In 2006, as a guest of Deutsche Telekom, I saw an early round World Cup match pitting those two soccer powers: Togo against South Korea. In the last World Cup, held in Germany, Togo was the side with the longest odds, this year’s North Korea. The big exception was that Team Togo, seeking to exploit a rare moment of negotiating leverage, decided to use the power of the most followed sports event on the planet to threaten a match boycott in the name of recouping unpaid wages, something even Kim Jong Il’s boys wouldn’t dare try.

Togo lost 2-1 that day, but they eventually got paid.

The other memorable thing about that game was the heat. With the midday sun blazing and temps in the mid-90s, my gracious Teutonic hosts abandoned any attempt to show me the geeky stuff–i.e., how they wired up the stadium. The sacrifice was not lost on me; if it’s one thing techy Germans like to show off, it’s their engineering prowess. Instead, we went looking for cold beers and shade. We found the latter inside the stadium. There was a problem with the beer though, my apologetic hosts informed me; all they sell on match day at the stadium is Budweiser, the World Cup beer sponsor. If there’s one thing Germans are more proud of than their engineering prowess, it’s their local “bier.” We drank our cold Buds, longingly discussing the  “bier” brands we wish we were drinking instead and plotting which bar to hit in town once the match ended.

Four years on and the Germans (among others) still haven’t forgotten the indignity of being forced to drink Budweiser at a football match. “When Germany hosted the World Cup in 2006, the country was awash in fuzzy feel-good patriotism. Only one thing threatened to ruin the party—crappy American beer,” The Local, a German English-language news site recalls. Readers of South Africa’s Mail & Guardian, meanwhile, refer to Bud as “Blatter Beer”.

The distasteful cracks don’t end there. Budweiser has also been the victim of the biggest ambush marketing stunt so far at this year’s World Cup when the Dutch brewer, Bavaria, paid a group of cute blondes to take in the Netherlands-Denmark match decked out in bright orange mini skirts. The sight of babes in tight dresses doing “the wave” was of course caught on camera. Several times. Some of the masterminds were arrested for breaking Fifa rules; that is, jeopardizing the $1.2 billion the organizers pull in from the likes of Budweiser to sponsor the World Cup. Cue: outraged European newspaper columnists.

With all this ill-will swirling around an “American” beer brand sponsoring a very non-American game, you might be tempted to nod in wonder why Anheuser-Busch InBev, despite its new Belgian owners, would bother with the massive investment. Sure, it’s trying to make in-roads in the overseas market, but is all the grief worth it?

I think it is. Here’s why: at Social Media Influence, we’ve been following how the World Cup sponsors are exploiting this massive investment to boost brand visibility and to build a more meaningful social media following, one that will stick around long after a new winner is crowned. To be sure, it’s not the perfect ROI measuring stick, but it’s one worth exploring as it sheds light on an old marketing question: can big-ticket sports sponsorships create more lasting brand loyalty?

In the first week of the 2010 World Cup, the big winner was Coca-Cola, gaining an impressive 169,000 followers, thanks to the popularity of its YouTube-inspired “Longest Celebration” contest. Coke tried to goose these numbers further with a Twitter ad buy, but not so. The big winner this past week was, gulp, Budweiser. Its “Bud United” campaign has proven to be a major social media hit, good enough to net an impressive 608,000 followers in the last week.

In terms of new footy followers, Budweiser is even beating out Adidas, a proud German brand, during this World Cup.