Aramco launches FootbOil tanning range for the hottest World Cup ever!
Oil giant Aramco has joined with likeminded allies to launch a new product line aimed at travelling World Cup fans. The FootbOil range of tanning oils is fronted by Gianni Infantino and Donald Trump and designed so that supporters can thrive in the World Cup heat this summer.
The FootbOil line, made up of InfantinOil and DonOil, debuted around England’s recent match at Wembley. Fan campaign group Fossil Free Football were on hand to see what supporters thought about Aramco’s step in cosmetics (watch their street interview videos here and here). FootbOil advertising material appeared on bus stops, an ad van and on TFL trains in London as well as around the stadium where the Netherlands played their own World Cup warm up. The campaign also made it to FIFA’s home town of Zurich and even appeared in the FIFA museum!
Extreme heat is set to define the World Cup this summer, with experts predicting dangerous conditions across the tournament. The issue has already marked US hosted competitions in 2024, when a lineman collapsed from heat exhaustion, and 2025, when Club World Cup players and managers repeatedly raised concerns. Despite this pattern, FIFA have been criticised by campaigners and players for failing to take the issue seriously and continuing to promote inappropriate sponsorship partners; accusations that seem set to continue given this new moneyspinning effort.
Campaigners on football, fossil fuels and climate change are urging FIFA to step away from big oil sponsorship, given its responsibilities to safeguarding the sport as a whole. They have pointed fans to the injustice at play as the game’s top executives and elite players benefit from fossil fuel sponsorship money while grassroots and amateur players bear the brunt of the heat, flooding and smoke caused by big oil.
The 2026 World Cup may be a turning point, as the impacts of extreme weather, even on the sport’s best prepared and fittest players, becomes impossible to ignore. The image of fans and players struggling in dangerous conditions while surrounded by oil advertising could make the link between sponsorship and climate change clearer for the billions of fans watching on.
It may also prompt new understandings of the heavy investment in sport by Saudi Arabia (and other petrostates) in recent years. These moves have consistently been framed for fans as efforts to diversify fossil fuel based economies away from oil. But given Aramco (which is 98.5% state owned) has been put forward as FIFA’s ‘Major Worldwide Partner’, and will be advertising to the World Cup’s massive global audience, it seems that a shift to tanning oil would be as far from fossil fuels as Aramco would consider going.
Fossil Free Football urges fans travelling to the World Cup to take heat dangers seriously and demands that FIFA begins to do the same.
Fossil Free Football is a fan climate campaign group and member of the Cool Down Sport for Climate Action Group. See more content from the FootbOil campaign here.