This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: More than 93,000 visible appearances of brands promoting unhealthy food and drink, alcohol, gambling and speculative products were recorded during coverage of the largest FIFA World Cup in history, new research has found. Unhealthy food and drink brands accounted for more than seven in 10, with 65,722 appearances.
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 the University of Bristol, to analyze all 172.6 hours of live play across the tournament's 104 matches. The scale of potential exposure was extraordinary.
FIFA reported that nearly 6 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 10 (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 recognized 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. 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.
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