America’s success as the world’s most prosperous and dynamic country rests on its culture. Key ingredients of this culture include our affection for innovation, for the pursuit of excellence, and our intolerance for those who seek to take unfair advantage of others.
Unfortunately, we have a major blind spot here when it comes to professional sports. Rather than watch an NFL, NHL, NBA, or MLB game with a focus on excitement, tactics, and momentum, we allow ourselves to be subsumed by an unending blitz of advertisements. We allow games to be delayed even when players are ready to restart after a change of offensive-defensive teams or timeouts. Just so that broadcasters can squeeze in a few more ads. And now it’s happening at the FIFA World Cup. The international soccer tournament, which is mostly being hosted in the United States, is suffering mandatory three-minute water breaks in each of the game’s two 45-minute halves. This is a major development for a sport that has never had timeouts.
Yes, ads pay for our ability to watch games affordably. Yes, ads are, at their most basic level, a positive reflection of a capitalist society in which corporate prosperity rests on consumer choices in a hypercompetitive marketplace. Ads are not bad per se. The issue is that Americans have allowed commercials to take priority over our enjoyment of sports.
Take the World Cup. These water breaks aren’t about player health, as FIFA and its bought-and-paid-for supporters, such as Fox analyst Alexei Lalas, like to claim. Lalas was a distinctly average player who screech-preaches through our TV screens like he’s a soccer god. But the truth is clear. These water breaks are about the greed of broadcasters and FIFA President Gianno “gay, disabled, migrant worker” Infantino. And their greed is grand. The water breaks are predicted to generate an extra $250 million in ad revenue for the main U.S. broadcaster, Fox.
But if Fox and FIFA are the beneficiaries, we and the world’s best soccer stars are the losers. Consider that these water breaks have afflicted games played in mild temperatures and in situations where both teams have been ready to restart but have been prevented from doing so until commercials can finish airing. As with Fox in the opening match, we’ve even seen those watching at home miss the restart of games due to broadcasters overrunning the water break window. These water breaks are particularly disruptive to soccer, in that the sport relies upon rapid and often unpredictable transitions of play and momentum. They also serve a diplomatic detriment to the U.S., being perceived globally for what they are: an opportunity to make more money at the expense of fan experience.
TRUMP SAYS HE HAD A ‘VERY GOOD MEETING’ WITH ZELENSKY AT G7
Americans shouldn’t be so servile in the face of this absurdity. Broadcasters need to air commercials to afford distribution rights and generate revenue. But just as taxes must be balanced against the pursuit of happiness, lines at McDonald’s against speed of service, and Little League performances against broad inclusion, so also should commercials be better balanced alongside our enjoyment of sports.
FIFA has got the balance wrong during this World Cup. We Americans have got the balance wrong when it comes to sports more broadly.