Yes that was the reason put forward, which is absolutely ridiculous if you think about it.

Some teams within the same group had to travel far more than others. Some played at noon in a California stadium shaped like a oven while others played later in cooler climates or in climate controlled stadiums. Some games had to be interrupted because of thunderstorms.

Yet the only measure they took for "fairness" happened to be the one that incidentally allowed them to make more money. Let's be honest for a second, a three minutes break amounts to a somewhat lengthy VAR or offside check, a slow corner kick, or an injured player getting escorted off the field.

If anything, it makes it _more_ unfair to make it mandatory everywhere. It's not an advantage, it's supposed to make up for a particularly hot/humid weather. Now your next opponent will have had the benefit of an extra 6 minutes break, without the disadvantage of having exerted themselves in a very hot weather.

Any talk of fairness when out of the window when FIFA decided to put their thumb on the scale and rescind Balogun's red card anyway.

That was merely the excuse given. Teams are already hugely disadvantaged by having to play in 30+°C when a rival gets to play in 20°C instead. Giving the team playing in better conditions a commercial break as well only adds to that unfairness.

> In Portugal you have to subscribe 2 or 3 streaming platforms

Same in the UK (Sky for EPL+EFL Cup, HBO for EPL+UCL, Amazon Prime for Christmas EPL + occasional cup games) + a TV licence (for the occasional cup game / tournaments.)

If you don't pay for anything, you can watch about 10? cup games a season on ITV. Or go to a pub, obviously (but then you'll be forced to buy drinks.)

You can usually listen to a bunch of games per week via BBC Radio (I think it requires a TV licence if you use streaming but you can still get 5Live on AM radio AFAIK) and TalkSport (also on AM radio.)

My solution for this is to just subscribe to an entirely legitimate IPTV service which costs about as much for a year as one month of Sport TV costs.

Sweden cleared $2.5M in profit from their participation, about the same as the previous edition, all the increase was eaten up by the US taxing the teams and higher costs. That's not nearly enough money to sell out for.

Football fans have shown they're quite eager to tell Infantino where to stick his revenue sharing.

It earned the most money, but was it the most sharing? The hosting cities were taken advantage of and clubs are in fact rebelling against fifa now.