The 2026 FIFA World Cup: are we gambling with the nation’s health?

The FIFA Men’s World Cup is one of the most watched sporting events in the world. For a few weeks every four years, people meet in living rooms, pubs, and across communities to watch the best footballers in the world compete. Even as someone who doesn’t follow much men’s football, I’ve caught myself whistling ‘Football’s coming home’ more than I’d like to admit. But the World Cup doesn’t just increase national excitement, it also increases gambling. 

I hadn’t really clocked it until recently but during major sporting tournaments, gambling adverts seem to be everywhere. They pop up on podcasts, streaming platforms, social media and TV. Once you notice them, they’re hard to ignore.

It got me thinking – what does an event like the World Cup means for people’s health?

For many people, gambling is occasional and under control. But for some, it can cause significant harm, including financial stress, debt, relationship breakdown, mental health problems and has been linked to suicide. In Great Britain, 2.7 per cent of people are estimated to experience ‘problem gambling’, where a person is experiencing gambling-related harms and/or a lack of control over their gambling behaviour, with a further 8–12 per cent at risk.

For behaviours that can be addictive, like gambling, the environments we are in often shape our behaviour. Exposure to gambling advertising is one factor associated with increased gambling participation and harm. That means major sporting events can create conditions where people are at greater risk.

The UK already has a large gambling market, worth around £16.8 billion. Nearly half of adults report gambling in the previous four weeks (28 per cent, excluding lottery players), and 63 per cent of people report seeing more gambling advertising across TV, online platforms and social media in recent years. Sport is a key channel for that exposure. In the Premier League for example, fans are exposed to massive numbers of gambling ads. In the opening weekend of the 2025/26 season, more than 27,000 gambling messages were shown, with the number reaching 5,000 adverts during one match alone.

The scale of the World Cup amplifies this. In 2022, an estimated five billion people worldwide engaged with the World Cup and $35 billion was spent on bets.

Importantly, these events do not only affect existing gamblers. They can also act as a gateway. One survey of 811 people showed that 101 had not bet on football in the year before the 2022 FIFA Men’s World Cup. However, 11–12 weeks after the World Cup ended, a third of these non-gamblers had placed a sports bet. Alongside this, the number of people contacting a national gambling helpline increased by 11 per cent over the same period.

Young people appear to be particularly vulnerable. Between 33 per cent and 50 per cent report having seen gambling adverts in the past week, while 30 per cent of 11–17-year-olds spent their own money on gambling in the past year. Among young adults, 83 per cent of 18–24-year-olds say major sporting events in 2026 will make them more likely to gamble, compared with 37 per cent of people aged over 55.

This raises the question: is current legislation around gambling advertising sufficient?

The UK has introduced measures such as the voluntary ‘whistle-to-whistle’ ban on gambling advertising during live sport, which restricts television gambling adverts from shortly before a match begins until shortly after it ends, alongside wider rules across media and sports. But in practice, the picture is more complex. Advertising now reaches people across social media, streaming platforms and in-app promotions, as well as on TV. Increasing cross-border and illegal advertising also make regulating advertising more challenging.

Major sporting events can bring people together and provide a sense of excitement and community. But from a health and care perspective, the World Cup also presents a time of intense exposure to potentially harmful environments and content. If we’re serious about prevention, we need to pay attention not only to the individual choices people make but also to the conditions that shape them.

But there are still important gaps in our knowledge about how we effectively prevent gambling-related harm. Organisations such as the Association of Directors of Public Health, parliamentary groups and charities have started to set out what stronger regulatory policy could look like, including measures such as a complete ban on gambling advertising and sponsorship, ending content marketing and influencer-led promotion, adding health warnings to all gambling adverts, or introducing a pre-watershed ban such as in countries like Australia, Germany and Ireland.

We also still need to build a clearer picture of what regulatory policy works, for whom, and in what context. This is why we are working with the Universities of Sheffield and Glasgow on UKRI-funded research which is bringing together policy perspectives, lived experience, and data to develop systems maps that show how potential gambling policies could affect different parts of the gambling system and influence outcomes. These can be used to inform the creation of policies that can offer meaningful protection to people at risk from gambling-related harms.

When it comes to addictive behaviours, gambling isn’t unique. From alcohol and tobacco to more recent debates about social media use among young people, each raise similar questions around how environments shape behaviour, what prevention should look like in practice, and who should be responsible for keeping people safe – the government, the health and care system, or individuals themselves.

The 2026 FIFA World Cup will be over soon, but it is a reminder that we still don’t know the answers to a lot of these questions, or what impact this year’s World Cup will have on people’s health, long after the final whistle.