Tune in to any World Cup match in the US, Mexico or Canada this summer, and you’ll find that around the 22nd and 67th minute of any match, the competition will stop. For the first time in history, FIFA has introduced such an option three-minute hydration breakswhich is officially described as a player welfare measure to combat extreme heat. Breaks will take place regardless of the weather outside, even on relatively subtle days in Fresh York or Los Angeles.
While FIFA doesn’t say exactly how much revenue is tied to the fresh game interruptions, the interruptions introduce predictable and guaranteed advertising windows into live broadcasts, creating fresh advertising inventory. There was a reaction from fans AND playersand many argue that commercial breaks disrupt the flow of a sport defined as continuous play.
Ghazi Saoud, 26-year-old half-Lebanese, half-Norwegian, soccer fan living in Chicago, supporting Norway and Morocco this World Cupdescribes the breaks as “hidden commercial breaks.” Saud says that’s part of what makes it happen football What’s unique is that it has been played largely the same way for over 150 years: 90 minutes, two 45-minute halves and predictable continuous play. He says water breaks have always existed, but only when they were actually needed; Saoud, like many others, believes that scheduled breaks change the rhythm of the game.
“I see the argument with conditions climatic stressbut you need a break, you need an extra drink – you don’t need three minutes,” says David Goldblatt, one of the world’s leading football historians and author of the book The Ball is Round: A Global History of Football. “Nobody needs three minutes to drink a glass of water. Why is it only three minutes?” As the expert notes, it is estimated that Fox in the US earns about $250 million from ads shown during hydration breaks. given to BBC Sport.
The tension created by these interruptions is really the fight for what the World Championships become. Around $3.9 billion is to come solely from broadcast rights, which means that stations such as Fox in the US or BBC in the UK pay FIFA to broadcast the World Cup, while another $1.8 billion expected from sponsorship and marketing. Based on forecasts by WARC Media, a British advertising research and intelligence company that tracks global media spending, approximately $10.5 billion to the global advertising market in 2026.
For some sports experts, these broader FIFA commercialization efforts reflect something else: a shift toward American-style sports entertainment. “I think there is a clear Americanization in this particular World Cup,” says Mark Dyreson, a professor of kinesiology and sports history at Penn State. “I think what FIFA is doing is in some sense normal and natural in business, although it offends many long-time football connoisseurs.”
Goldblatt cautions against treating the 2026 World Cup as a sudden turning point. “Football has been commercialized like crazy for 40 years,” he says. “We have been taking lessons from the American sports market in a hundred different ways over the last 30 to 40 years.”
In many respects, this trend was already apparent in Qatar. The 2022 World Cup was named the most watched tournament in history and attracted over 5 billion viewerswhich FIFA helped generate $7.5 billion throughout the 2019–2022 cycle. Broadcasting rights introduced more or less $2.96 billion in 2022 alone compared to the almost $3.9 billion FIFA forecasts for 2026.
Still, some experts say the hydration breaks are less about money and more about adapting the World Cup to a changing media landscape.