The duel began when current Barcelona and Brazil star Neymar posted a video of him causing a ball to bounce backwards and land inside a car boot.
Neymar posted the video on the Facebook page of World Cup-winning legend Ronaldo Lima, with the message: "Back of the boot. What you got Ronaldo Lima? #raiseit".
The video ends with the hashtag #raiseit in on-screen text, along with minimal branding from the client: online poker brand PokerStars.
Within 24 hours, Ronaldo responded with his own trick shot, replying "I see you Neymar Jr. and #raiseit". The face-off has since continued with a further six videos posted – some involved golf and tennis tricks. The eight videos have racked up 17.5m views between them, with one million likes and 120,000 shares.
Gravity Road founding partner Mark Boyd said the partnership with Neymar had enabled them to be unusually relaxed with the production of the films.
"We all ditched the concept of a high production ‘viral’ film," said Boyd. "Neymar brings such scale with his social following, that we wanted to create something that would reward them.
"Some of these challenges use smarts and others great skills. They are shot fast, some on phones, others with being just four seconds long. These look like social films and people seem to be enjoying them."
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