Social Media &
Branded Content

At Footballco I made the shift from traditional advertising to branded content and format-driven creative. Not as a trend I followed — as a discipline I learned inside the world's largest football media company, working where the content actually lives.

I worked on multiple season-long platforms for major SPL sponsors across insurance, real estate, automotive and gaming. Full-season architectures, not campaigns. Formats and series mapped to the football calendar. Mechanics where the brand is welded into the content, not stitched beside it.

The proof went public. Nescafé بكيفي with Al Hilal made the fans the medium: a tifo and an anthem the audience carried themselves. Numbers like that do not come from interruption. They come from content people choose.

Forty years old, diabetic, training back from heart surgery, and on day 148 of a 585-day arc with no rest days since 25 March 2026. A structured cut from 149kg toward 105, aiming at the u105 class at Strongman Middle East 2027, with El Fit in November as the first stop.

Every day of it is documented — shot, edited and published by me, in Arabic and English. The spine is a daily numbered series in Egyptian Arabic: the day count is the format, and the audience comes back for the next number. Around it I write about what actually powers the thing — discipline, habit design, the philosophy underneath. Not hustle culture. The opposite: you do not win the daily battle by fighting harder, you design a life where the battle never gets scheduled.

Roughly 8,400 followers across three channels, built from zero on one story, and converted into a five-tier paid membership — direct chat, exclusive footage, training programmes, nutrition and supervision, then an inner circle. Content, community and revenue, the full loop, run by one person.

This is the hardest version of the job. No media budget, no client brand equity, no agency behind it. Every principle I sell a client, I run on myself first.

A seventy-nine-second film, written, shot and edited alone, about a forty-year-old diabetic strongman training back from heart surgery. Published across both Instagram accounts in June 2026 and run as a paid campaign.

The number that matters is not the views. It is that 44 people watched it and followed — 0.78% of everyone it reached. That is a film doing acquisition work, not awareness work, and it is the same job a brand hires me to do.

This post was boosted. The figures above are paid, not organic.

Watch it: “You Will Fail”. Running live at @reffaeiy and @theoneandonlyreff on TikTok, with @thategyptianstrongman as the second Instagram.

Two stints running social for El Fit, seven years apart — the only place where the fitness content was made for an employer rather than for myself. Same discipline as the personal channels, different owner of the audience.

Hero piece: this one. Channel: @elfit_egypt.

Fuller case study in progress — the growth numbers and the campaign results are going in here.

I helped establish American football in Egypt. Not a team — a sport. Academies at Wadi Degla and ZED. A club, the Gezira Thunder, one of eight teams under the Egyptian Federation of American Football. Fifteen years of recruiting players, building coaching structures and creating an audience for a game the country had never played.

Here is the part that makes it a content case rather than a sports one. Every account ran a registration form in the bio — Gezira Thunder to a survey form, the ZED academy to Google Forms. Tryout posts carried the date, the venue and the time: Tuesday 29/10, Moalemeen Club Field, 9PM. The content was not brand awareness. It was a funnel with a measurable endpoint, and the endpoint was a human being turning up to a field.

The hardest brief in it was Women's Flag Football, where the job was not to grow a segment but to create one. There was no audience to convert. There was only content, and then there were players.

It is also why the fan work lands. When I make content for supporters I am not guessing what supporters feel. I was in the stands and on the sideline the whole time.