De Laurentiis wants half-time replaced by two-minute breaks every ten

📰 Napoli president Aurelio De Laurentiis wants to scrap half-time and replace it with two-minute time-outs every ten minutes. 📌 Key points 🗣️ De Laurentiis spoke at the TEHA Club forum in Rome on 1 October. ⏱️ He proposed shortening or abolishing the 15-minute half-time break. 🔁 His alternative: a two-minute break every ten minutes for coaching. 📱 His reasoning: young fans at home reach for their phones and never come back. 🎬 "There are no sacred rules just because they have existed for 100 years," he said. 📝 What happened 🏛️ De Laurentiis was speaking at a session titled "Cinema and Football: The End of the Attention Monopoly" at the TEHA Club summit in Rome on 1 October. The film producer turned club owner argued that football no longer commands young people's attention by default. 📱 He said supporters in the stadium will sit through the interval, but a child watching on the sofa will not wait a quarter of an hour. Once they pick up a phone or switch on a games console, they are gone for the second half. His answer was to shorten or remove half-time and introduce two-minute stoppages every ten minutes, when coaches could give instructions much like a basketball time-out. 🎟️ He described sport as "competition, but also entertainment", adding that if you ask fans to leave home, park and spend money and hours of their day, you have to give them something back. He also pointed to American franchise models, where stadiums are run as entertainment venues built around merchandising and hospitality. 🤔 De Laurentiis has floated radical ideas before, including basketball-style timed sin-bins instead of cards and 25-minute halves based on effective playing time. Broadcasters, coaches and supporters are expected to push back again. 🏆 De Laurentiis took over Napoli after the club's 2004 bankruptcy and relegation to Serie C and turned them into Serie A champions, so his views carry the weight of an owner thinking about football as a product. But half-time is also tied to player recovery, tactical changes and stadium catering and advertising revenue, so scrapping it would raise plenty of problems. 📊 By the numbers • Current half-time: 15 minutes • Proposed time-outs: 2 minutes every 10 minutes • Date: 1 October 2026, TEHA Club forum, Rome 🔭 Why it matters The Laws of the Game are set by IFAB, so one club president cannot change them on his own. Still, when the owner of the 2024-25 Serie A champions talks openly about competing for attention, it reopens the debate over how football can hold on to a generation raised on short videos and gaming.