Brazil 2014 had no-hassle “vanishing spray.” Qatar 2022 brought in much-debated video assistant referees. The 2026 World Cup, to be held in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, might already have confirmed its own next-gen contribution to the world’s game, and it happens to be a mainstay of American sportswatching.
In December, FIFA, the governing body responsible for organizing the World Cup, announced that this summer’s tournament will feature two scheduled three-minute hydration breaks in every game, an effort to mitigate the strain of high summer temperatures on players.
But viewers might not have to fill those three minutes staring at Lionel Messi downing a Gatorade. Instead, in the tradition of American sportscasting, they could be entertained twice a game by a quick cutaway to ads.
FIFA will allow broadcasters to go to commercial breaks during hydration breaks, the Athletic reported last week. A FIFA spokesperson confirmed the changes to Fortune.
While more frequent ad breaks are not likely to surprise many viewers based in the U.S., it’s a significant departure from how commercials have traditionally featured in soccer elsewhere. Soccer games are played in two 45-minute halves. Halftime breaks have long been considered fair game for advertisers, but the changes for this year’s World Cup will effectively split the games up into quarters, as FIFA’s hydration breaks are scheduled for the 22nd-minute mark regardless of weather.
American sports have long been built around pauses in play that double as inventory for advertisers. In 2010, the Wall Street Journal infamously calculated how the average NFL game features around 20 commercial breaks and more than 100 individual ads, with roughly an hour of screen time—about a third of the broadcast—devoted to advertising. More recently, a FiveThirtyEight analysis found that the average conference championship game had 18 separate commercial breaks totaling 43 minutes, versus just over 14 minutes of actual game action.
Other mainstream U.S. sports, from pro basketball to hockey, have adopted similar structures. In the U.S., sports’ share of total television ad spending climbed from 21% in 2019 to 26% in 2021, and by 2022 an estimated 31% of all linear TV ad revenue—about $24.7 billion—depended on live sports programming, according to a 2025 report from Global Sports Insights, a market research firm.
European soccer leagues, meanwhile, have largely refrained from following the U.S.’s lead, partly because the game revolves around near-continuous play and does not traditionally include breaks or timeouts. Some, like the U.K.’s Premier League, have also cracked down on certain types of ads, including those featuring gambling firms.
Another reason is that in many European leagues, a large share of broadcasting revenue comes from viewers’ pay-TV subscriptions, negating some of the incentives behind sweeping ad rollouts. Viewing rights to the most highly watched games—including those from the Premier League, the continental UEFA Champions’ League, and top competitions in Italy, Spain, and Germany—are primarily subscription-based. The price to access all the necessary platforms surged nearly 60% between 2020 and 2025, the Guardian reported last year, yet European soccer viewership remains at all-time highs.
But viewers might have to get used to ad breaks this summer. FIFA has sold World Cup viewing rights to private broadcasters in several countries, which will now all be able to air ads. While broadcasters must leave buffer time separating a commercial from the start and end of a hydration break, and can even choose to not cut to commercials at all, the incentive to do so is huge.
FIFA President Gianni Infantino estimated the World Cup could draw 6 billion global viewers, making those six-minute blocks in each of the tournament’s 104 games incredibly valuable real estate for advertisers. During the 2022 World Cup final, U.S. advertisers were reported to have paid $1 million for a 30-second slot.
