They’re calling them “hydration breaks,” as if 22 professional athletes who train every day in climate-controlled facilities suddenly forgot how to drink water.
What they are is commercial breaks. Little tollbooths carved into the middle of each half of a World Cup match, a chance to shovel a few more ads into the bloodstream of the game, dressed up as concern for player welfare. It is football’s version of handing you a paper cup while quietly stealing your wallet.
We know the script by now. First comes the euphemism; the soft PR language about safety, science, welfare. Then comes the “pilot program.” Then, before anyone has quite realized what’s happened, it’s standard procedure and some poor commentator is reading a scripted spot for a global betting firm while a left-back stretches his calves and stares at the turf.
You can see the direction of travel in everything that has happened to the sport over the last decade. More games, more teams, more “inventory” as the suits like to say, like we are talking about pallets of bleach instead of human beings and history. The World Cup bloats to 48 teams and an endless procession of group games that feel like pre-season friendlies with national anthems. The Champions League swells into a Swiss-system mutant where nobody can explain the format without a flowchart. Europa League, Conference League; an entire matryoshka doll of slightly worse competitions, each coated in the same sponsor-varnish.
It’s all the same trick: take something rare and meaningful, over-harvest it, and sell the carcass back at a higher price.
Hydration breaks are just the next logical step. You can almost hear the pitch deck: “We’ve unlocked two new 90-second ad windows per match without impacting total game time.” Somewhere in a boardroom a man with a very shiny watch nods, because to him a match is not a story or an experience, it’s 105 broadcast minutes with under-monetized gaps.
Meanwhile, the fan is told to be grateful. Grateful for the expanded formats, grateful for the extra “access,” grateful that a World Cup ticket now costs the better part of a month’s rent and comes wrapped in dynamic pricing, NFT lotteries, resale fees and a terms-and-conditions page that looks like a legal exam. Grateful that the tournament that used to feel like a pilgrimage now feels like trying to get Taylor Swift tickets in a foreign language.
The thing these people never understand is that attention has a breaking point. Part of what made a World Cup or a big European night feel sacred was the scarcity. Three group games, then the real stuff. One tie, home and away, then someone goes home gutted. Now, every stage feels like an onboarding funnel. Don’t worry if you lose today, there’s another game Tuesday, another group, another safety net. Knockout football has been wrapped in bubble wrap so nobody’s “assets” get bruised too early.
Fans aren’t stupid. They can feel when the stakes have been hollowed out. They can feel when the game has been slowed not by tactics but by sponsors; when players stand around during a scheduled pause so a global audience can be nudged toward another app, another bet, another sugar bomb in a plastic bottle.
Football didn’t need hydration breaks. Players drank water during throw-ins, injuries, substitutions; it was messy and human and fine. What the game needed was less greed, fewer matches, saner ticket prices, and the courage to leave some money on the table in exchange for meaning.
Instead we’re getting two little TV timeouts per half, a small incision in the flesh of the sport that tells you everything about who it really belongs to now. Not you, not the kids trading stickers, not the people working extra shifts to get to one match in their lifetime.
It belongs to whoever bought the right to shout at you while the players sip from branded bottles and pretend this is about their health.
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