In 1866, London and Sheffield decided their soccer match should consist of two halves totalling 90 minutes. In 1868, the newly-formed Football Association added extra time could be added by the referee. That became the rule world-wide.
Soccer has always been in tough when applying for membership in the exclusive club that is North American major sports. Too boring, they say. Not enough scoring. And what about dives by players in the name of fake injuries?
The rest of the world, which knows the game only as football, insists this is a beautiful game…and it is. However, it’s a beautiful game with blemishes beyond its most recent flaw: the dreaded drones of spying. Beauty erases boredom, lack of scoring is not a blemish and pretending to be hurt can be ignored.
Soccer’s biggest problem is time.
Games that last 90 minutes…but not 90 minutes of action. In this greatest age of technology, why can nobody put a clock on “action?” And just how much of 90 minutes is live action?
In an experiment that was decidedly inexact, I put my watch on the last soccer game Canada will play at the Olympic Games for the next four years, barring a suspension by the International Olympic Committee for its spy-by-drone tactics. It was the Canadian women against Germany and, while it may not have been a classic, I was only looking to size a sample. And I had no idea how much “action time” I would find.
Because it was on TV, precise timing was distorted by split screens to watch swimming, belated returns from replays, and images of which spectator faces were the most bizarre. That aside, what I found was 25 minutes and 29 seconds of dead ball time, when it wasn’t in play because of stoppages. Interestingly, the time was 12:27 in the first half and 13:02 in the second half, which in my world makes it conclusive that about 25 per cent of games have zero action.
Why is this ethical? Does the clock stop in hockey games when the puck’s out of play, or when there’s a timeout? It does in soccer, when the ball ’s out of play or there’s a “cooling break.” Does the clock stop in pro football when players are substituting: offence for defence? Or when there’s a timeout? It does in soccer.
Yes, extra time is added by the referee, which was factored into my calculations. How does the referee know how much time to add? Does he have a stopwatch? Even if that’s the case, the additional time is always rounded up (or down) to the nearest minute. Soccer’s idea of progress is now to let everyone know how much time was being added, as opposed to guessing how much time referees would add.
In most major sports, games last about two and a half hours. In soccer it’s about two hours. So wouldn’t it make sense to have a play clock running, and stopping, the way it does when there’s action in any time-based game, to have less boredom, less killing time and more action?
There is a reason why it won’t happen — tradition. Nobody tells soccer what to do.
