What is the value of a World Cup water break?For fans and players, they’re not worth much at all, and have engendered complaints they break up the flow of the game and topple decades of strategy.But for Fox Sports, the company airing the tournament in the U.S., the dollar figures loom larger than Lionel Messi lining up for a penalty kick: At least $250 million, with a plausible value of $500 million-600 million.Yes, that’s how much the company is likely to collect from advertisers for those sneaked-in ads from the likes of Nike, Adidas, Coke and Lenovo. A media-buyer source tells The Hollywood Reporter that the average cost of a 30-second spot during the soccer extravaganza is between $200,000 and $750,000, depending on a match’s participants (i.e. is the U.S. playing?) and the stage of the tournament (knockout stages amp up the interest).
With six minutes of hydration breaks, that adds up to anywhere between $2.5 million and $9 million per game. Multiplied by the 104 games played and of course factoring in that most buyers are buying packages that can run into the tens of millions of dollars, not single spots, this puts a plausible total above $500 million.Fox paid less than that for the entire rights to the tournament. (The full cost for English language rights to the 2026 World Cup is believed to be between $400 million and $500 million.)The further irony is that FIFA, which added the breaks earlier this year for the tournament as a global-soccer first, sold them as necessary because rising temperatures means players need time to stop and cool off — which, yes, means a Murdoch-owned company is making half a billion dollars thanks to climate change.
