An AI system watched every minute of play at the 2026 World Cup, all 104 matches and 172.6 hours, and counted the logos on screen. It found more than 93,000 appearances of brands for unhealthy food and drink, alcohol, gambling and similar products. Researchers from the University of Bristol and the University of Oxford published the results on September 22.
No person could count this by hand. The team ran a computer vision model, AI that recognizes objects in images, on Isambard-AI, the UK's most powerful supercomputer. For every logo it recorded the brand, the time and how long it stayed on screen.
What the AI found
Unhealthy food and drink made up 70.4 percent of the logos, with 65,722 appearances. The report also counts 9,266 alcohol logos, 6,429 gambling logos and 9,360 for prediction markets, sites where people bet on events. Together these brands were on screen for 39.3 hours, almost a quarter of all play.
One soft drink brand alone appeared 21,893 times, according to the report.
One feed, many countries
FIFA sends the same broadcast, with the same branding, to more than 220 territories. The researchers say that includes places where some of these products may not be advertised at all.
"FIFA's commercial model failed to adequately account for national laws and cultural norms governing harmful commodity promotion," says Raffaello Rossi, a senior lecturer in marketing at Bristol and co-author of the report.
The authors want regulators to apply advertising rules to logos inside sports broadcasts. They also say FIFA already has the technology to remove or replace logos where a product cannot legally be advertised.
