Football Is Opera, Soccer Is Punk Rock

Why nobody knows how much time is left in a soccer game.

Lots of Americans wonder: Why does nobody know how much time is left to play in World Cup soccer game?

For example, in yesterday’s Turkey-USA game, when the clock reached 90 minutes with the score tied 2 to 2, the referee announced that there would be an extra 7 minutes of stoppage time to account for excessive time-wasting, injuries, and hydration breaks.

The seven extra minutes came and went, but Turkey had the ball and was mounting a rare credible offensive threat, eventually scoring the winning goal 7 minutes and 51 seconds into the seven minutes of stoppage time.

Why the extra 51 seconds?

Well, an American player had gotten hurt early in the stoppage time, so that dead ball time apparently added more stoppage time to stoppage time, although nobody in the stadium was told how much.

The ref lets spectators know how much stoppage time he’s adding at the end of 90 minutes, but how could he possibly inform the world TV audience of how many extra minutes he’s adding on top of that?

Use hand gestures?

I don’t think so!

And refs have some latitude to let play continue as long as one team is mounting a plausible effort to score, as Turkey was for those last 51 seconds before its goal. Those promising attacks happen so infrequently that refs tend to let the game play on to see what, if anything, will happen.

Note that adding seven minutes of stoppage time doesn’t mean that there had been only 7 minutes in the previous 90 minutes in which play had been stopped.

Even though soccer fans love to claim that soccer, unlike American football, consists of 90 minutes of non-stop thrilling action, studies of English Premier League matches suggest that the ball is not in play for an average of 35 minutes of the 90 minutes in each match, due to fouls, out of bounds, injuries, fake injuries, goal celebrations, hydration breaks in this World Cup, and what have you. The ref adds stoppage time only for extra time-killing beyond the reasonable minimum.

Nor is the action terribly non-stop even when the ball is in play. Besides the time spent kicking the ball backwards or sideways, most of the attacking play involves roughly a half dozen players at once while the other 16 on the field stroll around in other parts of the field and follow the progress of the far-off game with interest.

The greatest player, Lionel Messi, tends to spend about 83% of a match standing around or walking, 15-16% jogging, and maybe 60 or 70 seconds, a little over 1% of the 55 minutes of actual play, sprinting. Of course, players with less ability to predict what will happen next will have to run more, but there are human limits to how much intense energy you can expend in one day.

American football receivers and defensive backs probably sprint about as much per game as do soccer players: about a minute, i.e., not much of the time in the big picture of things.

But because American football has offensive and defensive units, players can go all out a higher percentage of the time they are on the field. For example, if Messi runs hard for one minute out of his 55 minutes of playing time, while Travis Kelce runs hard for one minute out of, say, his 7 minutes of time when the ball is in play for the Kansas City Chiefs offense, the NFL game will appear to be more intense on average per second of actual action.

To the American mind, it would seem pretty easy to simply declare that a World Cup soccer game consists of 60 minutes of action with the stadium clock stopping whenever play stops. And you could even have the clock count down to 00:00, without any mystery about how much time might be left.

Oldsters may remember when the NFL similarly had two separate clocks. Up through 1969, the stadium clock that spectators and players could see was just an unofficial estimate of the time left. The official time was on the clock hidden in the head ref’s pocket, and he wasn’t telling. Thus your team might be driving for a come from behind victory with 14 seconds left on the stadium clock, when suddenly the ref would wave his arms and declare game over: you lose.

When the rival AFL started in 1960, they sensibly decided that that was really, really stupid. So they made the stadium clock the one and only official clock. When the two leagues merged in 1970, the AFL rule became universal. After all, professional football is a big time operation and it can afford to pay an official to operate the stadium clock in accordance with the officiating crews’ arm signals.

But that would violate the soccer ethos that you ought to be able to play a World Cup match with as little additional infrastructure as possible. The ideal way to put on a World Cup match would be the exact same way that you and 22 friends would play a soccer match in your local park: 11 on 11 with one ref with a watch.

As I mentioned yesterday, the American football ethos is like that of grand opera: the more lavish the expense, the better. Sure, it would be cheaper and safer and saner to put on Aida with just a puppet replica of an elephant. But that violates the spirit of grand opera. For example, in 1997 the community opera association of Grand Rapids, Michigan mounted an Aida with 150 human extras, 16 horses, multiple elephants, and a tiger.

That may sound excessive, but once you get into the spirit of grand opera, you start to realize that you’ll always regret not having rented a live elephant, ideally an unfixed bull who might rampage around the stage and toss the tenor with his tusks into the orchestra pit. (See the highly entertaining 1979 book Great Operatic Disasters for numerous on-stage catastrophes, including the classic anecdotes Tosca and the Trampoline and Tosca and the USC Football Team.)

In contrast, soccer is supposed to be like punk rock, which has a minimalist, low rent ethos.

Without too much practice, you and your high school buddies can play “Blitzkrieg Bop” in your garage exactly the same way The Ramones played it on their 20th anniversary tour in 1996, other than that The Ramones would play it better than you could.

But just because it was their 20th Anniversary tour, The Ramones didn’t bring out a string section with conductor, a saxophonist, a synth player, a hype man, the Solid Gold Dancers, and three hefty black ladies to sing back-up. Nah, Dee-Dee just shouted One Two Three Four as always, and off they went, same as some juvenile delinquents could do in a garage.

Same with the World Cup.

After all, 22 guys from the neighborhood playing soccer in a vacant lot in Malta don’t know how much time is left in the game, so why should Turkey and Team USA?