Stop worrying about time-wasting - every team does it and it's not getting (much) worse (2024)

Time-wasting. By all accounts, a massive waste of time… or a means to an end by which a football team can win a match.

There have been several high-profile examples this season of what has felt like inexorably painful bouts of time-wasting. Players dropping to the ground one, two, even three at a time in the closing stages of matches, ‘keepers taking an age with goal kicks… it’s felt extremely common. Because it is common. It basically happens in every single match — and that’s nothing new.

Add in new elements such as players deliberately feigning a knock to engineer a window for an ‘impromptu’ team talk, or the altogether more sinister approach of pretending to have a head injury to immediately stop play and it’s no surprise that ‘game management’ has become such a talking point.

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World football governing body FIFA’s idea to punish time-wasting teams at the men’s World Cup in November and December last year by adding extended periods of stoppage time was generally welcomed, but it hasn’t transferred to club football in the months since Qatar.

And every team does it. Recently, you had the succession line of Newcastle United doing it to pretty much everyone, then Arsenal doing it to Newcastle, then Brighton doing it to Arsenal. On and on it goes. Some teams — and their supporters — revel in it. League One side Wycombe Wanderers even have supporters who sing in praise of it.

Others, usually followers of the bigger clubs, are accustomed to it and expect their team to do it… then rail when less prestigious opponents dare to employ the same tactics.

Not only does every team do it, but pretty much every manager moans about it.

Some, including Mikel Arteta, Antonio Conte and Unai Emery, very rarely complain about time-wasting in post-match interviews, choosing to save their haranguing specifically for the referee or fourth official.

Others can’t help themselves.

Here’s Brighton coach Roberto De Zerbi after a defeat to Emery’s Aston Villa earlier in November: “If the games are 90 minutes, during the 90 minutes you have to play — you can’t play 45 or 44 minutes.

“Yes, a lot of wasting time. Too much wasting time. I thought before I came to work in the Premier League. I thought in the Premier League the people were correct, also in Italy, also in Latin countries, but it is not like this.”

Conversely, this was Gary O’Neil following a Brighton victory over his Bournemouth team: “It’s not our job to stop how long they take over a free kick. I am glad that the lads were trying to hurry them up.”

Jesse Marsch had a meltdown after his Leeds team’s October draw with Villa, then managed by Steven Gerrard, arguing they “slow the game down and now it’s two or three opponents that we’ve had here that just wanna throw the ball away, take a minute in every goal kick, and so we need some help to manage this.

“I almost feel we have to apologise to our fans. They didn’t get an entertaining match, they got a match that was slowed down by an opponent from the first minute. I will be speaking to someone from the League and (have) already spoken to the referees’ committee — it’s clearly a tactic.”

Marsch might have had a point about Villa, but it’s fair to say that Premier League referees have noticed. Nineteen yellow cards for time-wasting (more than double the team with the next most; and six of them to goalkeeper Emiliano Martinez alone) in their 37 matches so far this season is quite a lot.

In the interest of balance, let’s include a couple more teams.

This was Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp following a draw with Tottenham Hotspur at the end of last season: “Time-wasting — it doesn’t make it easier for us, but it is smart. But I cannot play like this. It’s not me.”

The piece de resistance came from Eddie Howe, whose Newcastle team top the chart for their matches having the lowest percentage of time with the ball in play. Newcastle also have the longest average delay before their goal kicks are taken, at 37 seconds.

“We wanted the ball the play, we wanted to find our rhythm, it was very stop-start,” Howe said after the 2-0 loss to Arsenal at St James’ Park three weeks ago. “It was frustrating from our perspective.

“That was suiting, of course, the away team. As the home team, you want the ball in play, so it was frustrating in that sense for us, definitely. They slowed it down, lots of breaks in play. We can’t control that, that’s the referee’s job.”

So we’re all in agreement: it’s a problem, it’s annoying. But is it an issue that’s getting worse? Or does it just feel that way because it’s been given a bit of airtime lately?

Let’s crunch the numbers.

Your textbook, standard, basic form of time-wasting is a ‘keeper taking their sweet time with a goal kick. If not playing out from the back, they’ll take a while to pick the ball up, perhaps take it from one side of the six-yard box to the other, then carefully peruse which exact spot 70 yards upfield to lump it towards, amid a barracking of whistles and boos from the opposition fans.

Data from Opta shows that the average time taken for a goal kick this season is 29.54 seconds, which is actually quicker than the 2018-19 season, when the average was 30 seconds. Who can forget?

But yes, interestingly, over a 10-year period, the average on this stat has only increased by one second.

It’s a similar story with throw-ins, which have only gone up by a couple of seconds on average, albeit with more throws than goal kicks in a match this will cumulatively add more time.

Where the huge differences occur is the types of stoppages that have been impacted by VAR, the most obvious being how long the game stops before a penalty is taken. Every spot-kick awarded is checked by VAR, sometimes painstakingly, which has led to a delay of an average of two minutes and 23 seconds — more than double the amount of time it took to take a penalty a decade ago.

VAR was introduced in the 2019-20 season, and that’s where the big leap in time occurs in the table below.

That’s a lengthy delay, but unless Villa’s Martinez is involved, it rarely has anything to do with time-wasting.

Ditto a restart after a goal — not least given the fact that the team who have just conceded usually want to get going again as quickly as possible.

Once more, this has increased a fair bit since VAR came into being in 2019 (although interestingly the number drops in 2020-21, a season when almost all matches were played behind closed doors and there were no fans in the stands to celebrate your goals with).

Direct free kicks can occasionally be delayed by a VAR check too, but this is the biggest non-VAR stoppage which has considerably increased in the past decade.

Corners have also gradually gone up, taking eight seconds longer on average since 2013-14.

All of which means more stoppage time, which has gone up by two minutes in the past 10 seasons, with another big jump after VAR arrived and another decrease for that pandemic-affected season.

And yet at the same time, the average length of time that the ball is in play during a match has reduced. In 2014-15, the ball was moving for 56 minutes and 22 seconds, compared to 54 minutes and 46 seconds so far this season.

A natural conclusion to make, then, is that we’re watching less football in terms of the amount of time the ball is in play, but matches are taking longer to complete. Not great, Bob.

In terms of the football being played, though, the quality of what’s on show in the Premier League has undeniably increased over our sample period. Long-ball football, apart from at Manchester City, is generally a thing of the past; pass completion rates are up (81.19 per cent this season compared to 78.88 per cent in 2016-17).

And time-wasting over the past 10 years, yes, has gone up too, but perhaps not in the manner we thought.

Like with everything else, just blame VAR.

(Top photo: Oli Scarff/AFP via Getty Images)

Tim Spiers is a football journalist for The Athletic, based in London and covering Tottenham Hotspur. He joined in 2019 having previously worked at the Express & Star in Wolverhampton. Follow Tim on Twitter @TimSpiers