The 2026 FIFA World Cup turned stadium advertising into a far-reaching platform for junk food and drink brands, according to researchers who tracked every match of the tournament across the USA, Canada and Mexico.
A team at the University of Bristol and the University of Oxford recorded 65,722 appearances by logos and products from brands producing junk food and drinks across 104 matches. The brands accounted for more than seven in 10 of more than 93,000 visible appearances promoting unhealthy food and drink, alcohol, gambling and speculative products.
The research found that junk food and drink advertising was visible for 28.1 hours, or just over 16% of the time matches were being played. Each match contained an average of 576 visible advertisements for those products.
Coca-Cola appeared most frequently, with 21,893 visible advertisements. McDonald's followed with 13,915, while Powerade recorded 12,777 and Lay's 12,087.
Most of the branding appeared on boards beside the pitch and elsewhere inside stadiums. These displays formed part of the international match feed during play, making them visible to viewers in every country broadcasting the games.
Junk food and drink logos appeared around seven times more often than alcohol and prediction market brands, the researchers found. They were recorded 10 times more often than gambling firms and almost 25 times more often than cryptocurrency brands.
Across all harmful product categories, television viewers encountered branding every seven seconds, according to the study. Such branding appeared in every match and was on screen during 39.3 hours of live play.
For UK audiences, the researchers estimated that harmful product advertising generated 267 billion impressions across the 53 broadcasts for which audience data were available. The estimate covers branding for junk food, alcohol and gambling products.
The researchers created an artificial intelligence tool to examine advertisements visible to television audiences during the tournament's live action. They used Isambard-AI, described by the University of Bristol as the UK's most powerful supercomputer, to analyse all 172.6 hours of live play.
The study is described as the first to examine commodity branding across an entire FIFA World Cup. Its count covers only advertising built into the international footage shown during matches. It excludes advertisements during pre-match programming, half-time commercial breaks and in-match hydration breaks.
The report is entitled: The price of the beautiful game: how the biggest Fifa World Cup ever became a global platform for promoting harmful products.
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