The Creeping Americanisation of World Football

The biggest casualty of this year’s World Cup could end up being the game of football itself, and the damage could be permanent.

Two weeks in, there’s plenty for football fans to like and not to like about the 23rd edition of the FIFA World Cup. On the positive side of the ledger, many of the games have been excellent, Leonel Messi continues to boss the pitch despite his 39 years and all three host teams, the US, Mexico, Canada, have all qualified for the next round.

My highlight of the tournament so far was watching 29th-ranked Ecuador beat four-time champions Germany in a 2-1 victory last night, thereby booking itself passage to the next round. By doing so, Ecuador became only the second Latin American side to beat Germany in the group phase of the World Cup, after Mexico. Watching grown men in the stands cry with joy is what the FIFA World Cup is all about — or at least should be.

#2026WorldCup — #Ecuador defeated Germany 2–1 to qualify for the Round of 32.

After the match, Ecuador head coach Sebastián Beccacece celebrated with the fans in the stands.pic.twitter.com/QiyVrhabP9

— Antifa_Ultras (@ultras_antifaa) June 25, 2026

The 2026 FIFA World Cup is also about making vast sums of money, much of which will be pocketed by FIFA, which controls the tournament’s most valuable and scalable revenue streams.

There also appears to be no limit to the damage the Trump administration can inflict on the biggest sports show on Earth, as we warned a couple of weeks ago. It has already done serious harm through its petty, vindictive treatment of the Iranian national football side as well as its visa bans and deportations of football fans and referees.

The Iranian team has been barred from spending a single night on US soil, leaving it no choice but to fly, often large distances, to each game from its training base in Tijuana, and back again all on the same day. This puts the team at a huge disadvantage vis-á-vis its opponents. Yet despite this, Iran is still within a shout of qualifying for the next round, having drawn its first two games. If it was to pull that off, it would be a huge accomplishment.

Meanwhile, Washington is stepping up its petty vindictiveness…

Here we go again. This is SO exhausting and I can’t even begin to imagine how mentally draining it must be for the Iranian squad.

It is long past time for other national teams to stand with Iran and speak up. This treatment is outrageous and deeply unfair. https://t.co/Yjt0UQldmL

— Leyla Hamed (@leylahamed) June 24, 2026

As NC reader Taufiq Al-Thauwry noted, with a twist of irony, in a previous comment, the appointment of the current FIFA CEO, Giovanni “Gianni” Vincenzo Infantino, in 2016 was meant to help smooth over the constant and credible charges of corruption made against FIFA under the Sepp Blatter “regime”:

Just seems such a sign of the times to go from the quaint and old-school corruption of bribery and things to supporting genocide, war, deporting referees, blocking visas, and forcing Iran to play in, but not stay in, the US after the host’s wild aggression.

The Cradle has dubbed the event, quite aptly, the “World Cup of Exclusion”:

Intrusive security screening, restrictive visa procedures, harsh immigration policies, and ticket pricing have all fueled criticism. International fans have struggled to obtain entry, while several participating delegations have faced extraordinary restrictions.

Alfred Archer, associate professor of philosophy at Tilburg University, tells The Cradle:

“It is very important to be aware of how the US government is using the World Cup as a showcase of US border power and political control. However, this issue cannot be easily separated from the fact that the World Cup is a global celebration of football, sport, and community.”

Disfiguring the “Beautiful Game”

However, the biggest casualty of this year’s World Cup could end up being the game of football itself. Barring a serious pushback from fans and players, the damage could even be permanent. The “beautiful game” has undergone sweeping changes, most of them unwelcome, mostly in the name of profit maximization, since this World Cup began. That this is occurring during a tournament hosted primarily by the US, where money does all the talking, is no coincidence.

The three-minute cooling breaks that occur at the 22nd and 67th minute of every half in the 2026 World Cup regardless of meteorological conditions represent a radical reconfiguration of the way the game is played, and one that has left most football coaches, players and fans severely unimpressed.

Paraguay coach Gustavo Alfaro was the latest to lambaste the so-called “hydration breaks”, calling for them to be used only in cases of extreme heat. From Reuters:

The straight-talking Argentinian, among the most outspoken figures at this World Cup, said football’s continuity was being threatened and cooling breaks should only be used in extreme conditions, with ​agreement from both teams.

“These are more than hydration breaks. I know this applies to everybody, ​but I like continuity. Football is continuity and continuity is broken,” he told a ⁠press conference that lasted close to an hour.

Alfaro vented his frustration on Sunday at the drinks ​breaks, saying they were for commercial interests, while accusing football’s business elite of hurting fans with eye-watering ticket ​prices in a sport played and followed primarily by the working classes.

FIFA President Gianni Infantino has defended cooling breaks, saying their usage was driven purely by sporting considerations.

Nobody is buying that. France coach Didier Deschamps tore into the stoppages in a television interview after the friendly they played on March 26, 2026, against Brazil in Boston, in which there was a three-minute pause in each period:

“It’s good for you as a TV network, to have an advertising break, but those three minutes change football completely. It doesn’t matter which team. If a team is enjoying a good spell, three minutes stop everything.”

Jürgen Klopp, the eloquent former Liverpool manager, has also launched a scathing attack on the cooling breaks:

Football is being held hostage by executives sitting in air-conditioned offices. These breaks are being presented as a shield for player welfare, a noble weapon against the heat. In reality, they are nothing more than a golden cage built for sponsors.

When I saw players standing around during cooling breaks while television timeouts dictated the rhythm of the match, I couldn’t help but ask myself: who is the World Cup really serving? The supporters? The players? Or the advertisers?

A World Cup match should flow like a river. Instead, we are building dams in the middle of it so commercials can be shown.

It’s dangerous for the spirit of the game. Football used to be the main event, but it now risks becoming background music for an advertising show.

It seems quite fitting that FIFA chose to announce the mandatory rehydration breaks at a meeting in Washington with global rights-holding broadcasters, who are among the largest beneficiaries of the rule changes. Privately, the sporting organisation had already distributed guidelines on broadcasts, reported The Athletic, which obtained the documents.

The World Cup is not the only major international footballing event to embrace cooling breaks over the past year. Conmebol, the governing body for football in South America, recently introduced a  90-second pause in each half of all matches in the two club tournaments it organises, the Libertadores and the Sudamericana.

For football bodies like FIFA and Conmebol as well as the broadcasters and global brands whose interests they primarily represent, the benefits are obvious. Cooling breaks represent a phenomenal money making opportunity for FIFA, whose advertising revenue represents one of the top three cash inflows, along with ticket sales and TV rights.

For broadcasters, particularly the Murdoch family’s FOX Sports and Sky Sports, they represent a perfect money-grabbing opportunity, as the Argentine geopolitical analyst Bruno Sgarzini broke down in a recent article for Canal Red (machine translated):

Fox Sports, for example, gave FIFA $485 million to secure television rights for most of the matches. With cooling breaks, the networks have two minutes and ten seconds to place advertising spots; that’s four for each break. With two breaks per game, that works out at roughly eight commercials per match. If you multiply that by 104 matches, we have 832 new commercials that would never have existed without the cooling breaks.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Fox charges $200,000 for a 30-second spot in group stage matches. If the US national team is playing, it goes up to $750,000. The figure is likely to rise as the tournament progresses. According to Sports Business Journal, Fox could make $250 million from the cooling break ads alone. If the average price rises to $400,000, the figure would reach $333 million with these ads alone. The channel would thus recover more than half of what it paid for the broadcasting rights [from the cooling breaks].

As for global consumer brands, they are delighted with the cooling breaks, which allow them to further expand their invasion of the minds and souls of football viewers. As El País reports, guaranteed income streams and expanded branding opportunities are just what TV broadcasters and the marketing departments of global corporations want. And those corporations would like the new four-quarter structure to remain in place long after this edition of the World Cup is over.

“It’s key,” says Mercedes [Blánquez, head of marketing and advertising at Movistar+], “that it be included in the schedules and advertising assets that licensees of TV rights can monetize, and that it helps them recoup the large investments in those rights.” FIFA and Conmebol have opened the way to a new way of selling soccer and playing it, and the World Cup will serve as a huge proof of concept.

Creeping Americanisation of World Football

The ultimate goal will be to have the same, or similar, changes introduced by the national football leagues in Europe and even the Champions League.  Once that happens, the rest of the world will follow. There’s one major obstacle to this, however, as reader John A points out in the comments below — Europe’s cold winter:

[F]ootball is a winter game in most parts of Europe. Plus, thanks to floodlights and further encroaching TV scheduling rights, many games are played in the evening. Hydration breaks would be a nightmare for players forced to stand around for several minutes in cold temperatures.

What we are witnessing is the creeping Americanisation — as in, “USonianisation”, as in corporate crapification (h/t John A) — of world football (aka soccer), a process that has been unfolding for well over a decade, at least since the FIFA-gate scandal of 2014.

If there is one thing US sports organisation bodies have perfected, it is the art of bombarding viewers with unwelcome commercials at every possible turn. In the NFL, each game has four quarters, two halves as well as time outs or injury time outs during series of plays (h/t Bugs). In total, the TV networks broadcast a whopping 20 commercial breaks containing more than 100 ads. Those ads take up an hour of time in all games, according to The Wall Street Journal.

None of this, of course, is news to most of our US-based readers. But it may be news to many of our readers from other parts of the world. As Sgarzini notes, many of the same US tycoons who dominate the American football, baseball and basketball leagues in the US are not just wielding outsized influence over this edition of the FIFA World Cup; they have also been quietly taking over global elite football, one league at a time:

For example, Arthur Blank owns the Atlanta Falcons football team and the Atlanta United soccer team of Major League Soccer (MLS). The Mercedes-Benz Stadium, which he runs by concession from the state of Georgia, hosts eight World Cup matches. Blank has influence at the US Soccer Federation, which is in charge of organising the World Cup, as he donated $50 million to build its national training centre. Jerry Jones, owner of the Dallas Cowboys NFL team, was able to convince FIFA to stage several key games at his AT&T Stadium. Lionel Messi, on the other hand, scored his thrilling hat-trick at the Kansas City stadium, which is owned by the Hunt brothers, owners of the Kansas City Chiefs, multiple NFL champions, and one of the most powerful families linked to oil and the Republican Party in the state of Texas.

These tycoons have established a business model of multi-use stadiums with more commercial breaks and exorbitant ticket prices. One that, according to a report by the CIES Sports Intelligence, a research and analysis division of CIES specialising in sports governance, policy and regulation, is moving into Europe’s elite football. U.S. capital, for example, owns or is a shareholder in 117 European football clubs. In eight years the figure has multiplied by almost five, since in 2018 the number was only 25. In total, they control more than half of the Premier League, more than a third of Italy’s Serie A and more than a quarter of France’s Ligue 1.

Seven of the fifteen clubs with the highest revenues in the world belong to American billionaires or private equity firms. This includes half of this year’s Champions League semi-finalists in Europe, including Stan Kroenke’s Arsenal and Atletico Madrid from the investment fund Apollo Global Management, led by Marc Rowan. The names of owners with a presence in American sports, such as baseball, basketball and American football, keep coming up: Manchester United’s Glazer family owns the Tampa Bay Buccaneers; Todd Boehly, in charge of Chelsea, manages the baseball team of the Dodgers and the Los Angeles Lakers of the NBA; and Liverpool’s John Henry controls the Boston Red Sox in the baseball league. The main reason for this expansion of US capital into football is financial: according to the Financial Times, “an NBA team is valued at 14 times its revenue, while a big European soccer team is valued at 4.2 times.” For Gerry Cardinale, of the RedBird Capital Partners fund, owner of AC Milan: “Entrepreneurs look at European football and say: this is the opportunity to buy a global entertainment asset at a discount.”

And that is all football is to owners of US capital: a global entertainment asset at a discount that is just waiting to be crapified. For their sake alone, world football, a sport whose structures and rules have changed surprisingly little since the establishment of English association football in 1863, is now undergoing a sweeping change that threatens to irrevocably alter its very nature.

Football, like many team sports, is a game of rhythm. If you take that away, you take away much of its essence. As the ever-irreverent coach of Uruguay’s struggling national team, Marcelo Bielsa, warns, the introduction of hydration breaks at this summer’s World Cup marks a “change of culture” which “adds nothing” to the sport.