Climate change is transforming football, from more breaks during the game to billion-dollar cooling facilities, and it is ultimately the fans who will pay for it all.
The 2026 Fifa World Cup continues to deliver drama in abundance. For South African fans, it is the rollercoaster ride of Bafana Bafana’s historic highs and devastating lows that still has us shook.
There can be no doubt, the team did the country proud. Yet, beyond the action of the rankings, this tournament has quietly transformed the modern game. It’s not only the changing regulatory and commercial considerations; even the rhythm of a match has changed. Forced to adapt to dangerously high temperatures, fans and players have had to adjust to interruptions and play stops, every 22 minutes, for a mandatory three-minute cooling break.
Now a standard and familiar practice throughout the tournament, Fifa says the measure is necessary to protect players from increasingly dangerous temperatures during matches. It is a remarkable moment for the world’s most popular sport. Football, a game built around continuous action and endurance, is literally being forced to pause because the planet is getting too hot to handle.
Fifa is facing a crisis, but it is not one of its own making.
The World Cup has traditionally been played, quite comfortably, during the Northern Hemisphere summer. Yet climate change has pushed summer temperatures to new…