By Erfan Djazmi
Mexico 86 gave football the Mexican wave. This World Cup has given us synchronised boos. During England’s opening game against Croatia in Dallas, supporters of both teams booed loudly the moment the referee stopped play for the first hydration break, and the stadium’s solution was to drown them out with Mr Brightside. The crowd understood what was going on. This was not really about water.
Every match at this World Cup now stops twice, around the 22nd and 67th minutes, for three sponsored minutes, and FIFA’s guidelines allow broadcasters to fill each pause with four thirty-second adverts. Fox, the American rights holder, is expected to earn at least $250 million from these breaks, with some estimates running far higher, against a rights fee of around $485 million. The water breaks may pay for the entire tournament.
Now run the same move across club football. Two hydration breaks across the Premier League’s 267 televised matches would create over two thousand premium slots a season and with all 380 matches airing live internationally, international feeds plausibly double it, much of it on AVOD and FAST platforms like DAZN, where a signaled three-minute break is the perfect trigger for addressable, server-side ads. Add the Champions League’s 189 match format and the Europa and Conference tail, and club football is sitting on £700-800 million a year of unsold airtime, equating to £3 billion across a four-year tenure that the game is choosing not to sell.
Broadcasters pay more for what they can monetise more. The windfall never reaches the leagues mid-tenure and it arrives as bigger bids at the next tenure. UEFA has run this play before with the expanded Champions League lifted annual revenue from €3.5 billion to over €4.5 billion. Both the Premier League’s deal and UEFA’s next cycle land in 2028–29 and the door through which breaks would arrive, announced before the tenure, priced into the bids, likely sold as player welfare.
Telemundo on the other side, handed identical inventory to Fox, refuses to show adverts during the breaks at all, and viewers are switching to it for precisely that reason. One broadcaster priced the slot. The other priced a relationship. ITV is a different case where it sits under Ofcom’s stricter cap, which only applies to UK free to air broadcasters.
The breaks are already changing football, and England proved it against Mexico. Tuchel is leveraging them with tactical mastery: right after the first-half break, England scored twice; after the second-half break, he shored up the defense and went to five at the back. The pattern repeats across the tournament where coaches hold substitutions for the pause, instructions come in structured windows rather than shouted from the touchline, and late momentum has shifted. Whether driven by heat, five substitutes or the breaks themselves, the game is behaving differently. And the very thing we booed in the group stage could carry us to our first World Cup in sixty years.
If this ever happens, £3 billion flows into adland with new inventory, new CPMs, a windfall for broadcasters, agencies and brands. What flows out is harder to price and the one thing that makes football unlike every other television product on earth. Forty-five unbroken minutes is the last genuinely scarce thing in the medium.
For brands, this would be less a windfall than a sorting mechanism. The first cooling break in a title decider would be among the most-watched, and could very well be the most-resented advertising moments in British media history.
It may never happen. Fans and players hate the breaks, they cut against football’s identity as a continuous ninety-minute game, and UEFA has already ruled them out for Euro 2028 except in extreme heat. Any permanent move needs IFAB law changes and some level of buy-in from clubs, players and supporters. Football’s traditions are entrenched and that entrenchment is the culture. It’s what makes the game iconic, and what makes it hard to change.
Every other entertainment product has surrendered to interruption. Streaming platforms insert ads. Social platforms interrupt every few seconds. Even YouTube’s premium inventory is designed around breaks. Football is one of the last places attention is bought without interruption. Football sells the breaks around the game but never inside it.
But the idea is not entirely without charm. Bring cooling breaks to a wet Monday night in Liverpool, mid-January, and nobody is reaching for the water bottles. Two pauses per half, a brew on the touchline while the fourth official holds the biscuits. We could sell that to the world. We would just have to call it what it is.
