I was going to bump up my topic created in 2011 with its most recent post in 2015 titled "Blog Post: "How Much Football Is There In A Match?" However, that just linked to www.bigsoccer.com/articles so I'm starting this topic. The original topic linked to a blog post within www.soccerbythenumbers.com which doesn't exist anymore. Talking about VAR at http://www.fifa.com/worldcup/news/one-month-to-go-boban-looking-forward-to-special-world-cup FIFA Deputy Secretary General Zvonimir Boban said: "At the last World Cup the ball was in play for 57 and a half minutes (on average). So already we are somehow losing 35 minutes or even more. We lose time on free-kicks, but for us this is a normal use of time. But it’s not actually normal that we’re losing nine minutes on average for free-kicks during a game, seven minutes on throw-ins, five-and-a-half on goal kicks and four-and-a-half on corner kicks."
There's an easy fix for this, stop the clock when ball is out of play. Most sports were developed in the 1800s when the stop clock was invented, but it was not efficiently mass produced until the 1900s. After the mid 1900s digital stop clocks were invented. Around this time many sports started to stop the clock when the ball went out of play. Many sports still don't, it makes no sense on why you wouldn't do this. Absolutely primitive. This will also make it impossible to waste time by pretending injury or walking off the field during a substitution.
http://www.soccermetrics.net/match-quality-metrics/2018-fifa-world-cup-effective-time-review says the World Cup Final had the ball in play for 52 to 58 minutes, which is a significant decrease from the 60 to 67 minutes in the 2014 Final. The amounts are inexact because the data does not include how long from when the ball went out of play until it was thrown in. FIFA calls the whole tournament the "World Cup Finals," so I want to be clear that I'm talking about one game in 2018 compared to one game in 2014.
But this is the average time of all games in 2014 vs average time of all games in 2018 or it's a random game 2014 vs random game 2018 ?
I typed that thinking it was one game in each tournament, but I read it wrong. The 52 to 58 minute and 60 to 67 minute ranges are for the whole tournaments. The Final game had about 15 minutes fewer time in play. The site has the time range for each game in 2018 but not 2014.