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9 Ads per Minute: FIFA Cup 26 – "the price of the beautiful game"
The research, led by the University of Bristol in collaboration with the University of Oxford, is the first to examine harmful commodity branding across an entire FIFA World Cup. The team used the UK’s most powerful supercomputer, Isambard-AI, based at University of Bristol, to analyse all 172.6 hours of live play across the tournament’s 104 matches.
The scale of potential exposure was extraordinary. FIFA reported that nearly six billion people around the world engaged with the tournament, while broadcast records were broken in more than 30 countries. For the UK, the researchers estimated that harmful product advertising generated 267 billion impressions across the 53 broadcasts for which audience data were available.
The analysis counted advertising built into the match footage (e.g. on the hoardings), rather than commercials shown during advertising breaks. Harmful product branding appeared in every match and was visible during 39.3 hours of live play, almost a quarter of all live play. Viewers could not avoid this marketing without also missing some of the football.
Unhealthy food and drink brands were found to dominate the tournament's sponsorship, representing more than seven in ten (70.4%) of all branding detected. This was followed by prediction markets with 9,360 appearances, alcohol with 9,266, gambling with 6,429 and cryptocurrency with 2,632.
Exposure was heavily concentrated among a handful of globally recognised brands. A familiar soft drink brand accounted for the highest number of logos (21,893), followed by a major fast-food chain (13,915), a sports drink brand (12,777), and a popular crisps brand (12,087). Together, these four brands were responsible for 65% of all harmful commodity logos recorded during the tournament.
Dr Raffaello Rossi, Senior Lecturer in Marketing and Co-Director of the Bristol Hub for Gambling Harms Research at the University of Bristol, and co-author of the study, said: "As one of the world’s most watched sporting events, reaching billions of people, this year’s FIFA World Cup provided an unparalleled platform for advertising. Our findings reveal the sheer scale of branding embedded throughout tournament broadcasts, making exposure to unhealthy food, alcohol and gambling brands both omnipresent and unavoidable for viewers.
“This is particularly concerning given the substantial body of evidence linking marketing for unhealthy products, alcohol and gambling with increased consumption and a range of health, social and financial harms, especially among children and young people.”
Dr Elisa Becker, Researcher, Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, University of Oxford, co-author of this study added: “We are facing a global crisis of childhood obesity and diet-related disease, yet the world’s biggest sporting event is saturated with marketing for unhealthy food and drinks. Sport should be part of the solution to poor health – not one of the world’s most powerful advertising platforms for the products driving it.”
A key issue highlighted by the research is that FIFA’s match footage, which featured the same embedded advertising around the pitch, was shared with broadcasters around the world, including in countries where alcohol, gambling or prediction markets advertising may be restricted or illegal.
Despite existing virtual board replacement technology which enables different advertising to be shown in different countries, findings from this report suggest FIFA’s commercial model failed to adequately account for national laws and cultural norms governing the promotion of harmful commodities. FIFA did not use this technology, and distributed World Cup footage containing embedded branding to countries where the use, advertisement, or purchase of some promoted products is not legal.