Napoli president Aurelio De Laurentiis has never been short of bold ideas, but his latest suggestion might be his most attention-grabbing yet. Speaking Tuesday at the TEHA Club summit in Rome, during a session titled “Cinema and Football: The End of the Attention Monopoly,” the outspoken club owner floated the idea of shortening, or even completely abolishing, the traditional 15-minute halftime break. In the fast-moving world of modern soccer, few proposals challenge the sport’s DNA quite like this one.
Napoli Boss Wants Halftime Gone: What He Actually Said
De Laurentiis framed the issue around one simple reality: football no longer has a monopoly on young people’s attention. “There are no sacred rules simply because they have existed for a hundred years,” he said, pointing to the United States as a model. “Americans realized years ago something we in Europe are afraid to admit, which is that sport is competition, but it’s also entertainment.”
His specific target was the 15-minute interval. Fans at the stadium soak in the atmosphere and wait together, he argued, but the experience at home is completely different. “What about the kid watching on the couch?” De Laurentiis asked. “You stop the match for a quarter of an hour and think he’ll stay there waiting for you? He picks up his phone, goes back to the PlayStation, finds something else to do. By the time the second half starts, you’ve already lost him.”
Wanting Halftime Gone Isn’t His First Radical Proposal
De Laurentiis has built a long track record of provocative ideas aimed at the same target: a younger audience he believes football is losing. He’s previously floated scrapping yellow and red cards entirely in favor of basketball-style time penalties, 10 minutes for a yellow and 30 for a red, along with 25-minute halves built around “effective playing time” rather than the current 45. He’s also suggested swapping one 15-minute halftime for a two-minute break every 10 minutes, giving coaches something closer to a timeout. Earlier this year, he told The Athletic football’s 90-minute format is simply too slow for a generation raised on video games.
Passion Isn’t Enough Anymore
De Laurentiis has spent two decades turning Napoli from a club that went bankrupt and dropped to Serie C in 2004 into a genuine Serie A force, winning the Scudetto in Antonio Conte’s first season in charge in 2024-25. He’s always mixed sentiment with hard business logic. “Passion fills stadiums,” he argues, but it doesn’t balance the books or guarantee future relevance. A €100 million player, in his view, isn’t automatically ten times better than one worth €10 million, and a hundred-year-old rule isn’t automatically right for 2026.
Visionary or Just Provocation?
Skeptics will dismiss this as classic De Laurentiis showmanship, a film producer who loves the spotlight floating an extreme position to force a conversation. Abolishing halftime would face real practical, commercial and cultural resistance: coaches need the break, broadcasters sell advertising during it, and fans at the ground treat it as part of the ritual. But the underlying concern is harder to wave off. Whether or not anyone seriously considers scrapping the interval, De Laurentiis has once again succeeded in putting an uncomfortable question on the table: how much of football’s traditional structure is actually serving the sport, and how much is actually hurting it?
Napoli Boss Wants Halftime Gone: ‘Kids Will Pick Up Their Phones’