Yet another Hacker News

9 Ads per Minute: FIFA Cup 26 – "the price of the beautiful game"

83 points KellyCriterion 1 hour ago 94 comments

KellyCriterion 1 hour ago | parent

- 9 ads per minute

- approx. 1 logo per each 6,7 seconds

lostlogin 30 minutes ago | parent

How can it be that little? Showing any one player would get you more than 1 advert on screen the whole time.

chistev 1 hour ago | parent

And it seems the "hydration break" has been adopted by La Liga.

serial_dev 1 hour ago | parent

It's just an ad break, and now that it has been normalized, probably everyone will do it. They should just say directly we have quarters from now on because we want to show you more ads, the most annoying part is this gaslighting, pretending it is for hydration.

bdavbdav 1 hour ago | parent

Yep. US World Cup ruined it for the rest of us :(

stockresearcher 46 minutes ago | parent

Are you going to be leading the campaign to get your national FA to return all of the money it received from the highest-revenue-sharing-ever US World Cup?

windward 43 minutes ago | parent

Football fans have shown they're quite eager to tell Infantino where to stick his revenue sharing.

watwut 40 minutes ago | parent

It earned the most money, but was it the most sharing? The hosting cities were taken advantage of and clubs are in fact rebelling against fifa now.

kryptiskt 13 minutes ago | parent

Sweden cleared $2.5M in profit from their participation, about the same as the previous edition, all the increase was eaten up by the US taxing the teams and higher costs. That's not nearly enough money to sell out for.

rbarrosoPT 40 minutes ago | parent

Each year, I watch less and less football. In Portugal you have to subscribe 2 or 3 streaming platforms if want to follow the Portuguese League, the Champions League, and eventually other country leagues (like Premier League and La Liga).

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.

zimpenfish 31 minutes ago | parent

> In Portugal you have to subscribe 2 or 3 streaming platforms

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.)

VulgarExigency 16 minutes ago | parent

My solution for this is to just subscribe to an entirely legitimate IPTV service which costs about as much for a year as one month of Sport TV costs.

H4cks0r1337 58 minutes ago | parent

Yes, the important hydration break. Because players didn't have ample time to drink something up until now before free kicks, corner kicks etc and during VAR checks every ~ 10 minutes. Glad I stopped watching more than 10 years ago.

dzonga 46 minutes ago | parent

and the Italian league.

honestly I think it's not a bad move - as it allows for tactical flexibility.

lbreakjai 45 minutes ago | parent

A break to drink water is not a new thing in La Liag. It's however only implemented when the temperature reaches a certain threshold (I think 30 degrees but I may be wrong), which I think makes sense and is acceptable.

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.

originalvichy 38 minutes ago | parent

It was only mandatory so that teams wouldn’t feel like they were disadvantaged if a rival got breaks during games that crossed a set temperature limit and they did not. League game fixtures are so random that this would not be an advantage, but for a short cup tournament like this it could be a big tactical/performance advantage, especially in the knockout phase.

tremon 25 minutes ago | parent

That was merely the excuse given. Teams are already hugely disadvantaged by having to play in 30+°C when a rival gets to play in 20°C instead. Giving the team playing in better conditions a commercial break as well only adds to that unfairness.

lbreakjai 15 minutes ago | parent

Yes that was the reason put forward, which is absolutely ridiculous if you think about it.

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.

Muhammad523 1 hour ago | parent

I think people simply ignore the banners and logos all around so its not that much of a problem

xnorswap 1 hour ago | parent

They clearly don't, otherwise it wouldn't generate so much advertising revenue.

onion2k 1 hour ago | parent

That assumes advertisers are correctly measuring the impact of their ads. They could just be wrong.

xeyownt 1 hour ago | parent

If you invest millions, you make sure that being wrong is a very tiny probability.

rf15 1 hour ago | parent

And as a provider of advertisement surfaces you have every incentive to oversell the reach of your surfaces.

gwd 1 hour ago | parent

That doesn't match the behavior I've observed from large corporations.

LPisGood 1 hour ago | parent

VC firms batting at such a small rate.

smallmancontrov 1 hour ago | parent

"I am convinced that about one-half the money I spend for advertising is wasted, but I have never been able to decide which half."

DaiPlusPlus 49 minutes ago | parent

That's the ideal, yes.

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!

NeutralCrane 10 minutes ago | parent

Absolutely not.

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.

xnorswap 1 hour ago | parent

Yes, it could be a mass-delusion drive ad-spend, but I think you're vastly underestimating how much these logos actually go in to "brand recognition".

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.

mitxela 44 minutes ago | parent

Right, you won't buy a GHTESKJVFII even if it happens to be the best product

amanaplanacanal 29 minutes ago | parent

Half the products on Amazon have names like that.

mrweasel 1 hour ago | parent

The problem is that you have no idea if those ads are working, not really.

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.

devsda 37 minutes ago | parent

Ads don't have to be the primary deciding factor but it does make the rest of the process in the sales pipeline easy.

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.

DaiPlusPlus 58 minutes ago | parent

On the contrary: it's because people ignore them so much that motivates those very same brands to constantly push harder, and more obnoxiously, each time major sporting events are on.

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.”

inexcf 21 minutes ago | parent

And homeopathy works because people pay for it.

dude250711 1 hour ago | parent

Meta/Snap should make AR-glasses that block out ads.

If only they were not glorified ad companies themselves...

slig 33 minutes ago | parent

Well, they can block their competitors ads...

EDEdDNEdDYFaN 1 hour ago | parent

I am sure you are aware that on a subconscious level the ads have an impact on you, even if you think you are actively “ignoring” them

rjknight 57 minutes ago | parent

The gambling ads have a conscious effect for me: I think “what a terrible world this portrays, I’m glad I don’t gamble”. For me, being reminded of gambling is just a reminder of the fact that I don’t like gambling. The same is true of some other ads too, they mostly serve to remind me that I define my personality in opposition to these things.

However, I have to presume that the effect is different for at least some other people.

inexcf 23 minutes ago | parent

I specifically avoid products i see ads for, cause the product can't be that great if it needs obnoxious advertisements, so the effect is more than subconscious. Now, i don't see many ads cause i block all of them where i can and roadside advertisements are not allowed here in Germany, but even if i was, i am of the opinion that the effect of this subliminal manipulation is severely overstated by the people selling ad space. I think the idea that i would buy something just because a company writes their name everywhere is ridiculous and as far as i know studies show that the effect on buying decisions is basically not measurable. I think the entire value in advertisements is just more people in general knowing of a brand.

bdavbdav 1 hour ago | parent

Not at all true. There’s a whole industry around measuring this (e.g. https://www.edo.com). A massive amount of money is spent on advertising for large companies. McD spend ballpark $3bn across the parent and franchisees, they want to make sure they get value.

bayindirh 52 minutes ago | parent

The worst part is, the value they get (monies) is not the same value you get (worse health all over).

totetsu 46 minutes ago | parent

You can ignore something actively but you are a still picking up on the message of it’s ubiquitousness. I think we have all had the experience of considering buying a {redacted} or something sometime after seeing and ignoring an add for one.

wateralien 59 minutes ago | parent

People don't ignore anything. Everything is absorbed one way or another.

brendanfinan 1 hour ago | parent

For many this was their first opportunity to invest in binary event contracts, so this is a win for financial liferacy

ricardobeat 1 hour ago | parent

*literacy?

this is funny on multiple levels.

serial_dev 1 hour ago | parent

I'm actually surprised it's only that many ads? How can people even take a screenshot of the screen without a bunch of ads on it? You can't even take a look at a player, their jersey has basically ads on it, the ball, the shoes, the names of stadiums... Or do they not count the adidas/nike/reebok logos?

tremon 49 minutes ago | parent

> The analysis counted advertising built into the match footage (e.g. on the hoardings [sic?]), rather than commercials shown during advertising breaks.

invalidusernam3 45 minutes ago | parent

Hoardings is UK English (so... English) for the advertising boards around a football pitch

pluc 41 minutes ago | parent

The jersey thing is completely insane to me. I'm from North America where jerseys are largely NBA, NHL and MLB. No ads (although, NHL has started). But the euro jersey has the biggest ad dead fucking center.

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.

aczerepinski 37 minutes ago | parent

NBA and MLB both have ads on the jersey (Nike and an additional per-team sponsor)

tialaramex 36 minutes ago | parent

But they are being paid, they're paid a tremendous amount of money, and advertisements are where the money comes from.

pluc 32 minutes ago | parent

I understand they're being paid to wear their sponsors logo. I am not.

rationalist 3 minutes ago | parent

Yep. Every logo that is sewn onto my clothes, I remove with a razorblade before I wear them.

iamacyborg 5 minutes ago | parent

He’s referring to jerseys sold to fans, not those worn by the athletes.

dwedge 35 minutes ago | parent

Not sure if there's push back or something behind this but a lot of premiership teams this season in the UK have a second kit where the sponsor is either missing or the same colour as the shirt so barely visible. Examples: https://www.safcstore.com/en/c-18416 https://www.brightonandhovealbion.com/media-article/125th-an...

pluc 31 minutes ago | parent

The same goes for international matches, no ads on jerseys.

expedition32 24 minutes ago | parent

Teams get paid to wear Nike or Adidas.

It led to the hilarious situation were they have to wear pink shoes so that the audience looks at them.

pluc 9 minutes ago | parent

The best example is Jordan's 1992 Olympic cover-up

https://boardroom.tv/michael-jordan-olympic-jacket-nike-reeb...

iamacyborg 4 minutes ago | parent

Pink boots is because of the strong contrast against the green grass, no?

o10449366 19 minutes ago | parent

What? Lakers are literally sponsored by Wish.

pluc 8 minutes ago | parent

Yeah I don't watch basketball or baseball or football so I don't know. Those are US leagues for US sports for US people, with one team to pretend it isn't.

etcetcetcetceta 12 minutes ago | parent

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c77kvx575npo

It's common even at a local grassroots level where local businesses will feature on the kits.

rob74 57 minutes ago | parent

> Our findings reveal the sheer scale of branding embedded throughout tournament broadcasts, making exposure to unhealthy food, alcohol and gambling brands both omnipresent and unavoidable for viewers.

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)?

probably_wrong 46 minutes ago | parent

To quote one of my teachers, "you may read the Constitution and think it's all obvious, that it's like writing a law that says people need air to live. The problem is, if you don't explicitly write it down someone may actually try to steal the air".

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.

mitxela 43 minutes ago | parent

also in the thread about OONI censorship measuring program people said they don't need a study to know China censors the internet

boesboes 55 minutes ago | parent

Marketing, the great value siphon. Marketing adds NOTHING of value of the world.

adrianN 53 minutes ago | parent

Product discoverability has some value, but marketing is largely a zero sum game.

pluc 29 minutes ago | parent

Marketing is the art of fucking with discoverability so that your shit gets discovered instead of what is relevant.

mordae 26 minutes ago | parent

Discoverability is trivially solvable by dedicating journalists to products. There are already events the companies use to present their products, frequented by journalists who then proceed to write periodicals with new product categories, benchmarks and comparisons.

Those do get gamed and might cheat since they'd get kickbacks, but that should result in a reputation loss as other journalists point it out. There are also various cooperative models that work here well as members can just vote kickback-taking staff out.

People used to actually subscribe to magazines (and some still do) in areas they are interested in. And they still go and visit the shops to see if anything interesting pops up and there is word of mouth.

So I believe discoverability is not really a problem. The fact is that polished advertisements take up bandwidth that would be more productively utilized by a benchmark comparison chart with a commentary on differentiators. People would get more performant and/or better fitting products and services and the overall productivity and happiness would increase.

iamacyborg 2 minutes ago | parent

What you are talking about is marketing and advertising. You’re not solving anything.

snemvalts 30 minutes ago | parent

The sport wouldn't be as popular or have as much funding. The reason football is where it is because of marketing.

This can be extended to all other sports. A sport needs to be easy to follow and easy to advertise with to get funding. Being able to practice it cheaply on a grass-roots level helps.

rationalist 1 minute ago | parent

> The sport wouldn't be as popular or have as much funding.

The sport, or the franchise?

hnisjafx40 51 minutes ago | parent

Worked on the ad insertion side for a league feed once, and hydration breaks exist because they're the only reliably schedulable stop in a 45 minute half.

wateralien 49 minutes ago | parent

It's not only the World Cup, it's everything, everywhere, all the time. We are drowning in marketing messages. It's gross.

gumby 39 minutes ago | parent

AR glasses with ad blocking would be a must-buy for me…though how would I learn about it?

Seems like a good feature for AirPods too, though the new CEO Ternus seems committed to the opposite.

thinkingtoilet 10 minutes ago | parent

At least soccer has continuous play. Watching American football is unbearable.

gps372 49 minutes ago | parent

Most comments may have ignored this so far, but this is an interesting AI based research.

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.

thevinter 45 minutes ago | parent

I'm sure this was already easily doable for years by using plain and boring computer vision

OccamsMirror 24 minutes ago | parent

You probably don't even need vision. The audio on adverts is noticeably different.

vasco 16 minutes ago | parent

There's no audio on the adverts in question.

> The analysis counted advertising built into the match footage (e.g. on the hoardings), rather than commercials shown during advertising breaks

gps372 21 minutes ago | parent

Plain and boring computer vision would have still required a team who would identify frames to sample before processing, and then annotate, generalize and classify the data.

Not an expert on this but I don't think same kind of manual effort is required anymore.

GuB-42 10 minutes ago | parent

It was easily doable for even more years using plain and boring MK1 eyeballs and a stopwatch.

If you are spending millions on ads, you can pay a couple of guys to watch TV and take notes.

brookst 8 minutes ago | parent

This is also being done in retail, where manufacturers and/or distributors pay for preferred placement (end caps, eye level, etc), but how do you check that e.g. Safeway is really doing that across a couple of thousand stores?

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.

amelius 3 minutes ago | parent

There's a lot of data extraction being done for every game. It already uses tons of AI, and has been using it for years. Doing it by hand would have been more surprising.

What's also surprising is that despite all this data we can't automate those soccer player jobs yet.

justincormack 43 minutes ago | parent

TIL that Fifa made a movie that had the worst US box office of an movie ever, taking $918 in its opening weekend.

lostlogin 32 minutes ago | parent

I wouldn’t put it past FIFA to make an award ceremony like the Oscar’s so that they could win it.

Like the FIFA peace prize.

shevy-java 42 minutes ago | parent

If I were to watch FIFA-controlled content, I would be annoyed about this.

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.

holoduke 36 minutes ago | parent

A bit of topic. But noaways even when having no time at all you can instruct your AI to setup DNS adguard at home and get rid of all (most) ads on any site or app. It took me literaly 10 minutes to set it up.

diego_moita 25 minutes ago | parent

So what? Did anyone expect it to be different?

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.

expedition32 10 minutes ago | parent

The 1978 world cup finale in Argentina was held right next to the torture center.

To put things into perspective when people whine about the American held world cup: nobody was thrown out of an airplane.

Tycho 24 minutes ago | parent

It was funny a few years ago when the English Premier League was all moralistic, having players “take the knee” before matches in solidarity with social justice, meanwhile all the stadiums and team shirts and television broadcasts were abound with online gambling ads and sponsorships.

iso1631 15 minutes ago | parent

They didn't "have" players "take the knee", they just didn't stop them. It's called freedom.

Tycho 7 minutes ago | parent

Freedom as long as it’s a cause officially sanctioned by the league.