Mick Hartley

Oliver Brown in the Telegraph on those infuriating World Cup hydration breaks::

You could understand it if this decision arose purely for a concern for players’ welfare, protecting them from the often sapping North American humidity. But it was 24C (75F) in Foxborough on Saturday night for Scotland’s win over Haiti. Allowing for the fact that this would represent a freak heatwave in Inverness, is it truly too much to expect elite athletes to last more than 22-and-a-half consecutive minutes in such conditions? Of course not. And if you watch one of these enforced intervals here in the US, you quickly understand the real motivation, with the interruption giving a precious three minutes for host broadcasters to pivot to adverts about beer, betting and medications where the side-effects take longer to list than the benefits.

Multiply those three minutes by two across 104 games and it equates to 10-and-a-half-hour cash bonanza, with each hydration-enabled advert during the group phase costing an estimated £150,000, rising to £560,000 for a game involving the US team. But for anybody with the slightest clue about football, such as US manager Mauricio Pochettino, the intervention is deeply unwelcome. “I don’t like it,” he said. “When the conditions are good, it’s unnecessary.”

His point was vividly illustrated during his side’s 4-1 victory over Paraguay, when fourth official Yusuke Araki had to hold up his hand to continue the hiatus, only signalling that the match could restart once Fox had returned from their advert break. It is ludicrous, with Fifa’s avarice so all-enveloping that it is disfiguring the very shape of a match. As if it were not daft enough to introduce a Coldplay-curated half-time show for the final in New Jersey on July 19, a Super Bowl flourish threatening to take the interval far beyond the allotted 15 minutes, Gianni Infantino and his merry men are now mangling the halves themselves.

Football was never designed to be a game of quarters. That is an overwhelmingly American obsession, with gridiron and basketball divided as such to help maximise commercial revenue during the stoppages. For the viewer, it can make for a maddeningly fragmentary experience. Indeed, men’s college basketball switched from quarters to halves specifically to improve the flow. With Fifa, there is no such regard for the purity of the drama. No sooner did Curaçao’s Livano Comenencia score a stunning equaliser against Germany in Houston than the players had to stand idly around for a break sponsored by a laptop brand.

Be in no doubt, these infernal breaks are compromising the very nature of the sport. Curaçao, against all expectation, had all the momentum midway through the first half, then along came the ads to allow the four-time champions to re-establish momentum. It was the same at the MetLife Stadium on Saturday, where Morocco were swarming all over Brazil until the dreaded “time-out” handed the chance for Carlo Ancelotti to rejig his tactics. Sure enough, Vinícius Júnior scored 10 minutes later.

Part of the joy of football is that, unlike its American equivalent, the action is continuous, unbroken, relentless. It is not supposed to be carved up into ever smaller constituent parts at the mercy of broadcasters. But the appetite this side of the Atlantic for milking money is insatiable. During the 1986 World Cup in Mexico, NBC even ran mid-game adverts while the football carried on, risking the possibility of missing a crucial goal. This time, cash is officially king, with games fundamentally restructured not on the grounds of health but of perceived financial imperative. 

Except this is a tournament already drowning in greed, with hundreds of thousands of fans raiding their life savings to turn up. Inserting needless gaps into the 90 minutes for which they have paid such obscene amounts feels like Fifa’s most devious ploy yet.

Even the BBC have concerns.