If you watched the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup, you were seeing plenty of advertising even when the game itself was on.
A new analysis from researchers at the University of Bristol and University of Oxford found 65,722 appearances of food and beverage brands they classified as unhealthy across all 104 matches. That worked out to about six logos per minute of live play, or roughly one every 9 seconds. The findings come from a university research report rather than a peer-reviewed journal article, and the study measured how often branding appeared, not whether it changed viewers’ eating habits.
The researchers analyzed more than 172 hours of live match footage. They focused on branding built directly into the game coverage, such as signs around the field, rather than commercials shown during breaks.
Food and beverage brands made up 70.4% of all the logos counted in the report. The researchers also tracked alcohol, gambling, prediction markets and cryptocurrency advertising.
A small number of familiar brands accounted for much of the food and drink exposure. Coca-Cola appeared 21,893 times, followed by McDonald’s with 13,915 appearances, Powerade with 12,777 and Lay’s with 12,087. Together, those four brands accounted for 65% of all the logos counted across the report’s five categories.
Food and beverage branding was also on screen for a substantial portion of each match. When the researchers adjusted the results to a standard 90-minute game, they estimated that these logos were visible for nearly 15 minutes.
That does not mean viewers spent 15 minutes actively looking at food ads. A logo could simply be visible in the background while play continued. The finding instead shows how deeply branding was built into the viewing experience.
How the researchers defined an “unhealthy” brand is important, too.
They looked mainly at a company’s core products and used a World Health Organization nutrient profiling system to help classify food and beverage brands. They did not rate every individual product shown on screen separately.
For example, Coca-Cola Zero Sugar was included in the same category as the Coca-Cola parent brand. Researchers counted 3,550 appearances of Coca-Cola Zero Sugar during the tournament.
That means the results are best understood as a measure of exposure to certain brands, rather than a tally of individual foods and drinks with identical nutritional profiles.
The researchers were interested in that exposure because previous studies have found that food marketing can influence children’s food choices, requests and eating. The World Health Organization has also recommended stronger protections for children from food marketing.
But this study did not test those effects.
Researchers did not ask viewers what they ate, track purchases or determine whether seeing a McDonald’s or Coca-Cola logo caused anyone to consume more of those products. The study simply measured how often that branding appeared during the tournament.
“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,” study co-author Dr. Raffaello Rossi of the University of Bristol said in the news release.
To analyze such a large amount of footage, the team used an artificial intelligence system trained to recognize the logos they were studying. They then checked its performance against people who manually reviewed portions of the footage.
The system found most of the same logos as the human reviewers, although it also flagged some that people did not. The researchers said some of those extra detections may have been logos the human reviewers missed.
The team also estimated how much branding viewers in the United Kingdom may have encountered. Using audience figures available for 53 broadcasts, they calculated about 184.4 billion potential impressions from food and beverage branding.
That figure does not represent 184.4 billion people. It adds up all the possible times viewers could have seen individual logos across those broadcasts. The researchers also cautioned against extending the estimate to the entire tournament because audience sizes differed from match to match.
The report also calls for tighter rules around advertising built into live sports, particularly when those broadcasts reach children or countries with different marketing laws. Those are the researchers’ policy recommendations, not findings about how the World Cup affected viewers’ health.
What the study does show clearly is just how much advertising can be present during a sporting event without appearing as a traditional commercial.
A single logo along the field may be easy to overlook. Across an entire World Cup, though, those brief appearances added up to tens of thousands of opportunities for familiar food and drink brands to be seen alongside the action.
The researchers reported no specific external funding for the study. The University of Bristol Business School Impact Fund provided a small amount of support for the report’s design and production. One author also received support from the NIHR Oxford Health Biomedical Research Centre, and computing resources were supported by the University of Bristol and UK government-funded research infrastructure.