The time has finally come to add a stop clock to soccer games

Younger audiences, raised on video games and YouTube, have grown increasingly disinterested in sports. The time is now to make soccer games shorter and here’s how.

I am a soccer purist. I generally hate gimmicks.

When crazy ideas were thrown out around enlarging goals, I was the first to denounce those notions as idiotic. More goals doesn’t always make for a better game.

FIFA has recently intensified its push to want to hold the World Cup every two years, rather than the current four. Again, not a great idea. It would dilute the world’s greatest sporting event.

One plan, however, that I have embraced is shortening soccer games — but only if it’s done correctly and without altering the sport as we know it. You see, younger audiences (those of you raised on a diet of video games and short YouTube videos) are increasingly becoming disinterested in sports as attention spans continue to shrink. As a result, the time is now to add a stop clock to soccer.

Many sports, most notably baseball, have struggled to attract younger fans. Overall, soccer has not, but could find itself in a similar position in the coming years. Why watch a live game when you can play FIFA on your PlayStation? Why attend a match when you can catch the highlights on your phone later?

How much soccer did you watch this past week? If you watched any of Europe’s top five domestic competitions or even the Champions League, you didn’t actually see as much as you think. A look at several metrics helps here. OPTA, which puts out analytics used by coaches and pundits alike, keeps records on something called “effective playing time.”

The stat keeps track of the actual minutes the ball is in play. Those minutes do not include goals, injuries, substitutions and time wasting, which sometimes reaches farcical dimensions in soccer.

Soccer isn’t actually being played for 90 minutes

Soccer technically lasts 90 minutes and features no stoppages — with the referee adding on added time at the end of each half. Effective playing time, when it comes to Europe’s top five leagues, could serve as a roadmap for change. Here’s what the stats say: League matches in England, Spain, Germany, Italy and France are all under 60 minutes if you take into account effective playing time. The use of VAR to review plays over the past few years during games has made the need for a stop clock even greater.

These stats from just before the pandemic in the Premier League, and with instant replay in use, only further illustrates this point. Since the pandemic, there is more use of video review across the globe and the normal three subs have been increased to five. These factors have all contributed to the decline in actual minutes the ball is in play.

The solution is to make games 60 minutes in length — each half lasting 30 minutes — with the referee stopping the clock whenever there is an injury, a goal, substitution and video review. No need for added time by the referee at the end of each half. Games would still fit into two-hour television windows, just without the time-wasting that plagues the sport today.

The International Football Association Board, which makes changes to the sport in conjunction with FIFA, first said it would study such a plan back in 2017. MLS, before the pandemic, had said it was open to radical experimentation with the clock in an effort to reduce time wasting. It’s not a terrible thing given that effective playing time in MLS, for example, has dropped from 56.9 minutes per game last year to 55.3 minutes this season.

The changes would eliminate time wasting, which teams engage in as a way of maintaining their lead or playing for a draw in the game’s dying minutes. It very often makes for some very boring soccer or gamesmanship that grinds on the nerves.

I admit that these changes would be revolutionary. It is also a much needed one. It’s one way to ensure that the game remains fresh and younger audiences are around in the future.