Publicis Dublin Did Something History Couldn't and Made Schillaci Miss

The chance to relive an epic summer of football at a time when there is no sport on TV and the country needs a bit of a lift seemed like a great idea. But as an Irish fan, it’s impossible to think of Italia 90 without thinking of the man who brought the impossible dream to an end – Schillaci. The Irish people still haven’t forgiven him for it, even after all these years. In fact, I’m pretty sure you can still buy ‘Fuck Schillaci’ t-shirts online. So we thought, what if we could change history? What if we could make Schillaci miss?

TG4 is a public service television channel which broadcasts in Irish and is available free-to-air across Ireland; the spot ran on TG4 and on their social channels. The client has always had an appetite for great creative work and there is a great relationship.

The client loved the idea but trying to do this in lockdown was tricky. We spent hours trawling through the footage from the games trying to find the right shots to tell the story convincingly. One of our in-house motion graphics guys Cormac, did an excellent (and quick!) job of putting the ball wide. Hats off to him. The ‘devastated’ Italian player and fan shots are actually taken from the Italy Argentina game when they were knocked out on penalties.

30 years on, we managed to do something our beloved goalkeeper Packie Bonner couldn’t do. We made Schillaci miss. We knew we had something that would really resonate with fans and give us a reason to smile again, if even briefly.