Leveraging Football Loyalty: Heineken’s Dangerous Push for Alcohol Through Sports

Posted on October 23, 2024 in Heineken, Promotion, Africa, Asia-Pacific, Eastern Mediterranean, Europe, The Americas

Heineken, through its Tiger Beer brand, has partnered with Manchester United, using the club’s massive global fanbase to embed alcohol use into the culture of football. By associating their beer brands with one of the world’s most popular football teams, Heineken isn’t just gaining visibility — they are actively exploiting the passion and loyalty of fans to normalize alcohol in a setting where many young, impressionable audiences are watching.

This strategy is designed to ensure that alcohol consumption becomes an accepted and expected part of the football experience. Heineken is embedding their products into the fabric of the sport, encouraging alcohol consumption as a part of socializing, celebrating, and supporting football. This creates a dangerous association between sports success and alcohol, normalizing alcohol use.

With a large portion of Manchester United’s fanbase made up of young people, this kind of surrogate marketing will have long-term negative effects on how alcohol is perceived and used. Young fans, many of whom are not yet of legal age to use alcohol, are exposed to constant branding and alcohol-related messages through sponsorships like these, creating a harmful association between sports, social success, and alcohol.

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.

Sources:
1. Heineken’s Partnership with Manchester United – The Heineken Company
2. Heineken’s Strategy with Manchester United – The Straits Times
3. Heineken’s Partnership with Manchester United – Yahoo Finance

alcohol marketing in sports, Football, Sports, Youth, Youth Alcohol Use
Back to top