9 Ads per Minute: FIFA Cup 26 – "the price of the beautiful game"
bristol.ac.uk
bristol.ac.uk
At the end of the article is this excerpt
>> Results from this research were generated using an AI computer vision model developed by the research team on Bristol’s Isambard-AI, the UK’s most powerful AI supercomputer. Isambard-AI powered the analysis of 172.6 hours of live match footage from all 104 games played between 11 June and 19 July 2026.
So, basically now merchandizers, auditors, compliance monitors, etc. have a tool using which they can quantify whether broadcaster complied with contractual requirements of showing their ads/merch/logos as per contract. And if they missed, then they can quantify the delta - to sue the broadcaster for the balance as well.
Also, it can enable many countries, where certain content is not allowed, then this tool can simply give them data points without having to employ someone, or have someone review the output of the AI tooling.
> The analysis counted advertising built into the match footage (e.g. on the hoardings), rather than commercials shown during advertising breaks
Not an expert on this but I don't think same kind of manual effort is required anymore.
If you are spending millions on ads, you can pay a couple of guys to watch TV and take notes.
It was not easy for your local triple A baseball game being streamed to 500 viewers. This approach scales down.
Not to mention human accuracy will likely be way, way worse, no human being will maintain their attention counting ads at five second intervals for even ten minutes, almost two hours is unthinkable.
Eventually, people buying ad time on TV stations could request an air check and receive a VHS tape showing a bit of the programming before/after the ad pod your ad ran. Particularly useful when buying ad time on local stations out of the market where you lived.
Technology is funny, I remember when an intern project detected cats in Youtube videos and it was front page news (round here, at least).
Now it's just boring technology.
This goes along well with another saying I have.
"You will never prove machines are intelligent, you will only prove humans are not"
You hire minimum wage people to walk around stores with cameras. This was actually done with notepads occasionally, but so much less expensive tondo with AI.
But there is a much more stringent privacy requirement here since customers walking in those stores haven't really signed up for this analysis. Hence, difficult to just setup the camera and take continuous data for analysis.
What’s going to be fun are robotic stockers, racing to ensure compliance when a person/bot flagged as an auditor is in the store.
You’ll be reaching for the Pepsi and some robot will swoop in and replace the entire shelf with Coke when the Pepsi auditor walks into the store. Then you’ll reach to bottom shelf for your Coke and just as the robot swaps it back to eye level because the Coke auditor walked in. The store having sold the same placement to both.
(Ok, a bit far-fetched, but entertaining)
In the US at least there is no requirement for this. You're already being watched, tracked, and put in identification databases as it is.
What's also surprising is that despite all this data we can't automate those soccer player jobs yet.
Automated ad-monitoring tools existed for decades for TV and Radio using even older DSP techniques and imperceptible audio/visual watermarks.
Seems like a good feature for AirPods too, though the new CEO Ternus seems committed to the opposite.
There's something to it
The other 99% it's "men" acting like 3 year old first born children who had a toy taken away from them.
It's a beautiful sport, ruined.
Soccer is an endurance sport, regrouping should be done with possession of the ball, not with theatrics.
Nice ad hominem btw.
As for continuous play, I feel like the Americans made the very particular decision to cut out the potentially boring parts the game, so every moment is either setup or bombastic action.
It's weird but there is appeal to the idea.
I understand the concept that the kit colours is what identifies the team, but still, I can't justify wearing a giant advertisement. If you gave it to me, I'd refuse it. Fuck you, pay me.
(Or at least I did, for a couple decades...)
A friend of mine used to do this with products that self-advertise when he was younger (I notice his Tilley hat is unmolested, presumably he had now stopped), but it doesn't really make sense on say a reproduction football kit.
It led to the hilarious situation were they have to wear pink shoes so that the audience looks at them.
https://boardroom.tv/michael-jordan-olympic-jacket-nike-reeb...
This is what you said word for word.
It's common even at a local grassroots level where local businesses will feature on the kits.
MLB since 2023.
https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6575747/2025/08/26/premier-...
>“The Premier League is clear on guidance to all its clubs in that flags, banners or other materials (including replica shirts and t-shirts) that display potential inflammatory content, which could include flags of countries in conflict, or content considered discriminatory, offensive or politically motivated, should not be permitted.
> The club also say: “In line with Premier League guidance, supporters are advised that Israeli or Palestinian flags, banners, t-shirts or materials will not be permitted to be displayed at fixtures for the foreseeable future.”
I couldn't find any of this on the Premier League website - it's all done by proxy (the clubs).
Ah... Old school culture jamming :-)
See also, billboard hacking and Adbusters.
I'll take a closer look at your idea too!
Now, we see huge panels (double the height) for ads in stadiums which become very intrusive when watching on TV (20–30% of the screen ends up being used for ads). Added the hydratation->ADs breaks, and increased World Cup tickets insanely.
Football used to be for everyone, now they're are killing it for almost everyone.
Same in the UK (Sky for EPL+EFL Cup, HBO for EPL+UCL, Amazon Prime for Christmas EPL + occasional cup games) + a TV licence (for the occasional cup game / tournaments.)
If you don't pay for anything, you can watch about 10? cup games a season on ITV. Or go to a pub, obviously (but then you'll be forced to buy drinks.)
You can usually listen to a bunch of games per week via BBC Radio (I think it requires a TV licence if you use streaming but you can still get 5Live on AM radio AFAIK) and TalkSport (also on AM radio.)
honestly I think it's not a bad move - as it allows for tactical flexibility.
The World Cup turned it into a farce by making it mandatory even during a rainy 19 degrees weather, or inside climate controlled stadiums.
It's still close to 40 degrees in Sevilla these days.
Some teams within the same group had to travel far more than others. Some played at noon in a California stadium shaped like a oven while others played later in cooler climates or in climate controlled stadiums. Some games had to be interrupted because of thunderstorms.
Yet the only measure they took for "fairness" happened to be the one that incidentally allowed them to make more money. Let's be honest for a second, a three minutes break amounts to a somewhat lengthy VAR or offside check, a slow corner kick, or an injured player getting escorted off the field.
If anything, it makes it _more_ unfair to make it mandatory everywhere. It's not an advantage, it's supposed to make up for a particularly hot/humid weather. Now your next opponent will have had the benefit of an extra 6 minutes break, without the disadvantage of having exerted themselves in a very hot weather.
Any talk of fairness when out of the window when FIFA decided to put their thumb on the scale and rescind Balogun's red card anyway.
But the problem with marketing and advertising is that it's impossible to know if a campaign will be a hit - a flop - or the butt of jokes from an entire generation (e.g. New Coke, Jaguar 2025; or it may very well just work despite all the industry naysayers like Apple's translucent plastic look from 1998 - I/we felt no-one would ever buy an overpriced and non-expandable PC that looked like a kid's toy, or a loo-seat laptop.
...of course, what actually happens is the strongest personalities in the C-suite eschew what their MBA course taught them about trusting the experts below them in the org chart; instead they champion their own personal pet ideas, no matter how much predictable damage they'll do to the company's share-price, because they couldn't possibly be wrong; he is the CTO, after-all; very smart!
Early in my career I worked for a pharmaceutical giant as a statistician. One of the things we would work on was trying to determine how much the various advertising efforts the company did actually moved the needle. Every year was the same miserable experience. The company would spend millions and millions of dollars in various advertising channels. We would attempt to determine how effective it was, but the wayin which they advertised and the way we collected data made it very difficult to generate any kind of insight at all. We would make recommendations as to how to adjust execution moving forward to ensure we could reliably determine how much value we were getting out of these campaigns, all of which would be ignored. They would massage our findings to tell whatever story they needed and would do the same thing the next year.
The marketing division is its own organization, with their own incentives that don’t necessarily align with the broader company’s incentives. They also were heavily addicted to relying on external analytical consultants who could pump out all the slide decks and pie charts they wanted, which would inevitably show that the marketing was not only effective, but should be invested in more the following year.
Next time you walk into your local electronics retailer and look at TVs, you might see a Samsung, LG, HiSense.
Chances are, if not for massive amounts spent on advertising sports, you'd overlook some of these brands in favour of the ones you recognise.
It won't be a conscious, "I saw this during the north London derby so I'll buy it", but subconscious name recognition will have a huge impact on willingness to buy.
Do I go to McDonalds because I saw an ad, or because it 3 minutes away and the kid wants nuggets? Do I shop at my local supermarket because they buy every third ad on YouTube, or because it's the closest? There are a ton of details that influence our daily choices, and I'm not suggesting that ads aren't one of them, but I'm starting to doubt that it's the defining one. When I look at what I buy it's: availability, cost, and specification. There's not a hold lot advertising can do about any of those three.
If we could truly measure which ads works and which doesn't the entire ad based economy would crash over night.
Whether we realize or not subconsciously our minds will associate the product and ad. When that association is reinforced by the salesman, a strategic placement on the shelf, or discount offers it is easier to convert it to sale.
Like, what-on-earth was Visa thinking when their sponsorship of the Olympics had all the food-vendors and merch sellers boasting how they were "Proud" to decline payments from customers unless they're using Visa-networked cards[1] - which demonstrates they just can't exercise restraint.
[1]: https://www.sportsbusinessjournal.com/Journal/Issues/2012/07... - Visa's official slogan really was “We are proud to accept only Visa.”
If only they were not glorified ad companies themselves...
However, I have to presume that the effect is different for at least some other people.
Also, if I were not use heroic ad-blockers. But as I neither watch FIFA's money laundering scheme nor its ad-pester business (all gets blocked here without mercy), it does not affect me in the slightest. Hopefully these clowns pay proper taxes to aid everyone, but I bet they park their money in offshore areas anway.
Like the FIFA peace prize.
- approx. 1 logo per each 6,7 seconds
I use 6.7 and say "point." My first read of "6,7" was "six, seven" followed by an internal audio of kids losing their shit.
I read it as "6-point-7" in English, I just used our local version-of-writing with the comma :)
Ban goods or expect advertising for them, full stop.
Seems like a perfect useless academic exercise to watch the World Cup and say you’re working.
Bonus points for judgment on the health of the goods just for giggles.
It's been decades since I last had a football jersey because I can't stand the idea of buying something (expensive) that has an ad on it.
We need to focus on this as a global culture going forward. Very valuable to call this out.
That income doesn't come from tickets alone.
There is no "beautiful game". This show is only about manipulating people by exploiting their most basic and stupid instincts: aggression, tribalism, etc.
Sports entertainment has always been like that since the Coliseum and Circus Maximus were the main attractions in town.
The very expression "beautiful game" was born out of it. From the late 60s to the 70s, Brazil was one of the strongest contenders in the World Cup. They achieved that because they were able to select a roster of very skilled athletes among an huge national league. Because the country was ruled by an extremely nationalist military dictatorship, the government fully supported and promoted wrapping the country around the national team. Then the subservient sports press invented the name "jogo bonito" (beautiful game) to typify this game based on individual skills. From there, the propaganda term caught on. A similar thing happened in other countries ruled by dictatorships by then: Argentina, Chile, Portugal, Greece, Turkey,...
My point is that football's tribalism (like the Roman circus) was always at the service of some power. Before, it was autocratic nationalism in dictatorships. Now, it is just bets, alcohol and junk food.
To put things into perspective when people whine about the American held world cup: nobody was thrown out of an airplane.
Sports are an organized place we have developed as an environment for us to express our most basic and stupid instincts rather than repress them.
As with many environments, opportunists try to find ways to exploit it for self serving interests. People enjoy gambling, for example, and that leads to exploiters trying to rig the odds.
Since there is a lot of money involved, it is unsurprising that the control and organization of sports would be sought after by powers but ultimately the audience puts much more faith in the players to have an honest desire to compete than they do the establishments organizing the games to be well intentioned. And gambling is the release valve, where if you believe it to be rigged a certain way then you can bet on it so it can never be too obvious if it's happening
Do we really need an academic study to tell us that yes, there were ads on the sides of the football pitch at the World Cup, and that FIFA's choice of sponsors is questionable (but hey, questionable sponsors pay better than less questionable ones)?
I didn't need someone to tell me that FIFA is full of ads. But studies like this provide a precise, measurable target to work with.
Most of it is ugly when you take it by itself but a place without it looks empty and soulless. I know it's ironic saying corporations add soul to public spaces but sometimes it's true.
Imagine a world where football kits are solid colours with nothing but the team crest. It would look incredibly boring. Same with people on the street, if you banned branding what would everyone wear? Plain shirts or random graphics like something from Temu? Political messages?
I'll take the most annoying ads ever made over that.
this is funny on multiple levels.