The Napoli president wants to abolish half-time. Aurelio De Laurentiis said so in Rome, at the TEHA Club summit. I read it on Monday, no, today, at the friterie (the chip shop), in Football Italia, which my nephew printed out for me. I didn’t finish my cone of chips.
He put it like this: “There are no sacred rules just because they existed for 100 years.” A hundred years. That is precisely what makes them sacred. I’m not criticising. I’m comparing.
His reason: a child at home won’t wait for the fifteen minutes to end. He will be lost before the second half starts. I’ll grant that. But the child will come back. I was ten at Sclessin (Standard Liège’s ground), it was freezing, and half-time was for stamping your feet to keep your toes. Nobody got lost. We were cold, together.
He is also a film producer in Hollywood. That explains the session, titled “Cinema and football: the end of the monopoly of attention”. They discussed how cinema must adapt to streaming and to telephones that never stop ringing. So the cinema has a problem, and football is asked to solve it. Football was supposed to be the last place where you were allowed to pause.
Football Italia reminds us that the 2026 World Cup final lengthened half-time for a show. So it gets stretched when there is a show and cut when there is a child. Note that I’m not against progress. I’m against this progress.
Without half-time, when do I give my team talk? During the throw-in?
I will keep my fifteen minutes. I will spend them sitting down, looking at the empty pitch. It is what I have always done. Well. It’s the times.
It’s true, we checked: Football Italia.
