Soccer is all about momentum. The distinguishing aspect of its competitive structure is that it’s unsegmented, with a simple, 15-minute halftime bisecting two 45-minute blocks. The neophyte might see a goalless desert stippled with oases distributed seemingly at random and out of nowhere, but the joy of watching soccer is that the shifting sands of the game operate on the invisible logic of momentum. As the 20 field players fight and scrap for every meter of turf, patterns of play emerge, and eventually, things make sense.
Until the 2026 World Cup, that is. This World Cup has seen the debut of mandatory three-minute hydration breaks, interspersed at the midpoint of each half, at the 22nd and 67th minutes. While the breaks themselves are not new, their ubiquity is. The new rule was rolled out following last summer’s infernal Club World Cup, a dress rehearsal for the real thing played in oven-like conditions that dozens of participants criticized as straight-up unhealthful. In that tournament, referees were deputized to stop matches in order to give everyone water breaks if the weather was too punishing.
This time around, every single match will stop twice, whether it’s 71 degrees and breezy in Santa Clara or 101 and punishingly humid in Houston. Keeping players safe in extreme temperatures is important, and competitions and organizers must adapt as climate change makes summer sporting events increasingly dangerous. That said, if you think FIFA is doing this for any other reason than to make money, you likely are the sort of person who calls it the “FIFA World Cup” at every turn and cheers when your favorite brand makes a cool commercial. In practice, the hydration breaks serve as timeouts against which broadcasters can sell ads. I have watched the first week’s worth of games on Fox, which cuts away for a long block of commercials every time.
This makes the viewing experience worse, for one because it forces the viewer out of the action and into a Walmart pitch to buy consumer goods. So much of the fun of watching the World Cup is seeing how the quality of the games themselves and the passion of the players and fans burn off the noxious fog within which FIFA and the U.S. have enveloped the tournament. Everyone knows that the enterprise is corrupt, but it’s not that difficult to keep that reality at arm’s length. Changing the substrate of the game so the tournament’s corporate partners can get theirs changes that. The viewers, the players, and even the participants are confronted anew with the cynical heart of the World Cup.
Virgil van Dijk was asked about the breaks after his Netherlands team drew against Japan in an air-conditioned stadium in Texas. “Hydration breaks are a bit interesting, because I was obviously watching almost all the games up until today, and every time going to commercial is a bit … Not really that I like it,” he said, Dutchly. U.S. coach Mauricio Pochettino has also been critical, as have many others. “Those three minutes interrupt everything,” France manager Didier Deschamps said before the tournament. “We have to adapt. But the broadcasters are happy, right?”
Deschamps’s use of the word “interruption” is spot on. Not only do the hydration breaks hammer home that the point of the tournament is to make money, they also make the games themselves significantly worse. Simply, they destroy momentum. In Mexico’s opener, the second hydration break hit right after Raul Jimenez scored, killing the hosts’ momentum and leading to a choppy, violent final 20 minutes. In Sunday’s thrilling Ivory Coast–Ecuador match, the Ivorians were pushing for a goal when the first half water break arrived, and rejoined the match without any of the momentum they’d been building.
The breaks genuinely change the game for the worse, and the extent to which these games feel different has been an unpleasant surprise. Soccer is not a sport that accommodates quartering. It must flow, undammed.
Instead, we have been confronted with the most harmful Americanization of the sport since the MLS’s draw-eschewing shootouts of two decades ago. This stuff isn’t going away; FIFA isn’t going to simply turn off a great revenue stream like this, and it’s not getting any colder outside.
