Beats headphones have been banned from World Cup matches by Fifa due to the tournament's licensing deal with official sponsor Sony.
The ruling will come as a bitter disappointment to some of the competition's brightest stars, who have been spotted wearing Beats in their respective team colours in recent days.
Brazilian forward Neymar was pictured wearing a green pair of the headphones as he stepped off the bus at the Castelao stadium of Fortaleza for Brazil's last training season on the eve of their match with Mexico on Tuesday, and star of last night's match against England Luis Suarez was sporting a blue pair during a break at a recent practice session.
Fifa's agreement with rival Sony means players have to remove the headphones when in World Cup stadiums for official matches and media events.
Earlier this month Sony sent all participating players a free set of their own headphones to wear out and about in Brazil, but few have been spotted using them.
During the 2012 Olympics Beats, which was recently acquired by Apple for $3bn, sent thousands of free headphones to high profile athletes, including the U.S. basketball team and the entire British delegation, despite Panasonic being the official sponsor.
A five-minute film featuring Neymar, Suarez, Germany's Mario Goetze, Netherlands' Robin van Persie, Mexico's Javier "Chicharito" Hernandez and other players wearing Beats headphones released days before the World Cup has been seen by 10.6 million people on YouTube.
First make a headphone that gives sounds as good as Beats then
50 dollar skullcandy sound better than Beats, basically any high end headphone that isn't Beats Audio sounds better than Beats. Watch reviews, read articles, Beats are terrible.
50 dollar skullcandy sound better than Beats, basically any high end headphone that isn't Beats Audio sounds better than Beats. Watch reviews, read articles, Beats are terrible.
Beats are cool.
Wait, you don't like Beats?
