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.
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?
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is an entire industry. It's profitable. It works. The ad based economy exists because they do truly measure which ads work and know exactly how much money it makes them.
"They" being the companies that sell advertisements and the marketing departments whose budgets are contingent on the fiction that advertisements create value, yes.
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.
The NHL does it. Watch a televised hockey game, and the ads that the venue has sold on the dasher boards are electronically replaced by ads that the broadcaster has sold. Sometimes when there's a different camera angle you briefly see the ads that are really there.
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.
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.
That's missing the point, or supporting it.
That is brand recognition/knowledge and not a factor in decision making. Knowing three tire brands doesn't tell you if i would buy any of them because of their ads. Personally i never bought tires, mine just are whatever "Mercedes Original" branded ones the car comes with. If i had the need to buy new ones i would get some recommendations. I would not go "I'll buy X because i saw the name a few times".
It's hard to think of any buying decisions i make where ads could matter. When i buy a phone i decide based on features with the highest priority being that it runs GrapheneOS. When i go shopping for clothes i don't look at the brands at all, and i avoid any pieces with visible branding on it. I can't think of a point in my live where i picked some product because i saw it or the brand in an ad. The subconscious part is so hard to measure and disprove but it is just as hard to prove it works as advertised.
Ads might make you remember a name, but i am questioning how much that affects my buying decisions, especially when it makes me trust the brand less when they have to fill every ad slot for people to even talk about them.
fwiw, while I can mention firestone, bf goodrich, more michelin, what I actually did on my last tires is drive to the tire shop and go whatever les schwab sells in-house. Promotion and distribution need not be confined to the internet. I saw the tire shop while driving, so I guess you could point out they have a business sign.
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.
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.
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?
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.
For sports shirts the advertising is literally part of the shirt design, if you remove all adverts with a razorblade now you'd wasted a lot of money on a shirt with huge holes in it.
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.
I reached a certain point and decided that a plain single color or striped cotton tshirt from kohls looks and feels as good as any plain single color cotton shirt that might have a swoosh on it. Bonus the no logo version is usually cheaper as well.
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.
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.
As someone who didn't grow up in NA, i don't understand this attitude. At least in soccer (football), we don't have to sit and watch ads and waste our time (barring the NA world cup). I know a league game will take ~2 hours to complete with a 15 minute half time break. I can allocate that time and then move on with my life. I much rather have that than having to sit through ads that end up taking more time than actual playtime! NBA used to have a thing called TV timeouts. But hey you don't get ads on the jersey
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)?
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.
You are familiar with Nike and Adidas. I want to start a shoe brand that makes shoes that would coincidentally be perfectly suited for your needs (whatever sport, activity, etc you enjoy). How do I get you to notice them?
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.
Hedonistic treadmill says there is little to no value in product discoverability. Marketing is usually creating a new feeling of need, not servicing an authentic existing one.
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.
Would less football be a bad thing? It's the only sport I know where the governing body have to advise the police on how to deal with fan violence, such as "please don't use tear gas on them"
The sport wouldn't be as popular or have as much funding.
And that’s bad because… I’m really asking. What’s the good thing about having millionaires running around a field passing a ball to each other, while billionaires are raking in even more cash by manipulating you with adverts? Not to mention all the other issues with the industry (John Oliver has multiple episodes on FIFA).
If the sport wouldn’t be as popular without marketing, maybe it isn’t that interesting to being with.
I mean, you're not really, considering everything that follows that statement.
The money in sports allows for people to focus on it and perform at the highest levels possible and compete against others who also have this same focus. Advertising is what allows for this to happen.
People, in general, enjoy seeing athletes do things that most normal people could not achieve. Watching the Tour de France, reading about ultramarathons, etc is enjoyable. The same thing is true with musicians, actors, artists, etc. I may not be interested in, say, eight string guitars, but I will still find it fascinating to see someone who has mastered the instrument.
The fact that these athletes are paid so well is a good thing. They are getting a significant share of the revenue they generate, at least in American sports where the revenue is more or less split evenly with the teams. That was not the case decades ago.
I mean, you're not really, considering everything that follows that statement.
I am. Everything that follows is merely the negatives I see to provide context as to why I’m asking. It’s there so you can understand my point of view and rebut it. If we don’t know each other’s views, we can’t convince each other.
The money in sports allows for people to focus on it and perform at the highest levels possible and compete against others who also have this same focus. Advertising is what allows for this to happen.
And my point is that I don’t think the bad of the latter outweighs the good of the former.
The fact that these athletes are paid so well is a good thing.
That they are paid well, sure. That they are paid so well, I’m not convinced. Either way, the amount of money the industry moves (and how it is spent and acquired) is more problematic than the money individual athletes get.
The money in sports allows for people to focus on it and perform at the highest levels possible and compete against others who also have this same focus. Advertising is what allows for this to happen.
Erling Haaland gets half a million a week. His contract is worth £260m.
These guys take the money because it's on offer to them, and fair play to them.
But I don't think they'd decide not to play football and go off to do something else if he were to "only" get, say £5.2m over 10 years instead (£10,500 per week).
The sport wouldn't be as popular or have as much funding. The reason football is where it is because of marketing.
wouldn't have as much funding, sure, but football was massively popular long before they started putting logos on shirts & hoardings.
If there was less money involved in football, then the likes of the free-to-air stations would be in a better position to compete to show more matches, too
Marketing is the interplay of product, promotion, price, and distribution. It is not simply promotion/advertising. Shitty ads exist and are a poor facet of marketing, not the whole of it.
If I want a humane mousetrap, the product must exist and I have to know about it, be able to afford it, and be able to acquire it. Me getting a humane mousetrap add value to my world, and the mouse's. And the seller of the trap. And all the interconnected economies that give others jobs and money to the trap is marketable.
They're not just talking about shitty ads, the entirety of the ad industry has infested our world so much that every ad is by definition a shitty one.
The problem with the steelman argument for marketing is that the scenarios people end up defending can be likened to a medieval shop owner putting a sign in fron of their establishment or a customer browsing a shopping aisle of items with packaging that perfectly represents the function of each item. But that argument must inevitably hit reality, where the industry spiraled into insanity and utter corruption of everything it touches. Lies, abuse, manipulation, FOMO, misrepresentation, scams. These are the primary values of that industry today. Maybe it was sane once upon a time, but that was centuries ago. Now they're unstoppable.
We do not need to endure modern marketing to have product discovery. Imagine if we had a universal service that acted as containment for advertising, where anyone could list their good or service, provide a standardized and fairly objective summary of what makes it good (no mind trickery) and post it to be displayed alonside everyone else's, without even favoring the richest with the most ads or the biggest ads. Then you could find as many mousetraps as you could ever need, while the rest of the world would be spared from the concentrated stream of garbage in the form of advertising that it's currently being firehosed with.
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.
When I first saw Google Glass this was my exact idea for the perfect use case. It's a shame that the advertising-fueled, spyware creeper reality of the tech makes that dream seem ever distant.
I have no faith in humanity, especially those involved in tech, to make this. If they did, they'd block real life marketing only so it could be used to replace with ads bought directly with the AR maker.
If we had good AR hardware, I bet this would eventually get made, just not by big tech. It would be a third-party, probably open source mod that uses the optics of a corporate device to run their own software. It would be unwieldy, expensive and janky, but so worth it. I wonder if the advertising industry would try to get it outlawed if this happens.
I'm shocked they don't just scale the picture down to do side by side style commercials at the same time regardless of what was occurring during play. They do this in auto racing events. There's no need to wait for specific times and can keep with their regularly spacing of breaks.
At least US pro leagues (other than MLS and racing) haven’t yet gone all in on desecrating the team uniform with ads. I can’t bring myself to buy a team jersey that’s 75% an ad for an unrelated corporation that I don’t want to support.
Watching adults roll around on the ground like they just had a limb ripped from their body because someone came within two feet of them is unbearable. It's the most embarrassing thing in sports, but at least the clock keeps going, I guess.
I'm not saying there's not instances of shithousery, but if you've never had a cleat scrape down the back of your calf or have a cleat stomp on the top of your foot, that shit hurts man. Yeah, it goes away, but the immediate pain is intense and is completely justifiable to to clutch at it. However, that can absolutely be done without theatrics
My solution: if play has to stop because you're rolling around, you are clearly injured and must be substituted. This would fix a lot of the fakery I imagine.
Again, sounds like someone that has not actually played. There are times where you just need a damn minute. The rule saying that if you require having someone come look at you on the field means you must spend at least one minute on the touchline before being allowed back on is fine. The ref accounts for that time of stopped play to extend play in what is known as stoppage time. There are plenty of times where the player is not actually looking to stop the play, and the ref doesn't stop play. There's other times where you actually need the magic spray. Of course, there are times where your team just needs a break in play to regroup.
OK sure. Watch a WorldTour cycling race where a rider takes a horrific crash, then hops right back on a spare bike to catch up with the peloton. It really shows the difference between tough athletes and prima donnas.
I'm the opposite - maybe because I grew up watching "soccer", I find American football much more exotic and insteresting. Lately I'm discovering the nuances of baseball, what a game!
I like American football enough to watch it, but not enough to watch it live, which which kind of gets rid of the ads.
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.
Millions of people go about their lives every day devising complex schemes to put as much visual garbage, deceptive messaging and mind-exploiting advertising in front of your eyes. They don't care about truth or integrity, they only value money. Nothing is too low for them. There already are millions of little maximizers everywhere, I'm just surprised there has been no backlash against them or their industry of spreading manipulative slosh onto every possible flat surface.
Yes, but FIFA's attempt to control every aspect of it was suffocating. I've never seen an event where stadiums had to change their name for an event. (Since the companies that paid for those naming rights hadn't paid FIFA)
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.
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.
Hours of bleeding-edge CV analysis sounds pretty expensive for a triple-A game streamed to 500 pairs of eyeballs. They’ll be using the pen & paper approach, too.
Not at scale - a thousand games automatically scored: easy, just feed in the new video files. A thousand workers for individual matches across the country and different channels: absolutely not.
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.
Broadcasters also keep logs of their broadcasts for verification purposes. The traffic systems that inject the ads have parameters for how often and what times certain ads are played which are quite deterministic.
I worked for a company in 2020 that did ad analysis with computer vision - specifically in sports, quantifying value for sponsors based on exposure on team socials (accounting for logo size, positioning, etc in photos + videos) - I was a humble annotator https://www.blinkfire.com
Since people have bought air time on a broadcast, people have done this very thing to ensure their ad ran. They also notice other analytics like what other ads ran around it and what the content of the program was when it ran. Can't run an ad selling a new car when the scene just before the break was a brutal car wreck or something.
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.
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.
True, in-store planogram compliance and floor-plan compliance have got in focus again. It never lost the focus to be honest, just that now there is an expectation to do it while ensuring nothing fall through the cracks.
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.
Interesting on the privacy angle. I’m not sure anyone is really caring about that; there are lots of companies offering automated compliance services. I’m not super close to that industry but close enough that I’ve heard the pitches, and even the “no expectation of privacy in public” CYA has never come up.
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.
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.
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
Automated ad-monitoring tools existed for decades for TV and Radio using even older DSP techniques and imperceptible audio/visual watermarks.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
“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 yes now that I think about it, I remember the nuns in my neighbourhood, between feeding the poor and preaching love and inclusion, would hand out casino memberships and bet coupons to the local youths.
I've been wondering about building counter ad technology. I think we recall their being some patents I saw sometime in the last handful of years that talked about swapping items out in a live show during reruns. But like why couldn't we just do that on our side and removing the items I assume we just pipe the HDMI in run some algorithms and then pipe it out. And I know I'm saying it as if it's trivial but if someone can write an algorithm to find existing things and swap them out it's the exact same thing except you just swap them out with a patch of the original scene for the original scene without whatever product placement I suppose.
Also just the title of this post reminds me of ready player one (I just watched again recently), we can fill 80% of their field of view with ads before inducing seizures (I forget exact quote but it's close enough)
I haven’t gotten to the “replace” bit yet, but I’m automatically muting live ads and auto skipping through recorded ones: https://github.com/michigandrew/the-clicker. Love your idea
As a socialist I think advertising is one of the few good parts of capitalism. Not because it's useful for society or sometimes produces artistic value, but because it adds a sort of chaos and texture. It's a lot like graffiti in the streets.
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.
- 9 ads per minute
- approx. 1 logo per each 6,7 seconds
How can it be that little? Showing any one player would get you more than 1 advert on screen the whole time.
tangent: when you read "6,7", what do you say for ","?
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.
Good one!
I read it as "6-point-7" in English, I just used our local version-of-writing with the comma :)
And it seems the "hydration break" has been adopted by La Liga.
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.
Yep. US World Cup ruined it for the rest of us :(
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?
Football fans have shown they're quite eager to tell Infantino where to stick his revenue sharing.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
ITV also requires the TV license so those also aren't free.
Huh, I thought it was just the BBC. But then again I haven't had terrestrial TV for nearly 2 decades. TIL.
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.
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.
Average play time is around 55 minutes in La Liga, so there’s around 35 minutes of wasted time anyway.
and the Italian league.
honestly I think it's not a bad move - as it allows for tactical flexibility.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The genie is out of the bottle. All football leagues will have it sooner or later. Then there's one additional break. Then another....
I think people simply ignore the banners and logos all around so its not that much of a problem
They clearly don't, otherwise it wouldn't generate so much advertising revenue.
That assumes advertisers are correctly measuring the impact of their ads. They could just be wrong.
If you invest millions, you make sure that being wrong is a very tiny probability.
And as a provider of advertisement surfaces you have every incentive to oversell the reach of your surfaces.
That doesn't match the behavior I've observed from large corporations.
VC firms batting at such a small rate.
"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."
I would be astonished to find a business wasting only half of its advertising spend.
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!
The irony is that these "flops" are still making these brands live rent free in your head.
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.
Pharmaceuticals is an extremely specific example here. Anyone can buy a Coke.
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.
Right, you won't buy a GHTESKJVFII even if it happens to be the best product
Half the products on Amazon have names like that.
And you’re mostly only seeing them because they’re paying Amazon to be promoted in listings.
One of them could actually be the best product, and you wouldn't even know.
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.
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.
This is an entire industry. It's profitable. It works. The ad based economy exists because they do truly measure which ads work and know exactly how much money it makes them.
"They" being the companies that sell advertisements and the marketing departments whose budgets are contingent on the fiction that advertisements create value, yes.
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.”
You think they advertise more because it's not profitable?
They need to up the ads because their competition is also advertising at their previous level.
And homeopathy works because people pay for it.
Homeopathy works as a business because of marketing :)
I doubt it is brand recognition and more an abstract kind of marketing you mean. Esoteric word of mouth.
Meta/Snap should make AR-glasses that block out ads.
If only they were not glorified ad companies themselves...
Well, they can block their competitors ads...
And replace them with their own?
The NHL does it. Watch a televised hockey game, and the ads that the venue has sold on the dasher boards are electronically replaced by ads that the broadcaster has sold. Sometimes when there's a different camera angle you briefly see the ads that are really there.
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
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.
The gambling ads aren't for you, they're to make the gambling addicts fall off the wagon
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.
Quick, name three tyre brands. No, not those ones - ones for which you've never seen an ad
That's missing the point, or supporting it. That is brand recognition/knowledge and not a factor in decision making. Knowing three tire brands doesn't tell you if i would buy any of them because of their ads. Personally i never bought tires, mine just are whatever "Mercedes Original" branded ones the car comes with. If i had the need to buy new ones i would get some recommendations. I would not go "I'll buy X because i saw the name a few times". It's hard to think of any buying decisions i make where ads could matter. When i buy a phone i decide based on features with the highest priority being that it runs GrapheneOS. When i go shopping for clothes i don't look at the brands at all, and i avoid any pieces with visible branding on it. I can't think of a point in my live where i picked some product because i saw it or the brand in an ad. The subconscious part is so hard to measure and disprove but it is just as hard to prove it works as advertised. Ads might make you remember a name, but i am questioning how much that affects my buying decisions, especially when it makes me trust the brand less when they have to fill every ad slot for people to even talk about them.
fwiw, while I can mention firestone, bf goodrich, more michelin, what I actually did on my last tires is drive to the tire shop and go whatever les schwab sells in-house. Promotion and distribution need not be confined to the internet. I saw the tire shop while driving, so I guess you could point out they have a business sign.
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.
The worst part is, the value they get (monies) is not the same value you get (worse health all over).
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.
People don't ignore anything. Everything is absorbed one way or another.
For many this was their first opportunity to invest in binary event contracts, so this is a win for financial liferacy
*literacy?
this is funny on multiple levels.
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?
Hoardings is UK English (so... English) for the advertising boards around a football pitch
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.
NBA and MLB both have ads on the jersey (Nike and an additional per-team sponsor)
But they are being paid, they're paid a tremendous amount of money, and advertisements are where the money comes from.
I understand they're being paid to wear their sponsors logo. I am not.
Yep. Every logo that is sewn onto my clothes, I remove with a razorblade before I wear them.
Hah! Someone else who does that!
(Or at least I did, for a couple decades...)
For sports shirts the advertising is literally part of the shirt design, if you remove all adverts with a razorblade now you'd wasted a lot of money on a shirt with huge holes in it.
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.
That's pretty extreme. I just buy stuff that is very minimalist with the logo. A small "swoosh" doesn't really bother me.
I reached a certain point and decided that a plain single color or striped cotton tshirt from kohls looks and feels as good as any plain single color cotton shirt that might have a swoosh on it. Bonus the no logo version is usually cheaper as well.
Is it actually extreme or is the overton window just beyond messed up?
Eh... gigantic logos on clothing have existed since the 70's. I do agree it's gotten WAY more prevalent from the 90's onward.
He’s referring to jerseys sold to fans, not those worn by the athletes.
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...
The same goes for international matches, no ads on jerseys.
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.
The best example is Jordan's 1992 Olympic cover-up
https://boardroom.tv/michael-jordan-olympic-jacket-nike-reeb...
Pink boots is because of the strong contrast against the green grass, no?
Watched Brighton beat Arsenal on the TV over the weekend and had no idea they had the sponsor’s name on their Jersey at all!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/live/c65ym9ml19d0t
What? Lakers are literally sponsored by Wish.
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.
Why did you act like you did know in your original comment then?
I didn't
This is what you said word for word.
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.
NBA has had ads on jerseys since the 2017 season.
MLB since 2023.
All of those sports have about 2 hours of advertising breaks during the game. Football has one, at half time, and that also includes some analysis.
As someone who didn't grow up in NA, i don't understand this attitude. At least in soccer (football), we don't have to sit and watch ads and waste our time (barring the NA world cup). I know a league game will take ~2 hours to complete with a 15 minute half time break. I can allocate that time and then move on with my life. I much rather have that than having to sit through ads that end up taking more time than actual playtime! NBA used to have a thing called TV timeouts. But hey you don't get ads on the jersey
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)?
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.
also in the thread about OONI censorship measuring program people said they don't need a study to know China censors the internet
Marketing, the great value siphon. Marketing adds NOTHING of value of the world.
Product discoverability has some value, but marketing is largely a zero sum game.
Marketing is the art of fucking with discoverability so that your shit gets discovered instead of what is relevant.
You are familiar with Nike and Adidas. I want to start a shoe brand that makes shoes that would coincidentally be perfectly suited for your needs (whatever sport, activity, etc you enjoy). How do I get you to notice them?
You make it relevant instead of merely making it present.
Why do you think I am familiar with Nike and Adidas? Why would someone look to buy them instead of looking objectively at whats available?
You're competing against the very thing you're arguing for.
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.
What you are talking about is marketing and advertising. You’re not solving anything.
Hedonistic treadmill says there is little to no value in product discoverability. Marketing is usually creating a new feeling of need, not servicing an authentic existing one.
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.
The sport, or the franchise?
Would less football be a bad thing? It's the only sport I know where the governing body have to advise the police on how to deal with fan violence, such as "please don't use tear gas on them"
And that’s bad because… I’m really asking. What’s the good thing about having millionaires running around a field passing a ball to each other, while billionaires are raking in even more cash by manipulating you with adverts? Not to mention all the other issues with the industry (John Oliver has multiple episodes on FIFA).
If the sport wouldn’t be as popular without marketing, maybe it isn’t that interesting to being with.
I mean, you're not really, considering everything that follows that statement.
The money in sports allows for people to focus on it and perform at the highest levels possible and compete against others who also have this same focus. Advertising is what allows for this to happen.
People, in general, enjoy seeing athletes do things that most normal people could not achieve. Watching the Tour de France, reading about ultramarathons, etc is enjoyable. The same thing is true with musicians, actors, artists, etc. I may not be interested in, say, eight string guitars, but I will still find it fascinating to see someone who has mastered the instrument.
The fact that these athletes are paid so well is a good thing. They are getting a significant share of the revenue they generate, at least in American sports where the revenue is more or less split evenly with the teams. That was not the case decades ago.
I am. Everything that follows is merely the negatives I see to provide context as to why I’m asking. It’s there so you can understand my point of view and rebut it. If we don’t know each other’s views, we can’t convince each other.
And my point is that I don’t think the bad of the latter outweighs the good of the former.
That they are paid well, sure. That they are paid so well, I’m not convinced. Either way, the amount of money the industry moves (and how it is spent and acquired) is more problematic than the money individual athletes get.
Erling Haaland gets half a million a week. His contract is worth £260m.
These guys take the money because it's on offer to them, and fair play to them.
But I don't think they'd decide not to play football and go off to do something else if he were to "only" get, say £5.2m over 10 years instead (£10,500 per week).
wouldn't have as much funding, sure, but football was massively popular long before they started putting logos on shirts & hoardings.
If there was less money involved in football, then the likes of the free-to-air stations would be in a better position to compete to show more matches, too
Marketing is the interplay of product, promotion, price, and distribution. It is not simply promotion/advertising. Shitty ads exist and are a poor facet of marketing, not the whole of it.
If I want a humane mousetrap, the product must exist and I have to know about it, be able to afford it, and be able to acquire it. Me getting a humane mousetrap add value to my world, and the mouse's. And the seller of the trap. And all the interconnected economies that give others jobs and money to the trap is marketable.
They're not just talking about shitty ads, the entirety of the ad industry has infested our world so much that every ad is by definition a shitty one.
The problem with the steelman argument for marketing is that the scenarios people end up defending can be likened to a medieval shop owner putting a sign in fron of their establishment or a customer browsing a shopping aisle of items with packaging that perfectly represents the function of each item. But that argument must inevitably hit reality, where the industry spiraled into insanity and utter corruption of everything it touches. Lies, abuse, manipulation, FOMO, misrepresentation, scams. These are the primary values of that industry today. Maybe it was sane once upon a time, but that was centuries ago. Now they're unstoppable.
We do not need to endure modern marketing to have product discovery. Imagine if we had a universal service that acted as containment for advertising, where anyone could list their good or service, provide a standardized and fairly objective summary of what makes it good (no mind trickery) and post it to be displayed alonside everyone else's, without even favoring the richest with the most ads or the biggest ads. Then you could find as many mousetraps as you could ever need, while the rest of the world would be spared from the concentrated stream of garbage in the form of advertising that it's currently being firehosed with.
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.
It's not only the World Cup, it's everything, everywhere, all the time. We are drowning in marketing messages. It's gross.
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.
Replace all ads with beautiful classic paintings, get closer to see info about (title, artist, year)...
There's something to it
When I first saw Google Glass this was my exact idea for the perfect use case. It's a shame that the advertising-fueled, spyware creeper reality of the tech makes that dream seem ever distant.
I have no faith in humanity, especially those involved in tech, to make this. If they did, they'd block real life marketing only so it could be used to replace with ads bought directly with the AR maker.
If we had good AR hardware, I bet this would eventually get made, just not by big tech. It would be a third-party, probably open source mod that uses the optics of a corporate device to run their own software. It would be unwieldy, expensive and janky, but so worth it. I wonder if the advertising industry would try to get it outlawed if this happens.
Isn't that the Brave and adblocker model?
Instead of blocking the ads you could even replace them with satirical slogans that mock those ads like "BUY", "CONSUME", "CONFORM" etc.
At least soccer has continuous play. Watching American football is unbearable.
And then the US advertisers came up with "hydration breaks".
How long do you think it’s going to take until another broadcaster starts adding ads during injury time, or maybe other 3-5 second ads between shots?
I'm shocked they don't just scale the picture down to do side by side style commercials at the same time regardless of what was occurring during play. They do this in auto racing events. There's no need to wait for specific times and can keep with their regularly spacing of breaks.
And then the Swiss FIFA accepted the "hydration breaks".
Swiss- / European-style capitalism has ruined football.
FIFA has little to do with “Swiss” or “European” style capitalism and more to do with Gianni Infantino & friends’ style.
So what do "US advertisers" have to do with the "US" instead of the CEOs of those companies and their friends?
Europeans sure don't like to use their own rhetoric against themselves. European-style arguments are sure disingenuous.
At least US pro leagues (other than MLS and racing) haven’t yet gone all in on desecrating the team uniform with ads. I can’t bring myself to buy a team jersey that’s 75% an ad for an unrelated corporation that I don’t want to support.
Watching adults roll around on the ground like they just had a limb ripped from their body because someone came within two feet of them is unbearable. It's the most embarrassing thing in sports, but at least the clock keeps going, I guess.
I'm not saying there's not instances of shithousery, but if you've never had a cleat scrape down the back of your calf or have a cleat stomp on the top of your foot, that shit hurts man. Yeah, it goes away, but the immediate pain is intense and is completely justifiable to to clutch at it. However, that can absolutely be done without theatrics
The 1% of times that's actually the case.
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.
My solution: if play has to stop because you're rolling around, you are clearly injured and must be substituted. This would fix a lot of the fakery I imagine.
Again, sounds like someone that has not actually played. There are times where you just need a damn minute. The rule saying that if you require having someone come look at you on the field means you must spend at least one minute on the touchline before being allowed back on is fine. The ref accounts for that time of stopped play to extend play in what is known as stoppage time. There are plenty of times where the player is not actually looking to stop the play, and the ref doesn't stop play. There's other times where you actually need the magic spray. Of course, there are times where your team just needs a break in play to regroup.
OK sure. Watch a WorldTour cycling race where a rider takes a horrific crash, then hops right back on a spare bike to catch up with the peloton. It really shows the difference between tough athletes and prima donnas.
This would be easily fixable with a video referee and enforced penalties for faking injuries.
I'm the opposite - maybe because I grew up watching "soccer", I find American football much more exotic and insteresting. Lately I'm discovering the nuances of baseball, what a game!
I like American football enough to watch it, but not enough to watch it live, which which kind of gets rid of the ads.
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.
The paperclip maximizer was some other dimension, we got the advertising maximizer.
Millions of people go about their lives every day devising complex schemes to put as much visual garbage, deceptive messaging and mind-exploiting advertising in front of your eyes. They don't care about truth or integrity, they only value money. Nothing is too low for them. There already are millions of little maximizers everywhere, I'm just surprised there has been no backlash against them or their industry of spreading manipulative slosh onto every possible flat surface.
Yes, but FIFA's attempt to control every aspect of it was suffocating. I've never seen an event where stadiums had to change their name for an event. (Since the companies that paid for those naming rights hadn't paid FIFA)
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
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.
I'm sure this was already easily doable for years by using plain and boring computer vision
You probably don't even need vision. The audio on adverts is noticeably different.
There's no audio on the adverts in question.
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.
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.
For the World Cup, this was always easy.
It was not easy for your local triple A baseball game being streamed to 500 viewers. This approach scales down.
Hours of bleeding-edge CV analysis sounds pretty expensive for a triple-A game streamed to 500 pairs of eyeballs. They’ll be using the pen & paper approach, too.
Not at scale - a thousand games automatically scored: easy, just feed in the new video files. A thousand workers for individual matches across the country and different channels: absolutely not.
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.
If attention is all you have, humans are pretty bad at it for long boring tasks.
Broadcasters also keep logs of their broadcasts for verification purposes. The traffic systems that inject the ads have parameters for how often and what times certain ads are played which are quite deterministic.
I worked for a company in 2020 that did ad analysis with computer vision - specifically in sports, quantifying value for sponsors based on exposure on team socials (accounting for logo size, positioning, etc in photos + videos) - I was a humble annotator https://www.blinkfire.com
Since people have bought air time on a broadcast, people have done this very thing to ensure their ad ran. They also notice other analytics like what other ads ran around it and what the content of the program was when it ran. Can't run an ad selling a new car when the scene just before the break was a brutal car wreck or something.
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.
I remember google bought a company that recorded local FM broadcasts around the country to independently verify ad plays.
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"
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.
True, in-store planogram compliance and floor-plan compliance have got in focus again. It never lost the focus to be honest, just that now there is an expectation to do it while ensuring nothing fall through the cracks.
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.
Interesting on the privacy angle. I’m not sure anyone is really caring about that; there are lots of companies offering automated compliance services. I’m not super close to that industry but close enough that I’ve heard the pitches, and even the “no expectation of privacy in public” CYA has never come up.
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.
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.
Automated ad-monitoring tools existed for decades for TV and Radio using even older DSP techniques and imperceptible audio/visual watermarks.
TIL that Fifa made a movie that had the worst US box office of an movie ever, taking $918 in its opening weekend.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
this doesnt give the audience enough credit.
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
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.
They didn't "have" players "take the knee", they just didn't stop them. It's called freedom.
Freedom as long as it’s a cause officially sanctioned by the league.
Which cause did players want to support but were forbidden from?
Probably Palestine related issues. Can they even talk about that stuff there without getting arrested?
Not FIFA specific but during early 2020s players were forbidden to support skipping the vaccine
How tragic
We don't know. It's likely they have less freedom than supporters.
https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6575747/2025/08/26/premier-...
I couldn't find any of this on the Premier League website - it's all done by proxy (the clubs).
Has the league sanctioned players taking a knee for other causes?
How are those things in anyway related? The morality around gambling is very debatable. The morality around racism is not.
They're pretending to care about social problems while causing and encouraging social problems.
The morality around "racism" however is.
Ah yes now that I think about it, I remember the nuns in my neighbourhood, between feeding the poor and preaching love and inclusion, would hand out casino memberships and bet coupons to the local youths.
which brand is non harmful?
I've been wondering about building counter ad technology. I think we recall their being some patents I saw sometime in the last handful of years that talked about swapping items out in a live show during reruns. But like why couldn't we just do that on our side and removing the items I assume we just pipe the HDMI in run some algorithms and then pipe it out. And I know I'm saying it as if it's trivial but if someone can write an algorithm to find existing things and swap them out it's the exact same thing except you just swap them out with a patch of the original scene for the original scene without whatever product placement I suppose.
Also just the title of this post reminds me of ready player one (I just watched again recently), we can fill 80% of their field of view with ads before inducing seizures (I forget exact quote but it's close enough)
Ah... Old school culture jamming :-)
See also, billboard hacking and Adbusters.
I haven’t gotten to the “replace” bit yet, but I’m automatically muting live ads and auto skipping through recorded ones: https://github.com/michigandrew/the-clicker. Love your idea
This isn’t awesome generally but I don’t understand how this study is novel in the slightest?
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.
At least it's not like the NFL, christ the constant interruptions to the broadcast are way worse than a spot on a jersey or on a barrier
Don't worry, "hydration breaks" will catch up to NFL levels in no time.
As a socialist I think advertising is one of the few good parts of capitalism. Not because it's useful for society or sometimes produces artistic value, but because it adds a sort of chaos and texture. It's a lot like graffiti in the streets.
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.
One thing I don't understand is why people buy football jerseys with ads on them.
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.