Good news! The boffins at FIFA have heard your vocal support for hydration breaks, and have developed a new way to play out the rest of the World Cup with 1000% more water consumption and a 1200% reduction in the danger of having to watch a football match involving any level of actual intensity.

Opinions differ as to whether these pauses in play were originally introduced as a response to complaints by the players’ union at a lack of opportunities for ‘water-cooler moments’ in their workplace, or to help Americans adapt to the sport by adding a comforting layer of intrusive advertising. No matter the reason they were introduced, the breaks are here to stay. Rain or shine or thunderstorm, these boys are going to be gathering, they’re going to be drinking, and by god they will be chatting. We can only speculate as to what exactly the players talk about, but presumably they’re discussing side bets on their game of ‘who can commit the most horrendous act in their personal lives and get away with it because they’re tremendous at delivering in-swinging corners’.

Instead of a measure of the athleticism, skill, and endurance of some of the world’s greatest sports people, organisers know that what people really love is to watch groups of men squirt water at each other while an old man yells at them. Why bother thinking about whether Mbappé or Messi will end the tournament as its all time top scorer when you can find out whether Curacao’s back-up left back is more of a sipper or a chugger? Why think about Erling Haaland’s electrifying physical prowess when you can watch Jude Bellingham attempt to maintain his aura while suckling at the teat of a bottle of Evian?

Organisers want to make sure nobody is able to gather any sort of momentum, or make the football at all interesting, and they’ve found a solution. The broadcast will involve 4 hours of hydration fetishism and insipid advertising interrupted by ten second snippets of players taking to the field and attempting to progress the ball downfield until they are tackled, at which point they will leave again and normal programming can resume. To make this simpler, these moments of play will be known as a series of ‘downs’, the ball will be thrown rather than kicked, and the goals will be stretched to become ‘end zones’.

Are there any plans in place to prevent FIFA getting rid of the sport altogether and replace it with the teleshopping channel? Will anyone without a fortune built on blood diamonds be able to get a ticket to the final? Will anyone ever be expected to play more than 30 consecutive seconds of sport again?

It’s impossible to know, but rest assured that if England do win the tournament you can completely ignore this article and jot this World Cup down as the greatest in history.

Eddie Atkinson