July 2nd, 2005

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Sports
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A Modest Proposal for Soccer

Tonight my brother and I renewed our sentence of suffering with Canada’s men’s soccer team. We watched Canada lose 2-1 to Honduras in a friendly (a ‘friendly’ is synonymous with ‘exhibition’, meaning it has no bearing on international competitions or rankings).

As frequently happens in the latter stages of a football game, the winning side employed a dozen tactics to delay the game. They feigned injuries at the slightest contact, they lingered over free kicks and dawdled during throw-ins. This practice, employed by every team, kills a game’s pace and frustrates its fans.

In football, the on-field official is the time-keeper. The clock is never stopped, and the official adds ‘added time’ at the end of each half to compensate for injury time, post-goal celebrations and other stoppages. At the end of this added time, the official ends the game at his discretion. Whether the added time actually adds up to the sum of the stoppages is rarely if ever discussed.

Why doesn’t football employ the basketball model of time-keeping? That is, when the whistle blows, the time stops. When each half reaches 45 minutes, the half is over. No official’s discretion, no times that don’t add up–just cold, imperial reliability. Unfortunately, football fans seem to favour their sport’s ambiguity.

Comments: 8 Responses so far

harp
July 3rd, 2005
1:36 pm

there’s a template for how much time is allowed (eg - 30 seconds for a card, or substitution) but you’ll never get an exact reading. Stopping the clock would frustrate fans more than anything and part of the charm of the game is the official having so much power over the game. Yes, there’s delaying over free kicks and whatnot, but it’s funny/good when your team’s doing it when scraping out a victory or hard-earned draw, so it balances out.

Our national team’s really gone downhill since the Gold Cup vintage of 5 years ago, it’s astounding. The new laws in Europe probably affect that too.

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joke
July 3rd, 2005
3:14 pm

Sure, and why don’t we have the last “minute” of a game take a half hour, just as in basketball.

No thanks. The rules are fine as they are.

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Darren
July 3rd, 2005
4:46 pm

Joke: Your argument is foolish. Basketball has an artificial final minute because of the game’s time-out and fouling structure. More importantly, a basketball scoring play can be constructed in only a few seconds. Neither of these circumstances apply to soccer, so there’s little risk of this final-minute problem creeping in.

Have you always had a status-quo view on soccer? I wonder, for example, what you thought of the change to the pass-back-to-keeper rule from a few years ago?

Harp: This is the response I frequently get from soccer fans–they’re strangely attracted to the game’s ambiguities.

I get a similar response when I suggest an electronic solution to offsides. Despite the fact that, as Nick Hornby points out, it’s nearly impossible for a linesman to look in two places at once, dedicated fans prefer unreliable humans to clinical accuracy.

Obviously, soccer doesn’t have popularity problems in the rest of the world, but I guess I like my sports to be as fair as possible.

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Declan
July 3rd, 2005
5:22 pm

This is pure speculation, but I suspect its a matter of simple practicality. basektball generally takes place inside in gyms with scoreboards. Soccer generally takes place on little bumpy pitches lucky to have bleachers never mind a scoreboard.

True, the referee could use his own stopwatch and keep starting and stopping it, but that would be prone to error and the fans would have no idea how much time was left in the game so it could be prone to corruption as well.

It’s by no means insurmountable and basketball certainly manages to function even when there’s no scoreboard around but I still figure that’s probably the reason (along with tradition).

Still, I share your frustration, both with team Canada and timewasting.

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Darren
July 3rd, 2005
5:39 pm

Declan: As I understand it, the referee in basketball isn’t the official timekeeper. There’s some guy on the side line who listens for the whistle and starts and stops the (official, which is to say the big) clock himself. That model, though trickier because of the noise and size of a soccer field, might work. I believe it’s applied in high school gyms around the globe.

If you want to get slightly more sophisticated, you could just devise a way for the on-field official’s stopwatch to ‘talk’ to the big score clock, which would display the current time remaining. This would enable the on-field official to continue to own the official time, but would let the punters in on it.

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Sue
July 3rd, 2005
6:19 pm

Considering that soccer/football is one of the longer games, at 90 minutes of play instead of 60 minutes for many other sports, I think if you stopped time when the game stopped, matches could take all freakin’ day. Think of what hooliganism could take place in the stands if the crowds were gathered there for all that time.

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Darren
July 3rd, 2005
6:33 pm

Sue: In theory, the actual total game time shouldn’t be any longer. Instead of going with the official’s rough estimate of the total stoppages, you’d be going with imperical data.

A soccer game currently tends to be, what, 48 minutes per half, plus 15 minutes for an intermission, given us 111 minutes. Compare that with a hockey game (averaging at least 2 hours and 15 minutes) or American football (surely averaging over 3 hours). So, despite being 90 minutes, soccer suffers from fewer stoppages, less time per stoppage and no commercial timeouts.

One downside of my proposal is that it would open the door for commercial timeouts in soccer, which would suck.

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harp
July 3rd, 2005
8:17 pm

that’s exactly it, Darren. At my first hockey game several years ago, I was astounded to learn of the “TV time out”.

Though infuriating at times, it can work in your team’s favour if you’re hanging on for dear life (as Canada did through a couple games in the Gold Cup, like Mexico comes to mind) and without the time-wasting we’d have never lifted that trophy. True that a linesman can’t see in two places at once, but that human error can work for or against you. I like the human element at the sacrifice of accuracy overall. Within reason, of course.

You should check this DVD out called FIFA Fever, it has an overview of all the World Cups with all sorts of highlights. Not just goals, but controversies, bad calls, all kinds of stuff that’s pretty interesting. It’s a part of the history of the game, its simplicity almost is a part of its root. Though I sure am glad about that back-pass rule as stated earlier!

I sure wasn’t complaining about a flag against Schevchenko in the first half of *that* game, for instance…

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