WATCH: Russian TV advert for La Liga goes viral featuring bizarre AI creations | OneFootball

La Liga has had some famous and some infamous marketing campaigns over the years, but few have been quite as strange as the one sweeping the internet in Spain. A Russian TV advert for Spanish football’s top tier has been making waves on social media.

Some may remember the La Liga advert taken out by the league itself, featuring the slogan ‘It’s not football, it’s something else. It must be La Liga’, which these days reappears in memes with frequency. While not strictly an advert for La Liga, sending numbered beers to goalkeepers that Lionel Messi had scored against during his career is another that sticks in the mind.

Russian TV advert racks up millions of views

However a video posted on social media of a Russian TV advert appearing on ‘Pimple TV’ has gone viral in Spain, being viewed over four million times at least, and likely many more, on Twitter/X alone. The video shows a brief clip representing each team in La Liga, with what appears to be an AI creation based for the most part on the mascots of the team in question, in situ with a landscape familiar to the club’s location.

Particularly comic is Real Betis’ section, featuring a man with palm leaves growing out of his head, a misconstruction of ‘Palmerin’, their palm-tree mascot. Others without mascots such as Sevilla feature a literal ‘Barber of Seville’ based on the opera, Real Madrid appear as a king, no doubt based on their ‘royal’ name, and Getafe feature as an intellectual ape working on football tactics. Perhaps rooted in their Darwinian survival tactics.

La Liga Mascots Olympiad

It certainly gives the clubs without team mascots some ideas. For the last two years, Leganes have hosted a ‘League of Mascots’, where the mascots from teams around the top two divisions of Spain descend on Butarque and compete in a series of games and challenges – perhaps the closest reality will come to the advert.