Hydration breaks at World Cup have many angry at FIFA, but this didn't come out of nowhere

INGLEWOOD, Calif. -- The air outside LA Stadium following the Iran-New Zealand game at the FIFA World Cup was crisp and chilly enough I wished I’d carried some sort of jacket with me to California when I departed home nearly a week earlier, and I was delighted the taxi I’d ordered came precisely on schedule.

And yet, earlier in the evening, mandatory “hydration breaks” had been ordered that sent both teams to the sideline for 3-minute periods in each half.

Originally introduced at the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, this used to be an action reserved for blistering conditions that developed anywhere in the world major soccer games were played: 32 degrees Celsius back then, which equates to nearly 90 degrees Fahrenheit.

Now, it’s every game at the 2026 World Cup, and it’s become one of the most controversial elements of the event. Coaches are asked about it regularly in press conferences.

“I don’t like it,” United States coach Mauricio Pochettino told reporters in advance of his team’s opening game.

“It’s different,” said New Zealand coach Darren Bazeley said after drawing Iran.

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In these forums and in the online reports that result, “four quarters” has become a four-letter word. TV analyst Gary Neville, a former right back for England and Manchester United, said coaches should not be permitted to make adjustments during the breaks. Writer Riath Al-Samarrai of London's Daily Mail wrote the introduction of the breaks "essentially distorted the way the very game is structured and played."

And the “football world” has only itself to blame.

I say football in this case, rather than soccer as preferred in the U.S., because it was only last year that many of the biggest clubs on the planet were brought here for the vastly expanded FIFA Club World Cup. And while that might have been an opportunity for teams and players from Brazil, England, France, Saudi Arabia and so many other nations to discover how much progress has been made in this sport in this country, what so many of them did was gripe about the weather.

Enzo Maresca, then Chelsea head coach, had to deal with a thunderstorm delay and called it “a joke”. He suggested, “That probably means this is not the right place to do this competition.” As if it never rains in London.

Mark Ogden, UK-based writer for ESPN, compared the summer weather in the U.S. to Qatar and declared, “Get set for a bumpy ride next summer.”

At that time, Europe was coping with a catastrophic heat wave impacting France and Spain and not long removed from 100-degree days that forced the closing of the Acropolis in Greece and 90-degree temperatures that prompted a heath advisory to be issued in the UK.

The World Cup is a summer event; June and July. It's almost certainly going to be hot wherever the games are played anywhere north of Anarctica.

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The obsession with weather that dominated international Club World Cup coverage and competition in 2025 created the ideal cover for FIFA to make the hydration break a regular feature. Rather than consult the thermometers during the course of games, officials could install them for all 104 games and assure there was uniformity to the product.

And, sure, if the networks across the globe wanted to use those sequences to sell advertising time, that’s just a prudent use of time.

With the world’s soccer journalists assembled in the U.S. and consuming games on American television, some are livid about the commercial breaks. (And, yes, they do call them commercials in other places, it turns out. That’s the language Bazeley used though he spent most of the past two decades either playing or coaching in New Zealand. Perhaps it was the one season he spent as an assistant with the Colorado Rapids in Major League Soccer.)

The opinions of coaches on the subject of the breaks tend to track closely with whether they’re playing well or poorly, whether they’re winning or losing. Those that are struggling can take the opportunity to make adjustments that could severely alter their teams’ directions; that’s why coaches in NCAA basketball and the NBA are so protective of the timeouts their sport permits when the ball is in play.

This has been foreign to soccer, except at halftime. Coaches always have been able to call over a specific player and attempt to issue an instruction and hope it won’t leave the player out of position and it will be communicated to the player or players in question. That has been one of the beauties of the sport, that it’s not overcoached and is so reliant on the ingenuity and adaptability of players. At least a little of that is removed with these breaks.

One of the inevitabilities of modern sport, however, is executives in charge never will ignore an opportunity to generate more revenue. Jersey patches, signage boards, stadium naming rights, even team naming rights – these all have slipped into our games in recent decades When Maresca and others made such a fuss about last summer’s weather, surely all the folks at FIFA heard were old-time cash registers ringing.

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They’d already sold most of the TV rights for this World Cup when they made the decision to make hydration breaks a part of this tournament, so the bonus primarily has been for the rights holders in each country. There’s always another event, though.

This year’s tournament has had games in such cities as Atlanta, Houston and Dallas, but all of those were indoors. The temperatures were cool for the two games so far in LA, and Seattle was on its way to the low 80s with ideal humidity when Belgium-Egypt kicked near noon off Monday. America didn’t deserve the weather hysteria that was visited upon the nation during the Club World Cup. It was annoying at the time, and for football purists there was a price for all those complaints.

Those who loathe the game being played in "quarters" should be aware how we wound up here.