Let us call the catastrophe by its correct name. These are not “hydration breaks”. These are commercial breaks. The Dallas, Houston and Atlanta games take place in air conditioning. The stadiums in Vancouver and Los Angeles have roofs that mitigate heat. In the first break of Colombia and Uzbekistan, the temperature was 16˚C. Ghana and Panama was played at 18˚C. These are two among many examples.
No reasonable footballer would oppose pauses in games played in extreme heat. But these are a minority at this World Cup, and no one takes three minutes to drink some water.
Under the pretext of equality (as if the only equality that matters was not between the two teams on the field), FIFA imposed a three-minute break for both halves of all games. From a two-quarter sport, football is transforming into a four-quarter sport.
I know you can’t understand it on television, but the boos have been loud. The public realizes that they are being deceived by a rule change external to the game.
At least twice in the history of football the rules were changed for reasons internal to the game. Until 1925, the offside law required that there be three defenders (generally the goalkeeper and two others) between the end line and the attacker at the time of the pass. Defenses could keep a defender behind the offside line. The attackers had to line up with the second-to-last line defender, not the last, like today. With a defender left behind the offside line, scoring goals was extremely difficult. The new rule was welcomed by everyone. The 1925-26 season broke attendance records in England.
The 1990 World Cup and the 1992 Euros were full of tedious exchanges of passes between defenders and goalkeepers. They caught the ball, served the defenders and received it back without danger. Change came.
The goalkeeper’s touch with his hands on balls retreated with his feet became a penalty with an indirect free kick. Goalkeepers now have to play with their feet and football becomes more dynamic.
Commercial breaks were not an internal necessity for the game. Goals can happen in fortuitous plays, but they often happen as a result of volume, of the gradual imposition of one team over the other. This accumulation of rhythm is essential, and is one of the reasons why it was never considered to adopt a stopwatch in football, as in basketball or American football.
This dynamic is being destroyed by pauses, which threaten the essence of the game. Football takes place in an elongated, malleable temporality, full of comings and goings. It is not a linear conquest of territory, like in American football. It is not an alternation of possessions of comparable duration, as in basketball. It is a chameleonic temporality, in which each game must find its breath.
This relationship with time is being fatally injured by the splitting of the game into four quarters. They are now talking about increasing the interval to half an hour, enough time for a show and more advertisements.
It’s the Superbowlization of football.
Let’s continue to suffocate the commercial breaks with our boos, until the business owners back down, as they did, six years ago, when the Super League was created.
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