Hydration breaks will be ‘key topic’ in future soccer media rights negotiations, per report

Many predicted after FIFA implemented mandatory hydration breaks for this summer’s World Cup, it would be impossible to put that genie back in the bottle. It appears those fears were well-reasoned.

In a report filed Monday about the future of hydration breaks in the sport of soccer, ESPN’s Ben Strauss writes that the mid-half stoppages “are likely to become a key topic in media rights negotiations going forward,” citing interviews with more than a dozen soccer and media executives both in the United States and abroad.

During the World Cup, hydration breaks have offered first-of-its-kind advertising inventory for soccer broadcasters: commercial breaks during the run of play. Fox, the English-language World Cup broadcaster in the U.S., is conservatively pocketing a quarter-billion dollars from hydration break advertising alone.

Now, the question is how quickly other leagues and competitions, both at home and abroad, decide to cash in on this newfound revenue windfall.

Former English soccer chief executive Charlie Methven told Strauss, “It’s not going to happen overnight.” But there are several European leagues that could afford to boost their media rights valuations after television revenues have stagnated in recent years.

France’s Ligue 1, for instance, was forced to launch its own direct-to-consumer streaming platform for its matches after a number of failed broadcast partnerships. The league’s media rights value is pegged at somewhere between $171 million and $286 million, per Strauss. Just over a month out from the start of the season, Germany’s Bundesliga is still searching for a media rights renewal in the U.S. Italy’s Serie A just took a substantial media rights haircut in the U.S.

“You’re going to have this conversation between executives of the league and the teams where they say, ‘The bad news is TV revenues are going to go down by 10%,’ and the clubs say, ‘What can we do?'” Methven said. “And the answer is, ‘Well, we can allow TV partners to have an extra break.’ That’s where the rubber hits the road. How determined are the clubs within the leagues to maintain their TV revenues versus doing something that is really going to piss off their fans?”

Strauss characterizes the English Premier League as the “last place to adopt a change” on account of its relative financial strength compared to the other top leagues in Europe, as well as the mild temperatures in the U.K. during soccer season. The Premier League generated about $10 billion in total revenues last season as compared to $4.9 billion for Bundesliga, the next highest revenue generator, and wouldn’t necessarily need the added revenue hydration breaks could deliver.

Interestingly, MLS left the door open for instituting hydration breaks when Strauss reached out to the league.

“We have not discussed any changes to [the league’s hydration break] policy, but as we do each year, we continually review all aspects of our competition,” an MLS spokesperson said.

“More broadly, MLS has a long history of creating and testing innovations that improve the game,” the league spokesperson said, nodding at how MLS has handled injuries and substitutions to speed up the game, initiatives that FIFA have implemented for the World Cup.

Regardless of how leagues ultimately handle the hydration break situation, it has created a new dynamic between potential broadcast partners and the leagues.

“The hydration break is so contentious that it can be used as a stalking horse to allow other forms of commercialization,” U.K.-based media rights executive Murray Barnett told Strauss.

Hydration breaks have raised expectations for broadcasters from an advertising standpoint. And even if leagues and competitions resist implementing them like this year’s World Cup, there will now be an appetite among broadcasters to find other ways to earn another dollar or two via advertising.

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