Exploiting the Beautiful Game: Carlsberg’s New UEFA Sponsorship

Carlsberg is once again exploiting football’s massive reach, emotional power, and popularity among youth to promote alcohol use, this time through a major new sponsorship deal with UEFA. The agreement includes high-profile tournaments like UEFA EURO 2028, the UEFA Nations League Finals, and the UEFA Women’s EURO 2029, giving Carlsberg direct access to millions of viewers across Europe and beyond.

Let’s be clear: this isn’t about “celebrating football” or “uniting fans”. This is about using one of the world’s most popular sports to normalize alcohol consumption, especially among young people. By associating alcohol with elite athletes, national pride, and community celebration, Carlsberg is pushing a harmful product under the glossy cover of entertainment.

The deal extends to both men’s and women’s European qualifiers and even UEFA Futsal competitions – part of a long-term strategy to insert the Carlsberg brand wherever football goes. It’s the latest example of Big Alcohol turning major sporting events into platforms for mass alcohol marketing, regardless of the health consequences.

Carlsberg’s claim that this sponsorship “celebrates the shared values of football and beer” is a textbook alcohol industry tactic – twisting the social appeal of football to normalize alcohol use while masking the reality of alcohol harm. This is not an isolated incident. From AB InBev’s massive Olympic campaigns to Heineken’s Champions League dominance, the alcohol industry has aggressively pursued sports sponsorships across the globe. It’s a deliberate and coordinated strategy to maintain social acceptability, increase consumption, and derail public health progress.

Promotion, or any marketing strategies, is Big Alcohol’s activity to drive alcohol availability and acceptability, to perpetuate the alcohol norm, and to place alcohol at the center of people’s thoughts and preferences, communities’ practices, and societies’ customs. The focus of this DUBIOUS FIVE strategy is the people and their beliefs about alcohol products, the public and their attitudes about and behavior around alcohol products, and the consumers and how much, how often they buy and consume alcohol brands.

Source:
https://www.thedrinksbusiness.com/2025/03/carlsberg-signs-major-uefa-sponsorship-deal/

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