According to the latest research from Ocado, 83% of Brits will be choosing to watch World Cup matches at home instead of their usual pub outings, citing cost on pints and bar snacks as the principle reason.

Preferring to watch at home because they can eat and drink whatever they please, the average Brit will be eating an extra 340 calories per match watched and will worry about putting on an extra 4lbs.  So, if the average person is planning on watching 11 matches at home and 5 in the pub (as detailed in the findings), according to my calculation, we will each be consuming an additional 5,440 calories and worrying about putting on a huge 64lbs – eeek!!!

As well as adding to our waistlines, the research revealed that watching World Cup matches down the pub will cost each person a whopping £63.74 more than if they were to stay at home (£94.75 compared with £31.01).  Quite disturbingly, 85 million packets of crisps and 85 million pints of lager are expected to be consumed during the tournament…with pizzas, chocolate and crisps labelled as our favourite World Cup snacks – what about burgers?

The sofa vs. pub spend breakdown shows quite a significant difference!

Pub: Alcohol: £61.20  Food: £33.55

Sofa: Alcohol: £17.12 Food: £13.12

In a bid to encourage more people to watch from home, Ocado has partnered with The England woman’s captain, Faye White, to launch an innovative campaign called the ‘world recipe challenge’.  For the campaign, Ocado asked customers to submit recipes to its online library, and 32 of these (one for each qualifying nation) are battling it out to receive the most amount of page views and recipe downloads. Jason Gissing, co-founder of Ocado comments, “We’re hoping that our unique World Recipe Challenge prompts shoppers to try something different. We’ve got some great World Cup dishes on our website, everything from Japanese salmon to peppy Ghanaian stew.   It’s a feast of football in more ways than one.”

The recipes will go live on Ocado’s website on Friday, they sound pretty tasty so do let me know if you try any.

What really made me laugh about the research is that Ocado found that lager and champagne sales increased significantly during the previous World Cup (53% and 23%), but smoking cessation products declined by 17% – so what it really boils down to is that The World Cup is just bad for us in so many ways – we spend more money, put on weight, eat unhealthy food, drink more alcohol, smoke more and take no exercise! AWESOME, crack open the champers!!!