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Coca-Cola’s “sportswashing” of health-harming products at current World Cup and previous major sporting events including Olympic Games amplified by digital media
New research exposes new marketing tactics by Coca-Cola and calls for greater scrutiny of its health-harming activities alongside the banning of Big Soda’s sponsorship of sports to protect children’s health
New research being presented at this year’s International Congress on Obesity (ICO2026) hosted by the World Obesity Federation (WOF) in Mexico City, Mexico (15-17 July) reveals how Coca-Cola’s sponsorship of the 2025 FIFA Club World Cup (featuring 32 of the world’s top football clubs) was amplified across social media to promote unhealthy products to millions beyond the live matches, including children and young people.
In spite of the link between sweetened beverages and rising rates of noncommunicable diseases including type 2 diabetes, obesity, and heart disease, there has been little media scrutiny of the public health harms of promoting these beverages on the global stage at events like the 2024 Paris Olympic Games, even in media outlets traditionally viewed as independent, say researchers.
As lead author Dr Nalin Singh Negi, Associate Director, Research, from global public health organisation Vital Strategies, headquartered in New York, NY, USA explains, “By aligning its brand with athletic excellence, Coca-Cola perpetuates a false sense of health and legitimacy that directly contradicts what sport represents—a marketing practice known as sportswashing.”
Coca-Cola has a long history of sponsoring sports, but the authors say the adverts have become more prominent and pervasive with huge digital marketing campaigns across multiple platforms in the run-up to events. Brands also target fans through social media—digital environments that are more difficult to monitor and regulate than traditional media.
“That dynamic is playing out right now at the FIFA World Cup,” says Dr Melina Magsumbol, Associate Director, Research at Vital Strategies, and author of a second study examining Coca-Cola’s digital marketing during the 2025 FIFA Club World Cup. “With 6 billion fans expected to engage with the tournament, Coca-Cola is appealing to young people directly through social media, including its creator squad campaign, and has built its official 2026 FIFA World Cup campaign around fan emotion as its central theme, backed by a celebrity-studded anthem and months of planned activations.”
Digital sportswashing
Toinvestigate how Coca-Cola’s sponsorship of the 2025 Club World Cup was amplified across social media, researchers systematically tracked publicly available social media posts in Brazil, Mexico and the USA linking Coca-Cola to the Club World Cup across 358 accounts on X, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok between June 1 and July 31, 2025 [1].
Most (71%) of the 795 posts assessed featured branding embedded in match footage and interviews, rather than direct product promotion—generating 3.6 billion impressions. The majority (79%) of posts were generated by sports broadcasters and streaming platforms.
“Branding spread largely through reshares of match footage — generating billions of impressions beyond the scope of many existing regulations that focus on specific products or formal adverts,”says lead author Dr Magsumbol.
Dodging media scrutiny
The partnerships between some of the most popular sports’ governing bodies and unhealthy food and drink companies are not being scrutinised enough, nor critiqued by the media, according to an investigation of traditional news coverage during the 2024 Paris Olympics [2].
Researchers from Vital Strategies assessed the content of 85 media articles published between May and October 2024, finding that “short, general articles without critical analysis” dominated coverage of Coca-Cola’s sponsorship of the Paris Olympics.
Most (78%) of the 85 articles assessed framed Coca-Cola’s involvement in a favourable light; just 14% critiqued the partnership. The articles reached an estimated 1.02 billion readers—the equivalent of spending US$9.41 million on advertising.
Critical public health perspectives were rare with just 2% of articles citing health risks or unethical practices, and public health advocates quoted in 1% of coverage.
“Our findings reveal that whether through what journalists write or what algorithms amplify, sport sponsorship reliably perpetuates Coca-Cola’s narrative, obscuring the health and environmental consequences of its products,” says lead author Dr Singh Negi.
He adds, “Aligning media practices and sponsorship policies with public health objectives may reduce public exposure to unhealthy product marketing and strengthen coherence between sport, health promotion and obesity prevention goals.”
The findings underscore the urgency to strengthen digital advertising regulation and advance legislative proposals to ban sponsorship of sports events by unhealthy food and drink brands. The Kick Big Soda Out movement, backed by over half a million supporters worldwide, has become a leading force pressuring bodies like FIFA and the International Olympic Committee to end sponsorship deals with leading Big Soda companies [3].
Dr Magsumbol adds: "Big Soda companies should not sponsor major sporting events or have sponsorship deals with sporting organizations like FIFA because of their significant contribution to health and environmental harms, which are so widespread that public health messaging, while valuable, cannot realistically counterbalance them. Therefore, our recommendation is for marketing restrictions to be applied to transnational and digital sports ecosystems, which would ban sports sponsorship by sweetened beverage and other unhealthy product industries.”
According to Dr Singh Negi: “Regulatory action to address sports-linked branding across social media is urgently needed to prevent Coca-Cola from deploying these tactics on an even larger scale, exposing billions of more viewers, including millions of children and young people, to marketing that conceals serious health risks.”
