It received dozens of awards from professional organisations within the television and marketing industries, and in 2010 was voted one of the top ten advertisements of the decade by the British public.

Old Lions opens to the team waking up and going through their pre-game morning routines; Peter Shilton yawning and getting out of bed, Alan Ball smelling his socks for freshness, Terry Butcher buying bacon sandwiches.

The team arrive at the grounds and go listen to a pre-game talk by Bobby Robson, interrupted by Stuart Pearce receiving a call from his mother.

[3] As part of the company's £25m annual advertising spend[4] Carlsberg sought to put their stamp on the 2006 FIFA World Cup, the biggest football event of the year.

However, the campaign had to be produced without using any FIFA trademarks or even mentioning the words "World Cup", as Carlsberg were not an official sponsor of the event.

[5] Saatchi & Saatchi, the advertising agency responsible for marketing Carlsberg in the UK, solicited ideas from their teams of creative directors and copywriters, eventually settling on a pitch written by Dave Henderson and Richard Denny, who had previously worked together on the successful Idle Thumbs campaign for Virgin Mobile.

However, given that the piece was to promote a brand of lager, it was felt that the use of players with a history of alcoholism, such as Tony Adams or Paul Gascoigne would be in poor taste.

[6] Once the list was assembled, the team began the long and arduous process of recruiting the players and finding a date before the World Cup on which none had prior commitments.

Palmer's previous work included the highly successful Kicking It campaign for Adidas and a live-action version of the opening sequence to The Simpsons.

[1] Among the few scripted moments were the booking of Jack Charlton for shirt-pulling, the scene with Alan Ball's smelly socks, and Pearce receiving a phone-call in the changing room.

The website link shown at the end of the commercial, oldlions.com, received 390,000 hits during the World Cup, and Old Lions spent two weeks at the number 1 position on the Google Video download chart.

[5] Over 30,000,000 pints of Carlsberg lager were sold in the four weeks prior to the World Cup, and sales within the United Kingdom were four times higher than normal.

[18] Director Chris Palmer went on to direct the 2007 Cake television advertisement for Škoda Auto, before switching his focus to producing feature films.