David De Gea’s goalkeeping heroics in Manchester United’s recent 1-0 win against Tottenham
Hotspur were remarkable for many reasons. Perhaps not since Jan Tomaszewski has Wembley
Stadium witnessed a Sondico-shaped forcefield of such invincibility.
In fact, his instinctive reactions to a series of helpfully aimed Spurs shots ranked third
on the all-time Premier League list for most saves in a single game. But the Spaniard’s
performance was also noteworthy for the amount of time he wasted.
It’s been reported that De Gea’s goal-kicks amounted to almost 5% of the match, which
saw a total of 10 restarts from the away side taking an average of 26 seconds per clearance.
While the club’s enduring “Attack, Attack, Attack” philosophy has clearly still to
recover from Jose Mourinho’s ideological hack, this serves to illustrate a broader
issue at the centre of football, which the sport’s authorities are now seeking to address.
In November, The International FA Board (IFAB) confirmed plans to discuss a range of measures
intended to combat time-wasting. Founded upon the organisation’s 2017 PLAY FAIR! initiative,
the news came shortly after a Premier League match between Cardiff and Burnley, which saw
the ball in play for 42 minutes and two seconds.
Officially confirmed as the shortest amount of actual playing time in the English top
flight since December 2013, when supporters enjoyed 40 minutes and 50 seconds of Stoke
City against Aston Villa, fans spent eight mins waiting for Cardiff's Sean Morrison to
work his way through 20 throw-ins.
For some time, pressure has been growing on the international football community to reconsider
traditional timekeeping measures, a fact highlighted on the biggest stage at last summer’s World
Cup tournament. The game’s showpiece event featured the dazzling spectacle of Neymar
rolling around the grass for approximately 15 mins.
The competition actually provided an even more acute illustration of the damaging and
defining impact such behaviour can have on the sport. In July, FiveThirtyEight, a website
that uses data to analyse happenings in global news and sport, crunched the numbers on Russia’s
footballing fiesta.
Founded by famed statistician Nate Silver, who successfully predicted the outcomes in
49 of the 50 states at the 2008 US Presidential election, they targeted two key themes: amount
of time wasted by each team at the tournament and the accuracy of stoppage time added by
referees at every match.
Their findings were simultaneously alarming and depressingly predictable. In the first
example, isolating five basic activities that allow players to control game pace – throw-ins,
goal kicks, corner kicks, free kicks and substitutions – a total of 4,529 points of data sourced
from 48 group stage games revealed: “Teams that are leading take about 34% longer to
complete these activities than teams that are trailing.”
In the second example, FiveThirtyEight used a stopwatch and a team of timekeepers to track
all 3194 stoppages during the first 32 games played at the World Cup. Their findings confirmed
that the current system is “wildly inaccurate”, a fact graphically underlined by the Group
B game between Iran and Morocco.
“Each side used all three substitutes; there was only one booking; no goals were scored.
In a group with Spain and Portugal, both teams presumably were eager to steal a crucial three
points and break the 0-0 tie. When the game reached the 90-minute mark, the fourth official
raised the electronic board to indicate six minutes of added time. It should have read
14 minutes,” they explained.
In a bid to address the issue, The IFAB have proposed a range of ideas “to reduce time-wasting
and ’speed up’ the game”. These measures include: Stricter calculation of additional
time and Goalkeeper holding the ball. Here referees will be directed to stop the clock
whenever incidents such as a goal, penalty, injury or substitution take place and enforce
the six seconds rule when goalkeepers are in possession.
Other strategies listed as part of PLAY FAIR! include: Self-passing at a free kick, corner
kick and goal kick. This idea, which would allow a fouled player to continue playing
directly after a foul, was part of the original 1863 Laws of the Game. Further options include:
Moving ball at goal kick and Goal kick position. These would rethink the existing parameters
of the sport at the point of a goalkeeper restarting play.
Elsewhere, more dramatic policy changes have also been outlined, for example: Effective
playing time (EPT). This centres on stopping the clock whenever the ball is out of play
and could result in a match consisting of two periods of 30 minutes rather than 45.
“Such a radical change would not only mean that there would be less point in players
wasting time but would also mean that in a competition every club would play exactly
the same amount of EPT,” explained The IFAB. Another option is: Stadium clocks. This would
provide a direct and accurate visualisation for fans to the referee’s official match
calculations.
However, in an interview with Tifo, The IFAB explained that their immediate priority at
the upcoming AGM in Aberdeen would centre on “simple and immediate measures”, namely
the potentially mandatory introduction of one specific strategy: Substitutions. This
commands substituted players to leave the field of play by the nearest boundary rather
than at the halfway line and has already been successfully trialled globally.
Elsewhere, the organisation, which includes four British football associations (England,
Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) and FIFA, remain focussed on the landmark recent
introduction of Video Assistant Referees (VAR) and seeking to build greater education about
the laws of the game to the sport’s global audience.
The IFAB told Tifo: “Our goal has always been and will continue to be the development
of the Laws of the Game and how the game is played, based on ‘what football wants’.
But we also want to ensure the image of the game can improved by focusing any relevant
amendments on the behaviour and fairness on the field of play.”