World Cup has become a global platform for promoting harmful products

The study is titled: The price of the beautiful game: how the biggest FIFA World Cup ever became a global platform for promoting harmful products. 

Researchers at two academic institutions in the UK – the University of Bristol and Oxford University’s Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences – recorded 93,409 such logos across the tournament’s 104 matches – around nine per minute. Every match carried them. 

The analysis counted only branding built into FIFA’s centrally produced match footage – pitch-side boards and stadium structures – not commercials added by individual broadcasters in different countries or regions.

Broadcasters in more than 220 territories received the same footage, meaning viewers everywhere saw the same branding and could not avoid it without missing the football. 

Unhealthy food and drink brands accounted for 70.4% of the logos recorded, with 65,722 appearances. Four brands – Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Powerade and Lay’s – made up 65% of all harmful product logos between them. Prediction markets came next with 9,360 logos, followed by alcohol (9,266), gambling (6,429) and cryptocurrency (2,632). 

“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,” says Dr Elisa Becker, a researcher in the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences and co-author of the study. 

Around one in 10 alcohol logos promoted a zero-alcohol variant – Michelob Ultra Zero or Budweiser 0.0 – that shares the name and visual identity of its parent brand. The report notes that this kind of brand-sharing keeps an alcohol brand visible in markets where alcohol advertising is restricted. 

Embedded branding must also be regulated 

The shared footage also carried branding across legal boundaries. For example, alcohol advertising reached the 10 countries where the World Health Organization says there is a total ban on alcohol consumption.  

Similarly, the tournament’s official gambling sponsor, Betano, operates in 20 markets, yet its logos appeared in every one of the 104 matches broadcast to more than 220 territories. 

The report makes three recommendations: governments should treat branding embedded in live sport as advertising and regulate it accordingly; FIFA should adopt independently developed public-interest criteria for selecting commercial partners; and FIFA should use existing technology to remove or replace branding in countries where a product cannot lawfully be advertised or sold. 

Dr Raffaello Rossi, Senior Lecturer in Marketing at the University of Bristol and co-author, comments: “Collectively, our findings highlight how a tournament celebrated for bringing people together is, at the same time, acting as a powerful platform for promoting products associated with some of the world’s leading causes of preventable illness and harm.” 

You can find out more about the study here.