9 Ads per Minute: FIFA Cup 26 – "the price of the beautiful game"

Researchers used a custom AI computer-vision model running on the Isambard-AI supercomputer to analyse 172.6 hours of live footage from all 104 matches of the 2026 FIFA World Cup and recorded more than 93,000 visible appearances of brands promoting unhealthy food and drink, alcohol, gambling, prediction markets and cryptocurrency. Harmful food and drink logos dominated (65,722 appearances, 70.4% of the total), with a single soft-drink brand appearing 21,893 times and three other major brands (fast food, sports drink, crisps) accounting collectively for 65% of all harmful logos. Harmful branding was visible in every match, present for 39.3 hours of play (almost a quarter of live time), producing an estimated 267 billion UK impressions across 53 broadcasts and exposing audiences roughly every seven seconds.

The analysis focused on embedded pitchside advertising within FIFA’s centrally distributed world feed rather than broadcaster ad breaks and found FIFA did not use available virtual-board replacement technology to tailor or remove such branding for territories with legal restrictions. The authors argue this created unavoidable exposure - especially for children - and call for regulators to extend marketing rules to embedded broadcast branding, impose penalties, and require FIFA to adopt public-interest standards and country-specific ad replacement to prevent promotion of products linked to health and social harms.