The hydration break. The scourge of the soccer fan at the 2026 FIFA World Cup (well, the other one, aside from Alexi Lalas).

Aside from who you think is going to win it all, it’s been the most hotly debated aspect of this year’s tournament.

Not because they’re entirely new, per se. There were three-minute breaks around the 22nd minute at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. However, the extreme temperatures in that climate gave them credence and a valid reason for their existence.

In 2026, however, when many of the matches are played in climate-controlled domes and at temperatures well within the normal range, their continued existence was presumed to be more about the possibility of incorporating advertising into the middle of a match than about player welfare.

Sure enough, some World Cup broadcasters took FIFA up on the offer. The governing body left it up to each broadcaster to decide whether to show ads or remain with the game. The BBC, ITV, and Telemundo are among those who declined to show commercials, but many others have. American English-language rights holder Fox Sports and Canadian host broadcaster TSN are among those showing ads, as are the broadcasters in Spain, Italy, France, Mexico, Ireland, and Germany (per The Athletic).

And if one thing has become abundantly clear to all of them, it’s that these hydration break ads, which add up to around 10 hours of extra ad time over the course of the whole tournament, are incredibly lucrative.

30-second hydration break spots on Fox are reportedly going for anywhere from $200,000 to $750,000, depending on the match. The broadcaster could potentially bring in $250 million in revenue from those ad spots alone.

Writing for CBC, Richard Deitsch spoke with several media analysts and experts in the industry, and they all seem convinced that hydration breaks, and the financial incentives to show commercials during them, are here to stay.

“This is a tremendously valuable move from the standpoint of sports media, and Fox has indicated as much by taking advantage of the ad breaks to run at least four commercials within each half,” Ed Desser, the president of consultancy Desser Sports Media Inc., told CBC.

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One week of the World Cup is officially in the books. And for all the complaints over hydration breaks, Fox’s coverage of the event, or whether other networks are giving the tournament requisite attention, one thing remains abundantly clear. The World Cup is a viewership event like no other.

Through the first weekend, Fox’s viewership is up 152% versus its Group Stage average for 2022 in Qatar. Telemundo, the Spanish-language broadcaster, is up an even more eye-watering 234%. Unsurprisingly, both are on record pace.

The data would seem to indicate that viewers are still quite happy finding the World Cup on good, old-fashioned linear television. Sure, these numbers include streaming viewership on Fox One and Peacock, respectively, but by-and large, World Cup viewers are watching on linear television.

Next year, no such option will be available. The 2027 FIFA Women’s World Cup will stream exclusively on Netflix in the United States. It’ll be the first major global sporting event to air exclusively on streaming in this country, and could very well be a sign of things to come as we look towards who will broadcast the 2030 FIFA Men’s World Cup.

It’s worth examining the differing economic models at play here between streamers and traditional broadcasters, because that could very well determine where that 2030 tournament goes.

The World Cup is a unique property in the context of other live sporting events, most of which occur on an annual, or at least biannual in the case of the Olympics, basis. That’s an important distinction. Traditional broadcasters like Fox, NBC, or ESPN are still largely in the business of distribution fees. Since the advent of cable and satellite bundles, the overarching economics of these networks can be boiled down to one question: How much is your content worth to viewers? That question determines the per-subscriber fee distributors like DirecTV, Comcast, or Fubo are willing to pay networks. It’s why NFL programming, far and away the most popular content left on television, is borderline existential for legacy broadcasters.

However, the quadrennial nature of the World Cup makes it a difficult bargaining chip for networks during distribution negotiations. Most major distribution deals are done on a three-year cycle. So for Fox, it’s possible that there have been distribution agreements in the past where the network wasn’t able to leverage its World Cup rights at all, or at least had to extend the deal’s term to ensure the value of the event was included, perhaps at a discount. But it’s not simply the cycle disparity that creates issues, it’s the difficulty of valuating an event that only happens once every four years, in different parts of the globe, broadcast to an audience that is historically soccer-agnostic.

The value of a World Cup varies greatly based on where it’s played, and the time zones the American audience will be dealing with. Obviously, one held in North America, with the United States having a guaranteed spot in the tournament as a host country, is going to be a much easier sell to distributors than, say, the 2018 tournament in Russia, where the United States failed to qualify. Location, of course, can be accounted for during distribution negotiations. Those are known far in advance. Whether the United States will be participating? At least back when the field was 32 teams, rather than 48, that was far from a guarantee. That downside risk, at least previously, made the World Cup far more challenging for networks to leverage during distribution negotiations than a surefire annual property like the NFL or college football.

There’s no such calculus for a streamer, whose business fortunes are determined by selling subscriptions directly to the consumer, rather than through a middleman distributor. In that way, purchasing a sports property like the World Cup is similar to producing a handful of big-budget feature films. You hope that the subscriptions generated from the event make the rights fee worthwhile. What you don’t have to do is convince DirecTV that it should pay you more for a five-week-long sporting event that’s 28 months away.

Fox is paying a reported $485 million for this year’s World Cup, a price that some experts say is two- or three-times under market value, thanks to the no-bid contract FIFA awarded the network on account of moving the 2022 Qatar World Cup to autumn. It’s safe to assume, then, that when FIFA goes to market with the 2030 World Cup, it’s expecting upwards of $1 billion for the rights.

The question becomes, does the quadrennial event drive more than $1 billion in incremental distribution revenue for legacy broadcast networks? Maybe, but it’s a tough sell, particularly when the majority of that event will be played in Spain, Portugal, and Morocco.

Of course, this is a bit of an oversimplification. The World Cup also drives plenty of ad revenue and streaming subscriptions for legacy broadcasters. But at a time when these same broadcasters are tightening content spends in preparation for an expected increase in price of NFL rights, the World Cup might fall firmly in the “nice to have” rather than “must have” category. Between the volatility in value and the fact that it’s simply hard to capitalize on an event that happens in only one of every 48 months, the World Cup just seems to make more sense for a streamer.

If so, the World Cup Final one month from today could mark the end of an era.

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