Tune into any World Cup match in the US, Mexico, or Canada this summer, and you will find that around the 22nd and 67th minute of any game, the plays will stop. For the first time ever, FIFA has introduced three-minute hydration breaks, which are officially framed as a player welfare measure to combat extreme heat. The breaks will take place regardless of the weather outside, even on relatively mild days in New York or Los Angeles.
While FIFA does not break down exactly how much revenue is tied to these new in-game stoppages, the intermissions introduce predictable and guaranteed commercial windows into live broadcasts, creating new advertising inventory. There has been backlash from fans and players, with many arguing that the commercial interruptions disrupt the flow of a sport defined by continuous play.
Ghazi Saoud, a 26-year-old half-Lebanese, half-Norwegian football fan living in Chicago, who is rooting for Norway and Morocco this World Cup, describes the hiatuses as “concealed advertisement breaks.” Saoud argues that part of what makes football unique is that it has been played largely the same way for more than 150 years: 90 minutes, two 45-minute halves and predictably continuous play. Water breaks have always existed, he says, but only when they were actually needed; Saoud, like many others, believes scheduled breaks change the rhythm of the game.
“I see the argument under conditions of climate stress, but you need a break, you need an extra drink—you don’t need three minutes,” says David Goldblatt, one of soccer’s leading historians and the author of The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Football. “Nobody needs three minutes to drink a glass of water. Why are they three minutes?” Fox, he notes, is estimated to be making about $250 million in the US on commercials that run during hydration breaks, according to expert analysis given to BBC Sport.
The tension over these breaks is really a fight over what the World Cup is becoming. Around $3.9 billion is expected to come from broadcast rights alone, meaning networks like Fox in the US or the BBC in the UK are paying FIFA to stream the World Cup, and another $1.8 billion is expected from sponsorship and marketing. Based on forecasts from WARC Media, a UK-based advertising research and intelligence firm that tracks global media spend, the tournament is expected to inject around $10.5 billion into the global advertising market in 2026.
For some sports experts, this broader commercialization effort by FIFA reflects something else: a shift toward American-style sports entertainment. “I think you do see a definite Americanization in this particular World Cup,” says Mark Dyreson, professor of kinesiology and sports history at Penn State. “I think what FIFA is doing is sort of normal and natural in the course of business although it offends a lot of longtime soccer connoisseurs.”
Goldblatt cautions against treating the 2026 World Cup as a sudden turning point. “Football’s been commercializing like crazy for 40 years,” he says. “It’s been taking lessons from the United States sports market in a hundred different ways for the last 30 or 40 years.”
In many ways, the trend was already visible in Qatar. The 2022 World Cup was reported as the most-watched tournament on record, engaging with more than 5 billion viewers, which helped FIFA generate $7.5 billion across the 2019-2022 cycle. Broadcast rights brought in roughly $2.96 billion in 2022 alone, compared with the nearly $3.9 billion FIFA is projecting for 2026.
Still, some experts to argue the hydration breaks are less about money and more about adapting the World Cup to a changing media landscape.
