Hacker News Reader

Comment by chistev | Hacker News Reader

And it seems the "hydration break" has been adopted by La Liga.

A break to drink water is not a new thing in La Liag. It's however only implemented when the temperature reaches a certain threshold (I think 30 degrees but I may be wrong), which I think makes sense and is acceptable.

The World Cup turned it into a farce by making it mandatory even during a rainy 19 degrees weather, or inside climate controlled stadiums.

It's still close to 40 degrees in Sevilla these days.

It was only mandatory so that teams wouldn’t feel like they were disadvantaged if a rival got breaks during games that crossed a set temperature limit and they did not. League game fixtures are so random that this would not be an advantage, but for a short cup tournament like this it could be a big tactical/performance advantage, especially in the knockout phase.

That was merely the excuse given. Teams are already hugely disadvantaged by having to play in 30+°C when a rival gets to play in 20°C instead. Giving the team playing in better conditions a commercial break as well only adds to that unfairness.

Yes that was the reason put forward, which is absolutely ridiculous if you think about it.

Some teams within the same group had to travel far more than others. Some played at noon in a California stadium shaped like a oven while others played later in cooler climates or in climate controlled stadiums. Some games had to be interrupted because of thunderstorms.

Yet the only measure they took for "fairness" happened to be the one that incidentally allowed them to make more money. Let's be honest for a second, a three minutes break amounts to a somewhat lengthy VAR or offside check, a slow corner kick, or an injured player getting escorted off the field.

If anything, it makes it _more_ unfair to make it mandatory everywhere. It's not an advantage, it's supposed to make up for a particularly hot/humid weather. Now your next opponent will have had the benefit of an extra 6 minutes break, without the disadvantage of having exerted themselves in a very hot weather.

Any talk of fairness when out of the window when FIFA decided to put their thumb on the scale and rescind Balogun's red card anyway.

Yes, the important hydration break. Because players didn't have ample time to drink something up until now before free kicks, corner kicks etc and during VAR checks every ~ 10 minutes. Glad I stopped watching more than 10 years ago.

Average play time is around 55 minutes in La Liga, so there’s around 35 minutes of wasted time anyway.

Yep. US World Cup ruined it for the rest of us :(

Are you going to be leading the campaign to get your national FA to return all of the money it received from the highest-revenue-sharing-ever US World Cup?

Football fans have shown they're quite eager to tell Infantino where to stick his revenue sharing.

It earned the most money, but was it the most sharing? The hosting cities were taken advantage of and clubs are in fact rebelling against fifa now.

Sweden cleared $2.5M in profit from their participation, about the same as the previous edition, all the increase was eaten up by the US taxing the teams and higher costs. That's not nearly enough money to sell out for.

Each year, I watch less and less football. In Portugal you have to subscribe 2 or 3 streaming platforms if want to follow the Portuguese League, the Champions League, and eventually other country leagues (like Premier League and La Liga).

Now, we see huge panels (double the height) for ads in stadiums which become very intrusive when watching on TV (20–30% of the screen ends up being used for ads). Added the hydratation->ADs breaks, and increased World Cup tickets insanely.

Football used to be for everyone, now they're are killing it for almost everyone.

> In Portugal you have to subscribe 2 or 3 streaming platforms

Same in the UK (Sky for EPL+EFL Cup, HBO for EPL+UCL, Amazon Prime for Christmas EPL + occasional cup games) + a TV licence (for the occasional cup game / tournaments.)

If you don't pay for anything, you can watch about 10? cup games a season on ITV. Or go to a pub, obviously (but then you'll be forced to buy drinks.)

You can usually listen to a bunch of games per week via BBC Radio (I think it requires a TV licence if you use streaming but you can still get 5Live on AM radio AFAIK) and TalkSport (also on AM radio.)

ITV also requires the TV license so those also aren't free.

Huh, I thought it was just the BBC. But then again I haven't had terrestrial TV for nearly 2 decades. TIL.

TV license is 'required' for all live TV (all channels) + iPlayer. Also if you're watching live sports through e.g. NowTV's website you still need one. It's much wider reaching than just the BBC channels.

My solution for this is to just subscribe to an entirely legitimate IPTV service which costs about as much for a year as one month of Sport TV costs.

The genie is out of the bottle. All football leagues will have it sooner or later. Then there's one additional break. Then another....

and the Italian league.

honestly I think it's not a bad move - as it allows for tactical flexibility.

It's just an ad break, and now that it has been normalized, probably everyone will do it. They should just say directly we have quarters from now on because we want to show you more ads, the most annoying part is this gaslighting, pretending it is for hydration.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com