Today, we live in an era of universal Fergie time; one impatient of stoppages
and which threatens to extend a 90-minute game indefinitely.
I.
I don't like football. I used to, when I was a child, in the '70s. Back then, I used to love playing football on the green and watching big match highlights on TV. But not now. I suppose I've changed. But so too has football changed. As one commentator writes:
"The sport that we loved so much as children no longer exists. It has been replaced with a Narrative of Football; a new game deeply entrenched in analysis, code, writing, superfluous discourse, and orchestrated controversy." [1]
This is football in the age of hyperreality and hypercapitalism. And it's also football played at such a manic pace that it has lost all sense of sporting rhythm; hyperactivity has destroyed the ebb and flow of the game and that most vital (and complex) aspect known as time-wasting.
II.
In an excellent piece for The Guardian, Barney Ronay describes how in the latest version of what was once the beautiful - often boring and profoundly frustrating - game, everything is now micro-engineered to produce maximum effective playing time.
Referees, argues Ronay, are now no longer present "simply to keep the mechanics of the game working, to understand handball and fouls and offside, but to police how football should feel and look, to decide what exactly can be deemed entertainment" [2].
This is the referee as television floor manager - that is to say, as the one who ensures that a TV production goes smoothly and that everyone involved in the on-field action - players, managers, supporters - knows exactly what they have to do and when they have to do it. Keep the ball moving! Keep the noise levels high! Ensure there are plenty of talking points for the pundits to analyse! And above all, don't ever forget the cameras are rolling!
This season, referees have been empowered (and instructed) to take aggressive action against time-wasting. And Ronay is right to say this is "a profound and quietly sinister little tweak, a value judgment taken
without any broader consultation on what the game should look and feel
like, with some deeply undesirable implications" [3].
Of course, on the face of it, this is an entirely reasonable change to make; in fact, the laws of the game have always discouraged (and allowed referees to punish) time-wasting. But, what is going on here is really something quite radical, driven by purely commercial considerations:
"As ever, follow the money. The drive to increase active 'game time' (itself a vapid, ill-defined concept) comes directly from Fifa. And Fifa
is essentiality a TV rights distributions agency, its entire model
based around increasing screen revenues. What we have here is the laws
of the game being employed as a tool to doctor the perceived TV
entertainment value of the product ..." [4]
If it risks player fatigue or injury, never mind! If it risks pissing off the fans in the stadium, who understand how the art of time-wasting is an intrinsic part of the game, who cares? The people who count are the big name sponsors and the punters who pay to watch the match live on TV - and they won't tolerate dead air.
Ronay concludes:
"Football is not a gameshow. This is not choreographed entertainment. The
reason this thing has survived and flourished is precisely because it
is messy and feverish, made up of both piano and forte, moments of fury
interspersed with interludes of vital, brain-mangling boredom.
And yes, time-wasting is part of the game, an ugly, maddening part, but a
source of beauty in its referred effects; not to mention an entirely
legitimate tactic in a 90-minute game." [5]
Unfortunately, however, football is now choreographed entertainment; played by millionaires, owned by billionaires, and watched by a global TV audience who expect non-stop action and plenty of goals, i.e., exactly the same kind of idiots who think one-day cricket is superior - because faster and more sensational - to test match cricket and want to see six after six after six.
Ronay's hope that in this burnout society we will once again allow sport to catch its breath, is, sadly, in vain ...
Notes
[1] Luke Alex Davis, 'Football Is Dead' (3 April 2022), on the website Playrface: click here.
[2-5] Barney Ronay, 'Time-wasting in football is ugly, maddening - and absolutely vital', The Guardian (17 August 2023): click here. Those who are interested in this topic might also like to read: Cameron Carter, 'Football has elevated time-wasting into a sophisticated art form', The Guardian (19 Oct 2022): click here.
For a related post to this one on football as a global televised spectacle, click here.
Though Ronay's piece is nuanced and thought-provoking, it seems to me commonsensically wrong-headed and ultimately an exercise in intellectual hair-splitting. Whatever one calls it - timewasting, shithousery, cheating, simulation - the issue has become much more corrosive an affliction in the pro game in recent years (compare the startling contrast with footballing highlights from the 1960s-1980s when, whatever the game's 'agricultural' tendencies, teams just got on with it and, though the baseline tempo may seem to have been slower in some ways, the ball was indeed far more in play and the contests, I think, were often more and not less intense). For me, therefore, the new refereeing policy re added time, if belated and hence over-heated, is in my opinion a much needed attempt to compensate this systemic strangulation of the spectacle. The game used to be more brutal, but is now much more cynical. I agree with Ronay’s view that its hyper-monetisation is surely the main factor (the stakes are far higher), as well as the ridiculously accelerated pressure on managers to succeed or face the sack after five games - if not five minutes! But football is a glorious waste of time either way, without taking that literally and rubbing fans' faces in it. Both parties may need to relearn how to lose - but lose in a playful spirit. That way, we all win.
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