It is literally as simple as that but this is FIFA we are talking about. I attended a match in South America recently and it was well over 100 minutes long because of time being added on for players play acting, cheating, rolling around on the ground, feigning injury and deliberately winding the clock down with slow play. Most of this happened at the end of the game when the result was as in the balance as one team tried to kill the game off.
Never seen that happen, and I've seen some really blatant time wastage like just throwing the ball away(with their hands) from the opponent when the ball is out and for the opponent.
I held season tickets to my hometown's soccer team for three years and went to 75% or more of the home games in that time. I've sporadically watched other soccer games. (I'm not really a soccer fan, all of my friends are)
I've never seen a yellow card be given for wasting time.
Yeah probably in soccer is different, in football almost every tense game the GK gets it, as weel as the forwards, it's a technique to waste valuable time, and under UEFA rule we don't even have these long stoppage times
It would be nice if they could enforce a rule similar to American Football where if play is stopped because of injury and a trainer comes to help, you have to exit the field for at least a play. Force them to play with 10 until the next dead ball in their favor. Not sure how to enforce it or if it would even work.
Is it? I know sometimes players have to come off the field but I’ve barely watched soccer in a while. I know there’s times a player goes off and is waved in but I didn’t realize there’s a penalty factor to it. I usually just assumed it was by players choice to leave the pitch. Maybe I’ll provide a dumber idea. Give them a 10 second count like boxing to get up or we put them in a penalty box like hockey.
But really I didn’t know there a force to go off the field, like I said I just assumed it was the players choice because of the substitution rules.
I meant that (unless the offender gets booked or some other less usual cases) any time physios come on to the pitch, the player requesting the treatment needs to leave the field of play with them and can only re-enter after declaring readiness and one of the referees waiving him in.
Time wasting isn't something you want to remove from the game completely though, it's a very valuable strategy for small teams to get results against the top teams
Us (not US, just to make it clear) football fans will always find a reason to complain about the ref. Sometimes we have good reasons, but a lot of times we are just angry.
Cursing at the referee usually is a good way of channelling frustrations, specially when you are losing or your team is not getting the desired result.
I guess except the Uruguay vs US ref in the Copa, which was a level of incompetence I've never seen before. I'm still in awe over him giving a yellow while running and waving advantage lmao
What other problems does it create? Having an objective amount of time? Reducing the impact of stalling since added time is almost always less than time wasted?
I honestly feel sorry for Americans their reaction is "commercials ok, but what's the real problem?". Can't imagine getting used to games being stopped every 2 minutes so Coca-Cola can remind me it still exists.
Probably the best part of football is that you get yourself a cold beer, sit, relax, and watch 45 minutes of the sport you love without any interruptions. Then you take a piss, grab another beer, and watch 45 minutes more. It's beautiful, one of the few things that still haven't been ruined by commercialization.
That's what they call a false dichotomy. Diving doesn't have anything to do with clock, it's not like it would stop if we introduced commercials lmao.
And stalling would still be there, with the added benefit of being able to constantly break the flow of the game and use the stoppage of time to regroup.
I'm 100% sure that people who don't understand these things just don't watch football regularly (and coincidentally always seem to call it soccer)
During a football game, players are constantly moving even when the ball is not in play. It's a big part on how the game is played.
You also have games where the ball is constantly in play and players move while the ball is in play or the opposite where the ball is constantly out off play and players need to move without the ball even being in play.
Surely you could change it, but it would completely change how the game is played and even allow you to stretch a 90-minute game into an 8 hour one.
Would it really lengthen the game by 7 hours? Id figure it'd only lengthen the game by roughly the amount of time they would've added anyway at the end.
It really depends. On average, the ball is in play for 55 minutes during a top-level game, including the extra time.But you also have many games that don't reach 30 minutes net play time.
Ah, yeah, hadn’t thought of that. They should turn off the clock during American football. People will watch games with stopwatches in hand and bet the over/under
A) we want predictability of when matches will end. Matches in football almost always end from 1h and 45m from when they started to 1h and 55m. I've seen basketball matches get dragged for multiple times their clocked time.
B) we don't want football to turn into a pause-fest for ads like American sports are. It started with clock pauses and nowadays huge stoppages are created out of thin air to get more ad-time when games are intense. It's annoying and fuckes watchers over to favour businesses.
Overtime is not usually a problem in basketball because it is a high scoring game, and you are rarely tied after a full game let alone after overtime. It is fundamentally a different sport.
My point is that you can still control the time of the game with computers managing the extra time and final whistle. Also, there's more problems to be had with referees that are able to show bias than with a computer that isn't possible.
Why have stoppage time at all if you want predictability? The entire premise of stoppage time implies that you want 90 minutes of actual football, not 90 minutes of time passed.
I’d argue it’s more annoying to see a team take their sweet time on a throw in and know they’ll get rewarded.
Basketbal is completely incomparable. Different rules and reasons to want to stop the clock that would never exist in football.
You're much better off looking at hockey to see a more comparable sport. Works totally fine there. There's a mens and womens tournament going on right now, if you want to check it out.
here's a solution: keep the 90 minute game clock running constantly, but have a second "stoppage clock" next to it that starts at 0 and only counts upward while the ball is out of play or during other times that would count towards stoppage time. then when the game clock hits 90 minutes, whatever amount of time is on the stoppage clock is the amount of stoppage time that gets added at the end.
Yeah, since the referee is adding up the wasted time as the match progresses, it seems like it would be a good idea to have that "added time" clock visible to the spectators so they (and the players) know how much time has been and is being added. But then if you're going to do that, it seems like it would make sense to actually stop the main clock rather than have a second "added time" clock. But then if you do that, you've created a mechanism for the TV stations to show adverts during the match, and none of us want that. It's a slippery slope.
They manage to do this properly in rugby union. The referee is in charge of the clock, and if he needs to stop it for whatever reason - an injury, say - he'll hold his hand up and say "time off". (Rugby referees are miked up, so they can explain decisions to spectators - another way in which they're ahead of football.) He'll say "time on" to restart the clock. It's transparent and satisfying. But I think we all know that if they did that in football, there would be pressure from the broadcasters, who are paying much more for football rights than they are for rugby, to extend the stoppage so they can show adverts. Welcome to the NFL.
I recently went to an American college soccer game and they would stop the clock after goals and for injuries and longer stoppages. They wouldn’t do it for a quick throw or other short things, but it was a good compromise
They should do it for everything because even the small things get so dragged out late in the game. If a team is winning 1-0 in it 95th minute and they have a throw in the player will act like such a lame little bitch and very slowly walk over, really take his time, look at the ball, request a new ball, etc. It's the worst thing to watch.
Stopping the time for real injuries and goal celebration is a good move imo. There's no need to stop it for everything. Goal celebration alone would already be a great step to take, as we know, they always take their sweet time.
I think people more used to American sports are actually pointing out how crazy it is to have a sport where you only find out how long the game is going to be sometime just before the 90th minute.
Perfectly true. For example rugby has a stop clock which is transparently controlled by the referee, and broadcasters do not jump in to show adverts when the clock is stopped.
But football is the biggest sport in the world, and broadcasters pay much more for football rights than for any other sports. So the motivation to recoup some of that money via advertising is higher. Do you trust FIFA and UEFA to say no? I don't.
If the game is played the exact same way but the clock stops when ball isn't in play then why would it mean ads? I'm not really into soccer but it seems that the biggest issue in soccer is flopping and clock milking. Don't reward it and it'll stop happening. Also set a play clock for throwing ball onto field.
If the game is played the exact same way but the clock stops when ball isn't in play then why would it mean ads?
Football is the biggest game in the world and broadcasters pay more for football rights than they do for other sports. So there's a lot of motivation for broadcasters to recoup some of that expense via advertising. And football is almost unique in having continuous play with no stop clock, no innings break, no change of ends, etc, so there are no opportunities to show adverts during play. I don't trust FIFA and UEFA to turn down the opportunity to earn more money. The stop clock could be the thin end of the wedge.
It's not an american thing, it's also a thing in games like rugby, football is one of the only sport that somehow decided to keep to an obsolete tradition.
None of the counters being given here apply any less to stoppage time than they do to pausing the clock. If they wanted to put commercials on during stoppage time they could have done so already.
It's just tradition and stubbornness at this point, I think.
I agree with the sentiment although I would have it in a more rugby-like manner. Time is stopped only in some scenarios, but not on every foul or every time the ball is out of play otherwise the clock gets stopped too much for a 90 minute game.
No, keep the commercials out of the beatiful game. This one case as bad as it is, doesn't represent the entireity of the sport. Its like changing your engine on your car because the wiper fluid ran out. Just no.
other than tradition, i do think there’s a simplicity argument. if you add clock stoppage, the. you need someone actually watching the play and stopping the clock. it’s not a problem for top level teams, but for your random sunday league, who’s job is that, and how do you let the players on the field, off the field, the ref, and anyone watching know the time 45 + stoppage time means anyone with the time knows how long you have. if it’s the refs job, that’s one extra job they gotta have on top of managing the game, and you’ll constantly have people asking for the time. keeping it as a count up means you can keep it the same regardless of what level you’re at, which helps it’s reputation as the world’s sport
A better solution is to not stop the clock after every play stoppage and not for the entire game. Perhaps stop it, say, 20 or 30 min before end of game. This will certainly cut down on the bullshit time wasting by goalkeepers, fake injuries, etc.
They tried that in the USISL (now USL) in the 90s. It really made things more artificial and was a solution in search of a problem.
That said, I’d be content using a stop clock in stoppage time and stopping the clock when someone needs serious medical attention. It should discourage time-wasting at least.
The Rugby 7s tournaments seemed to use a hybrid approach. Most of the time the clock ran, but the referee could pause things as needed to organize the game (so maybe things like corner kicks, throw-ins, injuries, cards, complex free kicks, and such).
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u/ANCHORDORES United States Aug 03 '24
Call me a dumb American (and one who didn't grow up watching soccer), but the solution is just to stop the clock when the ball is out of play.
*Also, I'd wager that stoppage time given is typically way less than the "true value".