Football's mythical match clock is entitled nonsense
Football's mythical match clock is entitled nonsense
Does football need a stopping match clock to maximise its ninety minutes? Of course it doesn’t.
Southampton look doomed to Premier League relegation again. I have a strange relationship with them, having grown up half an hour down the road in a town where the football team engaged in a one-way rivalry with a big city club several divisions above them.
I never much cared for that notion, nor have I ever had any affection for Saints. I went to The Dell and St Mary’s many times, mostly as an away supporter for Aston Villa matches but latterly as a neutral. I have great friends who are big Southampton supporters.
So I’ve seen them a lot over the years. I’ve seen them be better than my team, and often worse. I’ve seen them decline and rise and decline and rise again.
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen them as tame, as weak, as listless as this.
Football's mythical match clock is entitled nonsense
Have you ever left a football match feeling short-changed? I have. I’ve been let down by the performance of my team, by the general quality of the match, by the overall experience. By refereeing? Sure. By food, weather and other supporters too. But I’ve never thought a match too short. It seems I’m in the minority.
It’s long been my sense that the clamour for a match clock is in fact a tangle of issues and that none of them would be satisfactorily solved by freezing time – at least not when you take into account the unforeseen consequences along with the negatives we know about.
For many supporters there’s righteousness in the battle against the perceived blight of time-wasting. It doesn’t take much imagination to make a reasonable case against it, after all. They have the law on their side too.
But you and I both know that we only really take offence at time-wasting when it stifles our own teams. Put the boot on the other foot and we are far more amenable to players running down the minutes with their dastardly doings.
Time-wasting isn’t always designed to waste time. It’s done in any number of different situations and most of them are more to do with momentum and pressure. Killing the game – interrupting the rhythm – is its most common purpose. Stopping the clock would have no effect on that whatsoever.
In the 2022/23 Premier League season the average ball-in-play time has been 54 minutes and 46 seconds. That’s not something I’ll defend; it’s the lowest since records began a decade ago. But those records are from Opta and their recent feature on The Analyst editorialised the situation thus:
“At the basic, fundamental level, we are seeing less and less of the product we pay increasingly more and more for.”
Well, sort of.
The article on The Analyst also recognises that the Premier League doesn’t have the lowest ball-in-play time in Europe’s major leagues by either volume or percentage. Tellingly, the 2022 World Cup averaged slightly more than 58 minutes simply through more strictly adding stoppage time. That’s more than the Premier League managed in any of the measured seasons.
The numbers beneath the numbers are more interesting but it’s the value-for-money argument that sticks in my craw for a number of reasons. That the difference between the most and least ball-in-play time amounts to an unwhopping 57 seconds is just one of them. It’s worth examining but it’s not exactly a matter for Watchdog, is it?
Advocates of the match clock see the amount of ball-in-play time and subtract it from ninety, aghast at the squandering of what might have been. But football isn’t a ninety-minute game and it never has been. Supporters have never been promised ninety minutes. They’ve never paid for ninety minutes. Until fairly recently they’d never expected ninety minutes. Why now?
The match clock isn’t a fix for a real problem. It’s a sop to the entitlement that’s now rife in football supporter culture. Just like video assistant referees and referees with microphones. Just like hour-by-hour injury updates. Just like transfers for the sake of transfers.
Nevertheless, there is a debate to be had. Feasibility should be explored and implications – predictable and otherwise – thoroughly considered.
The bud of my opposition is the same as it was prior to the introduction of goal-line technology (which works) and VAR (which doesn’t and was never going to): I believe in the universality of football. As far as possible our sport should be played by the same rules from the bottom to the very top.
Make no mistake, the match clock is as unworkable in non-league and grassroots football as VAR. Any move towards it at higher levels is a hard no from me.
But are there other solutions? If we take the complaints at face value and in good faith – if we accept that time-wasting is a pressing matter and ball-in-play time is being maliciously reduced – how else might IFAB and FIFA get to grips with it while maintaining universality within reason?
Any alternatives are likely to belong to one of three categories. First, stuff the referee can do now. Second, stuff that involves a change in law to do with time-wasting. Third, stuff that requires a more substantial alteration to the game itself. I don’t necessarily agree with any or all of these. Call it a thought experiment.
Time-wasting is already outlawed under the ‘Delaying the restart of play’ section of Law 12. That’s within the ‘Cautionable offences’ subsection and actually dictates that the referee must caution a player who wastes time with the ball dead. Do that more and maybe it’ll happen less.
That demands that officials are streetwise to the tricks employed by players so it’ll never be perfect. But there’s ground between leniency and perfection and our referees are capable of finding it. As evidenced by the World Cup, just adding time on more generously could also be an easy part of the fix.
There are updates to the laws that would be as applicable in non-league as the top flight. Most obvious offences are covered but how might they be managed differently? There’s a certain fluidity about it – we ask referees to apply common sense and there is value, at least in my opinion, in individual referees approaching things in their own way.
Time-wasting is usually obvious, though, and a clampdown on that is preferable to a sixty-minute match clock. The introduction of a warning whistle followed by a no-questions-asked yellow card in every instance of time-wasting would go a long way towards snuffing it out.
Stoppage time is covered by Law 7, which refers to ‘Allowance for time lost’ due to a variety of stoppages including VAR checks and medical delays. Time-wasting is on the list too but there’s no further detail within Law 7 itself and referees are instructed that time should only be added when delays are excessive.
Losing that guideline is an option and would service the rationale for a match clock while leaving timekeeping at the referee’s discretion. Specific guidance on how much time to add for each type of delay is another possibility.
But that’s all pretty unambitious, isn’t it? Are we serious about ball-in-play time or not? If we’re going to cry and scream and stamp our feet about Them taking football away from us, let’s act decisively.
Let’s talk about fewer free kicks by using the advantage rule more often irrespective of whether the team in question would rather have the game stopped. With clarity in law, that’s achievable.
Let’s talk about substitutions without stopping play. It would require a fourth official at all matches in the midst of a refereeing recruitment crisis but it would at least keep the Laws of the Game universal.
Let’s talk about not stopping the game for treatment of minor injuries. That other sports do something is never an argument that sits well with me (our sport is better) but let’s be honest, minor injuries are a time-wasting minefield. Why not spike it at source?
Let’s talk about a mandatory time limit on every VAR check along with a stated reason for it. Looking for something, anything, isn’t good enough and it leads to long periods with the ball dead. How about correcting the offside law, broken in order to suit VAR, to ensure fewer offences and therefore fewer stoppages?
The intellectual overlap between the supporters who want or wanted VAR and the supporters currently losing their shit about football matches being too short must be a scary and fascinating place. It won’t be sparsely populated.
VAR is the real issue here. If the difference between the ‘best’ and ‘worst’ ball-in-play seasons on record is 57 seconds then is the culprit more likely to be active time-wasting or the massive delay cycle we’ve brought in for no good reason? We had time-wasting in 2013/14 too.
The ball-in-play dip doesn’t mean a great deal to me and I truly believe it to be primarily a consequence of VAR. Yet the numbers are real and it’s worth considering ways to deal with that. I am but one man and my opinion doesn’t amount to much because people do care about this.
But any solution should be applicable in a way that leaves the match at ninety minutes and the referee in charge of the game and its timekeeping whatever the level. The horse has bolted when it comes to the universality of the sport but that shouldn’t stop us being concerned about its welfare.
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“Every game in the League Cup, all opening day, final day, midweek, Bank Holiday, Christmas and New Year fixtures will be put on the streaming service, along with EFL trophy games.”
Last week the clubs of the EFL voted unanimously in favour of a £935m rights deal with Sky Sports, which will broadcast 1,059 matches per season from 2024/25 without the abolition of the 3pm blackout. A new streaming service will do most of the heavy lifting and Sky will show six matches at once every Saturday lunchtime.
Salty beef extracts
The ritual of being a Kashima Antlers Fan and my first J League experience (Hidden Japan)
Doncaster Rovers Belles: The shocking demotion of a Women's Super League founder (BBC Sport)
Going back to St Albans to find a club easing out of near-stasis towards the Conference (Football365)
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