Giles Smith: Half-time entertainment? No thanks, we're football fans

Remember vuvuzelas? Remember how swiftly we moved as one to crush them? We’re going to need that spirit again: that campaigning unity, that unyielding sense of what’s right for football.

They were the soundtrack to the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, of course – the plastic hornpipes that made it sound as though every game was being swarmed by hornets. And that was fine-ish in the context, and certainly while watching from 8,000 miles away on television.

Then it became apparent that some people had brought their vuvuzelas home with them and were ­intending to carry on parping them into the 2010-11 league season. And there the line had to be drawn. Because a World Cup was one thing, but the constant whine of synthetic insects was no backdrop for football that mattered.

And drawn the line was. The ­football family locked arms. The vuvuzela was banned from grounds along with fireworks and actual offensive weapons. And that ended it. I seriously can’t remember the last time I set eyes on a vuvuzela in the wild, let alone heard one blown in anger.

But here comes a new threat. For the final of the Club World Cup, in the US next month, Fifa has ­commissioned a half-time show, with Coldplay’s Chris Martin curating it.

Now, I genuinely love Chris Martin. But he shouldn’t be doing this. “Look, thanks for asking,” Chris should have said, when Fifa called, “but this is just wrong. This isn’t the Super Bowl; this isn’t a sporting event that nobody remembers apart from the half-time show. This is a football match. And half-time at football matches isn’t for condensed musical performances by leading proponents of the art. It’s for staring miserably into space for a quarter of an hour and for quietly eating your KitKat.

“Or it’s for reading your programme if you buy one, and not bothering to join the queue for the toilet because it will be too long. That’s what ­half-time is for. You can’t put a set by Charli xcx in there without revealing that you have entirely misunderstood football.” And then Fifa would have replied: “You’re absolutely right, Chris. Dropping Super Bowl razzmatazz on a football match would be a ­cultural abomination. I don’t know what we were thinking. Forget we asked, mate, and all the best with the ­ongoing tour.”

But no. At Chris’s suggestion, J Balvin, Doja Cat and Tems are even now working out how to fit the best of themselves into a 15-minute set. And yes, it’s only the final of the Club World Cup, which is inherently ridiculous. But it’s a wedge. And this time next year the actual World Cup final will be in that same New Jersey venue, and do you suppose Fifa will be able to resist?

And then we’re all in ­trouble because things that happen at World Cups have a tendency to stick. Stupefyingly large quantities of time added on? We owe those minutes to 2022 in Qatar. Peroxide hair-jobs? 1998 in France.

Name a bad idea in football and the chances are it will have come from a World Cup.

So, let’s restate the basics: half-time in football is the block of dead space that links the first half to the second half – nothing more, ­nothing less. If clubs want to wheel out a retired ­stalwart to pick a raffle ticket or take a lap of honour during that time, so be it. Ditto, if kids are invited to stage a penalty shootout against the ­mascot.

But nothing more distracting or absorbing than that, and ­definitely not 15 tightly choreographed ­minutes from Dua Lipa.

We’re in the ­middle of a football match, for ­heaven’s sake. We didn’t come here to be entertained.

However, if television wants to ­render that period still more ­monetisable, then it can do so by screening… well how about old Super Bowl shows? That Prince one, for instance. That never grows old.

But don’t bring this stuff into the ground. Football doesn’t want it, any more than football wanted vuvuzelas. And those of us who love football need to make that ­absolutely clear right now.

We’ve stopped ­terrible things in their tracks before; now it’s time to stop this one.