By Kachi Okezie, Esq.
As the 2026 FIFA World Cup builds momentum, so does a global campaign with a seductive slogan and a simple target. #KickBigSodaOut wants Coca-Cola out of football by 2030, arguing that sugary drinks have no place pitch-side at the world’s biggest celebration of physical excellence.
With 539,000 supporters, nearly 100 health organisations, and voices like Clive Tyldesley OBE now questioning the perimeter billboards he once ignored, the movement has moral force. Anna, the young activist from York who grew up loving England matches in her local clubhouse, puts the emotional case plainly: young fans are being targeted during the moments they love most, and football should fuel our futures, not undermine them. On its face, the contradiction is hard to ignore. Sport inspires. Soda doesn’t. So why let the two share a stage?
Yet the campaign’s certainty conceals a deeper question we are reluctant to ask: who actually decides what a child drinks? The answer, unfashionable as it sounds, is still the parent. English law, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, and centuries of common-law precedent all locate the primary responsibility for a child’s upbringing and development in the home, not in the marketing department of a global brand. The UNCRC states plainly: “Parents or, as the case may be, legal guardians, have the primary responsibility for the upbringing and development of the child” and “The parent(s) or others responsible for the child have the primary responsibility to secure… the conditions of living necessary for the child’s development”. Note that well. Sponsorship does not bypass parents. A logo cannot open a fridge. A billboard does not override a parent’s firm “no” at the checkout.
Coca-Cola, like every other legal product, is offered universally. It is not consumed universally. Between offer and consumption sits the decisive act of parenting: budgeting, buying, permitting, denying, explaining and modelling. If we pretend advertising renders that act powerless, then we infantilise adults and outsource discipline to corporations. That is a cultural trade-off we must not make.
This is where ESG enters, and complicates, the story. Environmental, Social, and Governance criteria have moved from investor footnotes to boardroom imperatives in under a decade. For FIFA, “S” means safeguarding and human rights; for Coca-Cola, it means sugar reduction targets, water stewardship, and community sport funding. ESG is the reason these campaigns have teeth. Investors now screen for reputational risk, and nothing looks riskier than a global brand accused of fueling childhood obesity. So #KickBigSodaOut is not just activism. It is market pressure wearing a health halo. Bite Back and its partners understand this. They are using ESG language because it works. Threaten the sponsor’s ESG score, and you threaten its cost of capital. That is why FIFA is listening in 2026 in a way it never did in 1990.
But ESG is a double-edged sword. It can drive accountability, yet it can also become a substitute for it. When we frame the problem as “brands versus kids,” we quietly demote parents from primary actors to passive victims of billboards. That narrative is politically useful and psychologically comforting. It locates blame in distant boardrooms rather than in kitchens, supermarket checkouts and corner shops. The data, however, are less compliant.
Government’s official statistics show UK teen consumption of sugary drinks fell 28% since 2009. This is despite uninterrupted World Cup sponsorship, by the way. From 1998 to 2017, daily sugar-sweetened beverage consumption among Welsh 11–16 year olds decreased from 57% to 18%. The Soft Drinks Industry Levy cut average sugar content of soft drinks by 46% and 47.4% on a sales-weighted basis without removing a single logo from a stadium. Meanwhile, despite having some of the world’s toughest advertising curbs, Norway still battles rising childhood obesity. More than 20% of school-aged children in Norway are overweight or living with obesity. Further, “across the WHO European Region, 1 in 4 children aged 7–9 years is living with overweight or obesity, while in Norway more than 1 in 5 children are affected”.
The line from pitch-side ad to public health is not as straight as the campaign suggests. Correlation is not the same as causation, and ESG pressure is not pedagogy. It’s more complex and nuanced. Weak or permissive parenting also has its consequences.
There is a harder truth underneath the hashtag. If FIFA drops Coca-Cola tomorrow but parents keep buying two-litre bottles for the family shop, children’s diets do not change. If we teach kids that bad choices are the fault of perimeter advertising, we train them to outsource self-control to regulators and ESG committees. That is the opposite of development. Discipline, delayed gratification, and critical thinking are not ingredients in a can, and they cannot be legislated into sponsorship contracts. They are taught at home, daily, by adults who say “water tonight” and mean it. No brand can match the authority of a parent who models limits, cooks meals, and treats ads as background noise rather than commands.
None of this lets manufacturers off the hook. Companies should market honestly, comply with relevant rules and regulations, stop targeting under-16s directly, and publish real health data. FIFA should weigh its commercial deals against the optics of promoting excess sugar to a generation already struggling with weight and diabetes. ESG demands that conversation, and it is a conversation worth having.
But “should” for corporations cannot replace “must” for parents. The primary firewall between a child and harm is not a sponsorship policy. It is a parent who decides what crosses the threshold of permission in the home.
So by all means, scrutinise Big Soda. Use ESG to force transparency. Ask Clive why it took Anna to make him notice the billboards. But do not pretend that removing a logo is the same as raising a child. Football is for the fans, and fans are raised in families, not by brands. If we want the World Cup to fuel futures, we must start where futures are actually fuelled: at the dinner table, in the shopping aisle, in the small, untelevised moments where a parent chooses long-term health over short-term ease.
This is because it’s better that we strengthen discipline in living rooms than chase it from stadiums. Because it is better that 1000 sponsors get dropped than one parent forgets the job was theirs first. That is neither nostalgia nor wishful thinking. It is the law. And it is still the most effective public health policy we have.
