Exposure to unhealthy commodity brands in YouTube highlights of English Premier League and FIFA World Cup football matches

For decades, public health researchers have watched how the products we see every day shape what we buy and how we live. They have long known that seeing advertisements for foods high in fat, salt, or sugar, or for alcohol, can nudge people toward consuming more of those items. In recent years, a new category has joined this list: gambling. Studies suggest that seeing betting ads can lead people to place more bets, spend more money, and make unplanned wagers. Because sports are a massive part of modern life, these unhealthy products often appear on the sidelines of the games we love, on the shirts players wear, and in the breaks between play. The question now is not just about what happens during a full ninety-minute match, but about the shorter, faster clips that millions of people, especially children, watch on their phones. These clips, known as highlights, condense the most exciting moments of a game into a few minutes, but they also concentrate the advertising that surrounds those moments.

A team of researchers from the University of Nottingham set out to measure exactly what children and young people are seeing when they watch these football clips on YouTube. They focused on two of the biggest stages in the sport: the English Premier League, which is the top professional league in England, and the FIFA World Cup, the global tournament held every four years. The researchers wanted to know how much time was spent showing brands for gambling, alcohol, and unhealthy foods in these short videos, and whether the rules governing these two competitions made a difference. They looked at the final ten games of the 2025-2026 Premier League season and a selection of matches from the 2026 World Cup. For each video, they recorded every brand that appeared for at least two seconds, noting what the brand sold, where it appeared on the screen, and whether it showed up before the video started playing. They also checked the advertisements that YouTube showed to viewers before the highlights began.

The results revealed a stark contrast between the two competitions. While the total number of brand appearances per minute was roughly the same for both, the types of brands were completely different. In the Premier League highlights, unhealthy products took up more than a third of the screen time. The vast majority of this was gambling. Betting companies appeared in every single Premier League clip, occupying nearly one-third of the total viewing time. These ads were not just in the breaks; they were embedded in the action itself, appearing on the digital boards surrounding the pitch and on the sleeves of players' shirts. In the videos shown before the clips started, gambling advertisements dominated, accounting for more than four-fifths of the total time.

The World Cup told a different story. Unhealthy products appeared much less often, taking up less than one-fifth of the screen time. Gambling was barely visible, appearing for only a tiny fraction of the duration. Instead, the exposure was spread more evenly among food, alcohol, and other categories. Crucially, no gambling advertisements appeared before the World Cup highlights. The researchers found that the difference came down to control. The World Cup organizers tightly manage what can be shown in the stadium, blocking brands that are not official partners. The Premier League, by contrast, allows a wider range of sponsors, including those on the digital boards that line the field.

The study also looked at where these gambling ads appeared, because this matters for how easy they are to block. A common proposal to protect children is to ban gambling companies from putting their logos on the front of players' shirts. However, the researchers found that in the Premier League, only about a quarter of the gambling exposure came from the front of the shirt. The rest appeared on the pitchside boards, stadium signs, and the sleeves of the players. This means that even if the front-of-shirt sponsorship were removed, the majority of the gambling exposure in these highlights would remain untouched. The ads would simply shift to the other available spaces.

The researchers concluded that the environment of the World Cup shows that it is possible to have a sporting event with far less exposure to gambling and other unhealthy products. The difference was not accidental; it was the result of strict rules that decided which brands could appear at all. The study suggests that for the Premier League, voluntary changes like removing shirt sponsors are not enough to solve the problem. To truly reduce the amount of gambling that children see, the rules would need to cover all the places where ads appear, not just the most obvious ones. The data shows that when a governing body decides to restrict certain categories of advertising, the result is a much cleaner viewing experience for everyone.