9 ads a minute: FIFA World Cup 26 and "the price of the beautiful game"

Research led by the University of Bristol with the University of Oxford counted more than 93,000 visible appearances of brands promoting unhealthy food and drink, alcohol, gambling and speculative products during the 2026 FIFA World Cup — the first study of its kind across a whole World Cup.

A brand every seven seconds

The team used Isambard-AI, the UK's most powerful supercomputer, hosted at the University of Bristol, and an in-house computer vision model to analyse all 172.6 hours of live play across the tournament's 104 matches. Harmful branding appeared in every match and was visible during 39.3 hours — almost a quarter of all live play, or roughly one brand appearance every seven seconds. The count covered advertising embedded in the match footage, not commercials shown in advertising breaks: viewers could not avoid the marketing without also missing part of the football.

Junk food dominates sponsorship

Unhealthy food and drink brands accounted for 65,722 appearances, more than seven in ten (70.4%) of all branding detected. Prediction markets followed with 9,360, alcohol with 9,266, gambling with 6,429 and cryptocurrency with 2,632.

Exposure was concentrated among a handful of global brands: a familiar soft drink brand recorded the most 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 they accounted for 65% of all harmful logos counted.

Footage shared with markets that restrict such ads

FIFA reported that nearly six billion people engaged with the tournament; for the UK alone, researchers estimate 267 billion impressions of harmful product advertising across the 53 broadcasts with audience data. The same embedded advertising was distributed worldwide, including to countries where such promotion is restricted or illegal: around 16,000 gambling and prediction market logos appeared, and one of the most advertised gambling brands listed licences in roughly 20 countries while the tournament was broadcast in more than 220 territories. FIFA did not use virtual board replacement technology, already deployed at UEFA EURO 2024, which lets different countries see different pitchside advertising.

Calls for tighter rules

Co-author Dr Raffaello Rossi of the Bristol Hub for Gambling Harms Research said exposure to unhealthy food, alcohol and gambling brands was "omnipresent and unavoidable" — and that the problem was avoidable.

The researchers call on governments and regulators to extend marketing rules to branding embedded in live sports broadcasts, backed by meaningful penalties, and urge FIFA to adopt an independent public interest standard for commercial partnerships. The report, "The price of the beautiful game", was funded by the University of Bristol.