A few weeks ago, I was on a Colombian radio show discussing the harms alcohol causes to our people and society. A man called in from another city. He sounded worried by what I was sharing, and he offered a solution that felt natural to him: let us promote sport among young people.
I agreed with him. Sport can be one of the most protective, joyful and connecting spaces a child can grow up in. And then I shared a reflection that I want to develop here, because it sits at the heart of a presentation I gave recently at a webinar of the Pan American Health Organization on alcohol sports sponsorship:
Over the years, we have allowed an activity that should inspire health and well being to become a vehicle for the alcohol industry to reach children, adolescents and young people, and to promote a product that is toxic, carcinogenic and psychoactive.
The FIFA World Cup 2026 shows that pattern at full scale. FIFA projects that close to 6 billion people will engage with the tournament. On Big Alcohol Exposed, Movendi International’s initiative for exposing alcohol industry misconduct, we have already mapped, in detail, the machine AB InBev built to convert that audience into beer sales and private profits: the consumer data, the delivery apps, the watch parties, the influencers. Alongside that machine runs a story. The alcohol industry tells that story about itself to make all of this feel normal, even generous. And in the Americas, the region I follow most closely from my base in Colombia, that story follows a recognisable script.
Over the years, we have allowed an activity that should inspire health and well being to become a vehicle for the alcohol industry to reach children, adolescents and young people.”
Angelica Maria Claro
One Global Giant, Many Local Disguises
Across the region, the same approach repeats: occupy as many everyday spaces as possible, and wear a local face in each one.
In Mexico, one of the three World Cup host countries, Grupo Modelo announced in April that it will hand 35,000 neighbourhood businesses, restaurants, family eateries and small fondas, free broadcast licences for every match, along with televisions, refrigerators and furniture. The company presented this as joining the government’s “Mundial Social” initiative, and framed it as generosity towards small vendors and the families who run them.
But what this really is, is a textbook marketing technique: turning a small business into a branded point of sale, and its owner into a long term loyalist of the Big Alcohol brand. The equipment carries the company’s products and stays in place long after the final whistle, deepening the presence of a harmful product in the everyday, family spaces of entire neighbourhoods, and tying thousands of vendors and their customers to the brand for years to come.
In Brazil, Brahma has built its own football festival, branded “Arena Nº1”, across five Brazilian capitals. In each one it occupies a public space that belongs to the city: the Maria Felipa square in Salvador, the Dona Lindu park in Recife, the Oscar Niemeyer Cultural Centre in Goiânia. These are civic, shared, open places, and for the days of the matches they become brand territory, carrying the alcohol corporation’s name, its bars and its atmosphere, with screens, live shows and crowds of up to twenty thousand a day.
Entry to the main area is open to anyone aged sixteen and over. As one Brahma executive put it, running the festival as the company’s own project gives the brand “more freedom of execution”. That freedom is the point: it lets a Big Alcohol beer brand take over a space that belongs to everyone, including adolescents and families, and rebuild it so that alcohol sits at the centre of how a whole community comes together for football.
In Colombia, Cerveza Águila launched a campaign called Fichaje Nacional (“National Signing”) months before the tournament began. The campaign reached for every available screen: it played in cinemas before films, on national and regional television, and across YouTube, Meta, TikTok, X and radio, reaching more than 20 million people within 24 hours. And it went beyond the footballers fans admire. It built itself into the cultural identity of our country, drawing on a range of figures beloved by Colombians, among them Betty la Fea, a fictional character cherished across generations of families.
Modelo, Brahma, Águila: three brands that feel rooted in their own country. Behind all of them stands a single global transnational alcohol corporation: the world’s largest beer producer Anheuser-Busch InBev. What they deploy is: One strategy, many cultural faces. The performance of local roots to exploit communities and extract as much profits as the beer giant can.
And while these examples come from the Americas, the same approach is unfolding worldwide.
Three beer brands that appear local but behind all of them stands a single transnational alcohol corporation: Anheuser-Busch InBev. They deploy the strategy of performing local roots to exploit communities and extract as much profits as the beer giant can.”
Angelica Maria Claro
The Masks the Alcohol Industry Wears
This occupation of physical and cultural space travels with a coordinated set of messages. At Movendi International we have been documenting them. Each one offers the public a flattering story about the alcohol industry, and each one quietly does a job.
The first story casts the industry as a facilitator of collective celebration and national pride. Quilmes in Argentina speaks of “hearts to believe”. Águila offers to sign 40 million Colombians to the national cause. In Mexico, Corona celebrates “the warmth of Mexicans”. The attention moves away from the product, the harms it causes and instead towards belonging, so that the brand becomes part of how a country loves its team.
The second story casts Big Alcohol as an ally of small business. This is a textbook marketing technique. In the language of marketing, it is called trade promotion: the practice of giving those who already sell a product the equipment, materials and incentives to stock it, display it and push it harder. Each shop, eatery or bar that takes part is encouraged to put the brand at the front of its space and its sales. So when better, evidence-based alcohol policy solutions are proposed, the alcohol industry has woven itself through a web of small businesses whose owners it has cultivated and made dependent on them. The industry is expanding its sales and its political base at the same time.
The third story casts the alcohol industry as a partner in protecting health, through the language of “responsible drinking”. This is one of the industry’s oldest and most consistent messages, and the World Cup puts it on a global stage.
For example, Diageo, the tournament’s official spirits sponsor, builds its entire involvement around the promise of “responsible consumption”, a phrase repeated by the company and by FIFA alike, set in the same sentence as the brands, the activations and the celebration. The framing does two things at once:
- It insidiously relocates the source of harm onto the individual, rather than the products alcohol companies such as Diageo produce, promote, and sell.
- And it lets the industry attach its name to celebration and wellbeing, even though its profits depend on heavy and high-risk alcohol consumption. That same language is then deployed to lobby against the policy solutions that genuinely protect people.
The fourth story casts the industry as a strategic partner of governments, and this is the one with the most at stake. Across the Americas region, alcohol companies seek out public institutions and present themselves as collaborators in shared goals. Mexico offers a clear example: in April, Grupo Modelo presented a joint World Cup initiative alongside the federal government, framed around bringing the tournament to communities across the country. The value of this proximity, documented across decades of research, is government access. By positioning itself beside governments as a willing partner rather than the maker of a harmful product, the industry earns a seat at the table where policy is shaped, and uses it to keep the solutions that would protect people from alcohol harm off the agenda.
The Space Was Protected. The Brand Arrived Anyway.
There is one more move, and it works even in spaces created to keep alcohol out. At the official FIFA Fan Fest in Mexico City’s Zócalo, the authorities decided that no alcohol would be sold, presenting the space as safe and family friendly. Yet the brand still walked in. Corona Cero, the nearly identical alcohol-free version of Corona, will be the only beer present across the entire Fan Fest, for all 39 days, publicly endorsed by the officials organising the tournament.
This matters because the alcohol-free product is not a separate brand. It carries the same name, the same colours and the same logo as the alcoholic one. At the PAHO webinar where I spoke, researcher Richard Purves presented work showing that children and adolescents don’t register these products as anything distinct from the alcohol brands they already know. They see the brand, not the “zero”. So in the one space where alcohol itself was kept out, Big Alcohol found a way in. Their alcohol brand stayed fully present, in front of the families and young people the decision was meant to protect originally.
And the industry knows what these products are for. Research published this year found that alcohol companies describe them in two voices:
- To the public, in social responsibility reports, they are tools for moderation and health.
- To investors, in trade publications, the same products are tools to expand the market, open new consumption occasions, and compete with coffee, water and soft drinks. The alcohol-free version keeps the brand visible in the very places the alcoholic product cannot reach, and the alcoholic product is what the whole marketing push is built to sell.
Sport Can Keep Its Promise
This brings me back to the man on the radio.
He was right. Sport can remain a space of celebration, identity and connection for our children and young people, for our community. And holding on to that promise is possible, because we already know what protects it. Comprehensive bans on alcohol advertising, sponsorship and promotion are among the most cost-effective solutions our governments can adopt. The evidence is clear and several countries already show that it is doable and desirable to put in place higher standards for alcohol marketing.
What remains is the decision to act. Communities want this protection. Civil society and researchers are ready to walk alongside governments who choose to protect people from harmful marketing. And governments have a human rights responsibility to protect people from avoidable harms, including harms caused by alcohol marketing.
The World Cup is putting all of this in plain sight. The alcohol industry activities to promote their products and unleash their aggressive marketing machine is now coming into focus. And with it the chance to do better next time, to really ensure sports favours people not harmful products; football helps promote the health and rights of children, young people, women and communities, instead of private profits for Big Alcohol. For the next mega sports event we should have a global playbook that ensure local spaces are for everyone, healthy, safe, and inclusive.
