Is the new added time system at the World Cup at good thing?
Time goes by so slowly for those who add 12 minutes onto the end of the second half.
We are now a few games into the Qatar World Cup and other than FIFA’s insistence to shoot themselves in the foot at every given opportunity, one thing has been incredibly apparent.
We are going to have a lot of added time.
Now in some of these games, most notably England vs Iran where unfortunately Iran’s goalkeeper’s nose was introduced to his defender’s forehead at speed, there have been long stoppages, but it does seem that aside from this there is a commitment from the officials to make sure that the ball is in play for closer to 90 minutes than it has been in the past.
Five to six minutes added on before halftime was once a rarity; in this tournament, it seems like it’s going to be commonplace. And this extension also applies to the end of the game as well.
But is this a good thing? Well, let’s take a quick look.
“Football is a simple game. Twenty-two men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, the Germans always win,” is the famous quote by Gary Lineker but though there might be 90 minutes on the clock, that is not how long football is actually played for.
Last season, the Twitter account UtdArena looked into the 19 top leagues in world football and found that the Eerste Divisie in the Netherlands was the league where the ball was in play the most… with 58 minutes.
These were the rest of his findings:
Armed with similar information, some of the top minds in football, and by that I mean Arsene Wenger, suggested that to combat this, the clock should be stopped during injuries and substitutions to minimise the effect of time wasting.
Some ex-footballers and fans have suggested that this should go even further and the clock should be stopped every time the ball goes out of play and the game reduced to 60 minutes in total, though this seems excessive to me (and also like an advertiser’s dream).
But it seems like in Qatar they are trying their own method, by silently keeping track of any time wasted and then adding it on at the end.
Pierluigi Collina, who is now Chairman of FIFA’s referees’ committee, confirmed this was the case before the tournament began, saying the fourth officials had been instructed to keep track of this.
It hasn’t yet been fully clarified just what contributes to the added time (though it can be assumed), but when the board goes up the inflated number is there all the same. Tunisia and Denmark seemed a perfectly fine game, but they still got four minutes at the end of the first half.
This of course affects the length of games.
Workers who had scheduled convenient meetings and parents who needed to pick up their kids from school were well aware of this during England’s fixture against Iran, but if we all get to watch more actual football in that time then it’s a fine trade-off on paper, as long as we don’t get too many ridiculous additions.
And the stronger teams will unsurprisingly be happier with this because more time with the ball in play means more time for their players to do something with it.
A team brings on substitutes to change the game? Well, those subs now have more time to do something.
But more time favours the aggressor in every match-up and personally, that takes away the balance of the game and nullifies the emphasis on defending well, which is an art form in itself.
The biggest losers however in this are the weaker teams and the underdogs. Those trying to hold onto a lead that they’ve earned against the odds (to be honest this applies to a team of any quality level that is trying to stay ahead).
As much as we don’t like to admit it, negative football has been a viable tactic for weaker teams to help them match up against superior forces, especially later in games if they are trying to defend an unexpected lead.
Like the Spanish Inquisition, their main weapons are ‘Siege mode’, tactical fouling, keeping the ball out of play and surprise (this coming in the form of counter-attacking football).
Negating the effectiveness of this could remove the frequency of upsets in the short term. Some of you may be happy with this outcome, but I expect that’s because you support a team (as I do) that would be on the benefitting side.
The obvious counter-argument is it encourages weaker teams to play better football and focus on evolving their game.
Saudi Arabia’s valiant effort to defeat Argentina today is a shining example of that. Herve Renard employed an effective high line which allowed Saudi Arabia to break down Argentina (though Argentina should have exploited this more effectively than they did) before dropping back and defending deep.
But not every team can do that and more importantly do it consistently. There’s also the consideration that more time on the clock could lead to the reverse with teams being even less adventurous with their football throughout the match.
We are watching the World Cup, so the World has to be represented, and whether we like it or not it is clear that there are confederations that are much stronger than others due to existing reasons and have deep and talented pools to pull 26 players with spares from (Footnote 1: see Colonialism). So the rest need to find some way to even the odds.
It’s all well and good wanting the end of negative archaic football, but the question then becomes can these teams successfully move away from these tactics when they are rewarded for winning frequently (with the money that would be needed to undertake a complete rework of a nations footballing project) rather than focusing on the long term.
Furthermore, it will be interesting to see how ‘more football’ will affect a group of players who are already struggling due to an unprecedented level of fixture congestion in a climate that most of them are unfamiliar with.
It’s an interesting debate and one that will likely be raised at multiple points throughout the competition as we continue to see double figures on the fourth official’s board.
It will also be interesting to see how this increased amount of added time affects games when we reach the knockout stages and when two giants face each other (as Spain and Germany will in the third matchday).
We can’t truly make a final decision until after the competition ends on December 18th and the dust has settled, but personally I don’t think it’s the greatest idea to throw it in at the last minute and just ‘see what happens’.