Georgi Licovski / EPA
Eder, the “ugly duckling” of the national team, scored the goal that made history in the Euro 2016 final
Everyone is suddenly reliving the past, more specifically, the year 2016. But why?
We’ve only been in 2026 for a short time, but on social media it often seems like we’ve left 2025 after all and we went back a decade in time. It’s millennial nostalgia manifesting itself on Instagram and Tik Tok, remembering an era that it considers simpler.
In recent days, social networks have been filled with old photographs published, with the aesthetics of a decade ago that already seem distant: the lo-fi, the heavy eyeliner, the skinny jeansthe classic photo filters (also uploaded) and YouTubers. Or the mannequin challenge, to the sound of Black Beatles:
@vu2u8 #nostalgia #mannequinchallenge #2016#2017#viral#foryoupage #blackbeetals @glxckzspizn ♬ original sound – cxld
The trend quickly spread to celebrities, influencers and brands. Experts interpret it as nostalgia for a time perceived as lighter, more authentic, less exhausting.
The wave also revives memories of a landmark year in pop culture, the sonic brand, with hits that defined the decade:
On Spotify, there was a 71% increase in playlists with songs from the year 2016, and searches for “2016” increased by 452% on TikTok, according to TikTok itself, cited by . The first song on this list, Lush Life, by Zara Larsson, re-entered the UK top 40 in December and reached eighth place in the first month of the year.
Many remember fashionable clothes, memes, but also the way they lived, the simplest publications they posted on their social networks, long before the platform ecosystem was dominated by Reels and Shorts, flooded with fast, loud and meticulously embellished and planned content, or even generated by artificial intelligence.
For social media and public relations experts, the popularity of 2016, 10 years later, reveals a deeper desire. Hailey Bailey, founder of Image PR agency, describes the trend as an appeal to the innocence, promise and naivety of that summer. Many millennials now look at the present with a feeling of disconnect between expectations and reality: difficulty in buying a house, uncertainty in relationships, professional pressure and successive postponements of decisions such as having children. Nothing that occupied your mind in 2016.
For digital strategist Kar Brulhart, the phenomenon acts as a pause: it is a way of revisiting 2016 at a time when many feel that they “no longer know” what to publish or how to position themselves online. On the other hand, he says, it is linked to the growing taste for “analog” habits and objects.
In 2016, Game of Thrones had yet to disappoint anyone on the small screen, and we were throwing bottles in the hope that they would land on their feet (remember the bottle flip challenge?).
And in Portugal? What was nostalgic about 2016? What was it like to live that year?
The photo in this article is not there by chance: , when he scored the winning goal of Euro 2016 against France, in the 109th minute: the streets were filled with flags, horns and hugs between football lovers and those who never wanted to know about the sport; on the radio, “Sorry” by Justin Bieber and “” by Richie Campbell were playing. But as one of the hits of 2016 says, one day “Tudo Muda”.
