How Big Alcohol Is Using the 2026 World Cup to Push Young People Back to Alcohol

Big Alcohol corporations are turning the 2026 FIFA World Cup into the largest alcohol marketing operation in the history of sport. For instance, Diageo, AB InBev and Ambev are using the tournament as their main lever to push back against a structural decline in alcohol use – and their first quarterly results of 2026 suggest the strategy may already be working.

How Big Booze Attempts to Claw Back GenZ

Generation Z is using less alcohol than previous generations in many countries, with US per capita consumption now at its lowest level since 1995. The trend began in the early 2000s and has continued for two decades.

Faced with this structural reality, the world’s largest alcohol corporations are responding with the most aggressive marketing offensive in years.

The 2026 FIFA World Cup is its centrepiece.

Diageo sales decline but World Cup Offsets the Slump

Diageo’s most recent quarterly trading update reported a 9.4% sales decline in North America – the market that delivers around half of alcohol giant’s profits – with spirits volumes down 15.4%. Group sales would have fallen sharply if not for distributors in Latin America stocking up on alcohol ahead of the World Cup, an inventory build-up the company itself credited for offsetting the US slump. Sales in Latin America grew 16.2%, with Diageo’s CFO telling investors the boost came in particular from distributors ordering ahead of the tournament.

Diageo’s new CEO has signalled a strategic retreat from the “premiumisation” model the company pursued for over a decade – a way to defend profits in the face of declining alcohol use by pushing higher-priced products. The new direction is lower prices, alcopops and mass-market formats.

The pivot is an admission that the premiumisation strategy has hit its limits as alcohol use among younger people continues to fall.

Big Alcohol Exposed has previously documented how Diageo’s 2025 deal to become the Official Spirits Supporter of the FIFA World Cup 2026 across North, Central and South America was a calculated attempt to embed alcohol deeper into the global sports experience – the first time the company has partnered with the tournament.

The deal puts Casamigos, Don Julio, Buchanan’s, Johnnie Walker and Smirnoff in front of the billions of football fans (including children and youth) who follow the tournament worldwide, with on-the-ground marketing campaigns across more than 20 countries in the Americas. Even before the World Cup has started, the strategy is already paying off in Diageo’s quarterly numbers.

The liquor giant describes the marketing push publicly as a “celebration” framed around “responsible drinking.” Investors are being told a different story: the World Cup is the engine that justifies short-term inventory build-ups and offsets weakness in Diageo’s largest market.

Ambev and AB InBev: Carnival First, World Cup Next

The same pattern is unfolding even more aggressively at AB InBev. Its Brazilian subsidiary Ambev had a difficult 2025, with consolidated sales down 3.3% and beer volumes falling. The company’s response was to intensify marketing around Brazil’s two largest events – Carnival in February and the World Cup in mid-2026.

Q1 2026 results suggest the strategy is delivering: Brazil beer volumes grew 1.2%, which Ambev described as an all-time first-quarter high, and the share price jumped 15.3% – the largest single-day rise since 1999.

Ambev’s CFO told analysts that marketing spend follows the company’s “mega platform events calendar,” which in 2026 is centred on the FIFA World Cup. Ambev has already built five branded arenas across Brazilian cities to host public screenings of matches alongside live music and brand promotion. The arenas will draw more than 600,000 in-person visitors, with national broadcast and media coverage carrying Ambev’s brand to a much wider audience. The company chose to build its own arenas rather than join FIFA’s official Fan Fest model, citing the freedom to control branding more tightly.

The beer giant is also pushing alcohol through its Zé Delivery 15-minute alcohol delivery service, which in 2025 reached 67 million orders and R$4.7 billion in sales.

Globally, Ambev’s parent AB InBev is running the largest alcohol marketing operation in sporting history, valued at $7.2 billion, with an estimated $250 million per year going to sports sponsorships alone. CEO Michel Doukeris has stated the strategy plainly: beer and sports are “better together”.

AB InBev has been FIFA’s beer sponsor for nearly four decades, and is simultaneously recruiting elite athletes as Corona Cero ambassadors for the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics – attaching alcohol to every major sporting event on the planet.

A GLOBAL Alcohol Marketing Push

The push spans the hemisphere.

In Colombia, alcohol industry analysts are projecting beer consumption will grow by 35%, whiskey by around 12% and aguardiente by about 9% during the tournament – numbers cited approvingly by industry actors and bar associations as opportunities to “cash in”, no matter the consquences for people’s health and safety.
In Mexico, Grupo Modelo has unveiled plans to place its flagship brands across stadiums, fan zones, corner stores and restaurants in Mexico City, Guadalajara and Monterrey. Two months ago, the same company turned Mexico City’s main square into a beer advertisement for 400,000 people under the banner of a Corona centenary celebration – building the brand momentum it now intends to convert into World Cup sales.
Constellation Brands’ Modelo brand has launched its largest football marketing investment to date in the US, under the banner “Cerveza for Fútbol.”

Michelob ULTRA, AB InBev’s official beer sponsor of the tournament, has built its campaign around Lionel Messi and a redesigned Player of the Match trophy. Coors Light has launched a tournament campaign on the explicit premise that watching football and using beer go inevitably together. Every major alcohol corporation with exposure to the Americas is concentrating marketing firepower around a single six-week tournament.

The Moderation Myth Wrapped Around the Tournament

Almost every World Cup campaign is being framed as “responsible drinking” or “responsible consumption.” Diageo’s partnership announcement and FIFA’s joint statement repeat the language. AB InBev positions Corona Cero as proof of its commitment to moderation. Diageo describes its tournament partnership as built on responsible celebration.

The financial logic contradicts this framing.

Every recent World Cup has produced measurable spikes in alcohol sales. AB InBev’s sales rose by 140 million litres during the Brazil 2014 tournament, Budweiser revenue jumped 10.1% outside the US during the 2018 event, and the company posted a 9.9% volume increase during matches even at Qatar 2022 despite the host country’s limitations on alcohol sales.

This is what the marketing budgets are built to repeat.

The same contradiction shows up in what Big Alcohol is actually selling. The responsibility rhetoric is often built around no-alcohol products – Corona Cero at the Olympics, Heineken 0.0 across global sport. Yet zero-alcohol beer still holds only around 2% of the global beer market. The remaining 98% – the alcoholic beer that drives revenue, profit and harm – is what the World Cup marketing is built to sell.

The Public Health Cost of a Manufactured Demand Surge

Research on alcohol marketing in sport is consistent. Repeated exposure to alcohol marketing through sport increases alcohol use among children and young people, normalises alcohol within social and family settings, and creates positive associations with alcohol that operate below conscious awareness.

The 2018 FIFA World Cup alone delivered 3.3 billion alcohol brand impressions just in the United Kingdom – including an estimated 385 million impressions to children. Past World Cup tournaments have also been linked with measurable increases in domestic violence in participating countries.

The 2026 tournament will run across 16 cities and 104 matches, drawing an expected 6.5 million in-stadium spectators and global broadcast audiences in the billions, including children and youth.

Mexican civil society has already proposed limitations on alcohol advertising in stadiums and broadcast spaces, and similar legislative efforts are under discussion in Brazil. Without action, the Americas are set to be saturated with one of the most concentrated alcohol marketing pushes ever deployed because Big Alcohol badly needs to claw back GenZ.

The structural lesson is the one the industry’s own financial reporting reveals: when alcohol use declines, the dominant alcohol corporations do not contract or accept a smaller, healthier market. They concentrate marketing firepower around the single largest cultural event available and try to push more people to use more alcohol. The 2026 Football World Cup is what that strategy looks like at full scale.