World Cup Is Gone. Beer’s Summer Blues Remain. Now What?
Long before the World Cup first kicked off earlier this summer, Wall Street analysts, industry insiders, and rank-and-file bar owners were already anxiously talking up the potential sales boost it might bring the beleaguered beer business. All those games, all those fans, all those “occasions”… it would have to add up to something, right? But what?
“On-site at the venues, whatever beer volume comes out of there is a gift, it’s a bonus, and whatever occasions people have off-premise, that’s a bonus as well,” said Dave Williams, the president at Bump Williams Consulting, speaking to Hop Take in advance of the World Cup in early June 2026. “So even with all of these concerns or challenges, I still think that this is a tidal wave of found occasions and reasons to celebrate.” It was the industry’s wave to surf, in other words.
Beer marketers had some fun along the way. “One of the most viral stories of the tournament so far is the sheer decimation of Boston’s beer reserves at the hands of Scotland’s fearsomely thirsty ‘Tartan Army,’” I wrote in mid-June. “It’s a funny story, at [Anheuser-Busch InBev’s] expense: ‘The Scottish fans just drank the place dry, and all they had [left] was Bud Light,’ one eyewitness told the local news.” Other brands, including White Claw and Heineken, tried their hand at fast-follow campaigns, with limited success; Boston Beer Company, whose comms team placed this story to begin with, partnered with JetBlue to “fly in” more Boston Lager. This gag sorta just underscored the point that a vanishingly small amount of the beer is actually brewed in Boston, but sure, fine, cute.
But enough with the marketing. What of the sales, man? Ah. The World Cup swell has come and gone, and the tournament’s tide has finally receded to the point we can get a sense for how it affected beer sales. The upshot is: not great, Bob!
Consider ABI. The company reportedly pumped $110 million into a (very boring) global campaign for Michelob Ultra, and likely gobs more across the breadth of its portfolio and around the world. The logic was straightforward for the longtime brewing partner of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association. “The FIFA World Cup is a once-every-four-years opportunity to build the long-term brand equity of our portfolio,” Michel Doukeris, the company’s chief executive, said on its most recent quarterly earnings call in late July.
But as Brewbound first noted, when an analyst on the call asked about the full-year volume lift ABI was projecting from this massive marketing effort, Doukeris put it at around 0.25%. Now, +25 basis points is nothing to scoff at, and the CEO argued that “the benefits of the activation and everything that we have done and seen from the World Cup will extend far beyond the year.” Maybe! But the beer industry is declining at a much faster rate — around 4.5 percent year-to-date, per the latest Beer Institute tax-paid figures — and ABI’s beer volume is, too, at least here in the United States. Its depletions and shipments for the second quarter of 2026, during which about half the World Cup unfolded, were down 1.9 percent and 0.6 percent, respectively. There may be knock-on benefits to… uh… whatever this was that will be more obvious in Q3, though scan data from multi-outlet grocery, mass retail, and convenience stores tracked by the market research firm Circana shows ABI’s American portfolio down 0.7 percent in dollars and 2.3 in volume for the four weeks through July 12, so maybe not. Either way, this is not shaping up to be a major boost for the country’s biggest macrobrewer.
Elsewhere in the industry, World Cup sales snapshots tell a similar story, if not worse. An analysis of category-level sales by Circana’s longtime beverage-alcohol scan-man Scott Scanlon put beer down 2.1 percent in dollars and 3.4 percent in volume year-over-year for the week through July 19 — the final day of the tournament. Those category declines outpaced the previous four weeks, 26 weeks, and year-to-date benchmarks, suggesting that the beer market may have gotten softer as the World Cup went on. “A bit concerned on [the] overall beer trend at just over the 2026 halfway point for the beer category,” Scanlon noted in a July 26 memo. Beer Marketer’s Insights elaborated in its signature unbylined pidgin last week, noting that a soft June performance “[s]uggests industry shed ~3.5 mil bbls vs yr ago thru the 1st half.” (That’s “3.5 million barrels versus a year ago through the first half of 2026,” for those of you who don’t read BMI-ese.) “Disappointing goin’ up against what was thought to be easier comps as industry slipped nearly [five percent] in the first half of 2025 vs 2024.”
Of course, scan data from Circana and its rival provider NIQ can only augur beer’s performance in the off-premise, and the World Cup was, for so many bargoers, an on-premise drinking occasion. The news was better for beer in those channels, according to sales data from BeerBoard, an on-premise analytics platform. Dollars and volume for draft were up 7.1 and 6.46 percent respectively across the firm’s network of on-premise accounts throughout the tournament. Package revenue was up even more for the period — 11.74 percent — but in a sign of the times, volume was up a little bit less at 5.52 percent. The discrepancy may be due to the fact that BeerBoard’s package data includes “beyond beer” products, which tend to command higher price points and deliver disproportionate revenue growth. On a week-by-week basis, sales surged at the very beginning of the tournament, and again as the U.S. men’s team was playing in the knockout round, then tapered off after both events. By the final week of the tournament, dollars and volume were both slightly down (-1 and -3 percent) compared to the same frames in 2025.
Of course, sales data never tell the whole story. It’s possible that the investments that brewers large and small made to align their brands with the World Cup will pay off down the road, like ABI’s Doukeris envisions for his portfolio. You could imagine, for example, craft breweries winning new repeat customers who first visited their taprooms during watch parties. The tournament might have brought drinkers back to sports bars for long enough to remember that they enjoy drinking draft beer, sending them on their way after the final whistle with vows to do it more often. Hell, if you really squint, you could even see Zoomers warming to the concept of beer specials during live sporting events — dare to dream. There’s a glass-half-full take here.
But the more realistic take, at least with the evidence we have in front of us, is that the World Cup has come and gone, and beer wasn’t really able to catch the wave. This is “tuff” — if you’ll indulge a bit more BMI-ese — because spirits products certainly were. Scanlon’s Circana scans show the category up 4.4 and 8.4 percent in dollars and volume year-over-year in the final week of the tournament, “with Cutwater, Surfside, Sun Cruiser contributing exceptional growth to the category offsetting traditional spirits (outside of Tito’s).” No kidding — Cutwater was up around 60 percent in both dollars and volume that final week. That’s what you’re supposed to do against easier comps!
The World Cup was never going to save the American beer industry, being a once-every-four-years event that won’t return to this continent for the foreseeable future. But it probably should have helped more brewers more than it did. Blame bad marketing, high gas prices, tough competition, or all of the above. But with time ticking off the clock on the second half of summer 2026, and the tournament already fading from the zeitgeist, the result is the same. The beer industry’s summer blues roll on.
🤯 Hop-ocalypse Now
Last decade, the explosion of craft beer in/around cities across the country made the segment an easy shorthand punchline for jokes about effete conspicuous-consuming Millennials. The New Yorker even got in on the action in 2014 with a semi-infamous cover sending up the scene at a stereotypical second-wave beer bar. Ah, memories. This stuff wasn’t quite cliche then, but it was getting there. Which is why I had to double-check what year it was earlier this week when New Yorker staffer and emergent Gen X contrarian Jay Caspian Kang mocked the social-media platform Bluesky (on Bluesky, naturally) as a “little pirate ship that looks like a microbrew meet up”. Ah, man… what? Anyway, loved that one essay you published 16 years ago, though!
📈 Ups…
They say “What’s dead may never die” and that apparently applies to Rogue Ales & Spirits’ intellectual property for Dead Guy Ale, which is currently up for auction… The Great American Beer Festival released its pour list for the 2026 event… Athletic Brewing Co. struck a multi-year deal with MetLife Stadium and the hometown New York Giants and New York Jets… Lawson’s Finest Liquids is launching its own non-alcoholic craft beer called Sip’N…
📉 …and downs
Tilray Brands announced plans to cease production at Terrapin Beer Co.’s plant in Athens, which may make you sad but shouldn’t make you surprised… Ohio mid-major Rhinegeist Brewing’s hot new line extension on Cincy Light is, alas, a vodka-based RTD called Cincy Splash… Monster’s beverage-alcohol division saw net sales decline 15.2 percent, oof…
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