Rohit Sarkar

Fan Pitches Nike a Matheus Cunha Surf Celebration Ad and Watches It Come True

Manchester United, Matheus Cunha, Nike

Football has always borrowed freely from culture, from music, from art, from the streets, and the most memorable campaigns in the sport’s history tend to land when genuine personality meets the right creative instinct at the right time. Matheus Cunha, Manchester United‘s Brazilian forward, has exactly that kind of personality: fiery, expressive, and built on nobody else’s template. His surfing celebration after goals, arms wide and body swaying like a man riding a wave rather than a football pitch, quickly became one of the most recognisable moments in the Premier League this season. That celebration would end up starting something much bigger.

On 3rd February, a content creator known as BG, operating under the handle @s1mon_g and the series BG Tips for Brands, posted a detailed video pitch directly at @nikefootball on X. The concept was tight and visually specific. BG proposed a short ad built entirely around Cunha’s surfing celebration, tying it to his real-life surfing hobby and the shaka hand gesture he throws up after scoring; the same loose, carefree sign beloved across Brazilian culture and surfer communities worldwide.

Matheus-Cunha

The campaign carried a clear theme: “Flow State,” connecting Cunha’s movement on the pitch directly to his life on the waves. Central to the pitch was Nike’s new Tiempo Maestro boot, which BG referenced as the “wavy Nike TMPO”; a nod to the boot’s wavy design that slotted into the concept almost too neatly.

The ad BG envisioned opened right after Cunha slots one on top bins and breaks into his surfing celebration. The camera zooms tight onto the Tiempo Maestro boots, their wavy pattern filling the frame before it seamlessly morphs into the design printed on a surfboard. From there, the scene shifts entirely. Cunha is genuinely riding the ocean; BG had looked into it, and Cunha genuinely surfs; this wasn’t a metaphor.

A bird’s-eye shot looks down on him carving through a wave. He glances up at the camera and delivers a single line: “I was doing this.” Then the shaka goes up, the wink lands, the teeth sparkle, and the camera pulls back into the boots before Cunha jogs away from his celebration, and the Nike swoosh closes the frame.

BG also shared a mock-up poster; bold white text reading “FLOW STATE.” against deep blue waves, with Cunha mid-celebration on the left, an aerial surf shot in the centre, and the Tiempo Maestro boot gleaming in silver and blue-purple gradient on the right. The post racked up over 57,000 views, with users praising it as genuinely inspired.

Cunha himself liked the post that same day, and Nike commented directly, and together, those two responses shifted the whole thing from a public pitch to an actual dialogue. Then, on 9th March, BG posted again: this time, behind-the-scenes footage of what appeared to be an actual Nike photoshoot, with BG himself on a branded surfboard, embodying the very “flow state” concept he had first sketched out five weeks earlier. What started as a tagged video on X was now a photoshoot.

Cunha has got to this point by playing some genuinely exciting football. After spending three and a half seasons at Wolverhampton Wanderers, where he finished 2024/25 as the club’s top scorer with 15 Premier League goals, a personal best, he completed a £62.5 million transfer to Manchester United in June 2025.

This season, across 26 appearances in the Premier League, he has contributed 6 goals and 2 assists, carrying a FotMob average rating of 7.18. He takes 3.23 shots per 90 minutes with a shooting accuracy of 40 per cent from 65 attempts, firing at a rate of one goal every 10.83 shots. The 26-year-old has established himself as one of the most dynamic forwards in the division, a player who brings enough personality on and off the pitch that brands actually want to build something real with him.

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