nike sponsored big name footballers and had national kit deals but they had a relatability problem for the average boots-buying grassroots footballer. Until...

The insight - Parklife changed the game. It recognised that everyone who has ever played football at any level started off with a love and a dream. For most the dream eventually fades (I’ve just about accepted I won’t ever play for Wolverhampton Wanderers) but the love remains and the sheer joy of it is why people "just do it" week in week out. Sure some of us are better than others and get to play on a bigger stage. But the joy of football is why we all play. It's summed up perfectly in the endline ‘Whatever league you’re in. Just do it’

The location - Our stage- Hackney Marshes. The spiritual home of Sunday league football and originally the home to a mind boggling 120 full size pitches. It's fair to say that it's not a place conducive to constructing a passing move out from the back (don't try this) or a place you'd associate with Nike's star athletes and national kit deals. But of course that was entirely the point. What would happen if you took brilliant Nike athletes and put them on the ultimate grassroots stage?

The music - I can't think of another ad where the music and the imagery are so beautifully aligned. The ad is literally named after the song. In many ways the ad is the song. But there's a lovely story about how it came to be. Legend has it that the ad’s creators Guy Moore and Peter Bracegirdle were meeting with a potential Director for the ad, Jonathan Glazer, in a pub off of Oxford Street to discuss it, someone else in the pub put some money in the jukebox, Blur’s Parklife came on and they all just looked at each other and knew. But because Parklife was 3 years old (it was released in 1994) there was quite a bit of client pushback that the ad wasn't very modern. They talked about using Blur's Song 2 instead. I'm glad they didn't.

The Art Direction - the ad is a TV ad and a series of iconic still images, moving seamlessly from one Hackney Marshes pitch to another. It doesn’t look like any other ad before or since. And it definitely looks different to how games are shot and broadcast on telly which gives it a grassroots feeling and an authentic timeless quality. The 90s haircuts and footballers might be different but the ad still feels just how grassroots football feels today.

The audacity - not many brands would turn up to Hackney Marshes with Eric Cantona, Ian Wright, David Seaman and Robbie Fowler and then tap the number 7 of a grassroots team on the shoulder and ask him if he’d mind sitting out the next game because this fella Eric wanted to play. Nike did. The rest is history.

The details - here’s a lovely thing. Once they agreed that Parklife definitely was the song they had a slight problem because “the good bit” of Parklife is 54 seconds and the ad needed to be a 60. They solved this with a stunning opening shot of an egg in a frying pan overlaid with audio of a woman saying “football, football, football, I get nothing but football morning, noon and night”.

A beautiful homage to the beautiful game."