9 Ads per Minute: FIFA Cup 26 – "the price of the beautiful game"
A University of Bristol study analyzed 172 hours of FIFA World Cup footage to track the prevalence of harmful commodity advertising. The research found that unhealthy food, gambling, and alcohol brands dominated sponsorship, appearing in nearly a quarter of all live play.
Why it matters
It highlights the pervasive nature of marketing for harmful products in global sports and raises questions about the ethics of corporate sponsorship in public health.
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.
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