Writhing Time

Wednesday, June 25th, 2014

During the first 32 games of the World Cup, Geoff Foster records, there were 302 players who could be seen at some point rolling around in pain, crumpling into a fetal position or lying lifeless on the pitch as the referee stopped the match:

These theatrical episodes ate up a total of 132 minutes of clock, a metric we have decided to call “writhing time.”

To be fair, it is actually possible to get hurt playing soccer. You can clang heads. You can snap a hamstring. You can get spiked in the soft tissue. There were nine injuries in total that forced players to be substituted from the game and to miss, or potentially miss, a match. These were discarded. That left 293 cases of potential embellishment that collectively took up 118 minutes, 21 seconds.

Another trick: how to calculate writhing time. The criteria used here is the moment the whistle is blown (because of a potential injury) to the moment that player stands up. If the TV camera cut to a replay, the stand-up moment was estimated. If he was helped off the field, the “writhing” clock stopped when he crossed the sidelines.

The study showed one thing emphatically: The amount of histrionics your players display during a match correlates strongly to what the scoreboard says. Players on teams that were losing their games accounted for 40 “injuries” and nearly 12.5 minutes of writhing time. But players on teams that were winning — the ones who have the most incentive to run out the clock — accounted for 103 “injuries” and almost four times as much writhing.

Writhing Time

Comments

  1. Magus Janus says:

    Players are playing according to the incentives of the rules and the institutions governing the sport create.

    This one (faking injuries to run clock down) is an easy fix: playtime clock, not running clock. Many other sports do this, such as basketball.

    Average soccer match has 61-64 mins of actual playtime out of 90 mins of running time.

    So the fix is: Have each half be 31 mins (or 30 or 32, doesnt matter) of ACTUAL playtime, with clock stopping every foul,ball out of bounds, etc.

    And just like that you’ve removed incentive for most of the faking, rolling around, etc.

  2. AAB says:

    ‘So the fix is: Have each half be 31 mins (or 30 or 32, doesnt matter) of ACTUAL playtime, with clock stopping every foul,ball out of bounds, etc.’

    I thought that’s what added time was supposed to be for:

    “The FIFA Laws of the Game states that the an allowance period [AKA injury time] may be added to make up for lost time due to the following reasons: substitution of players, stoppage of play because of a serious injury, transport of injured players off the field, and deliberate stalling by a team.”

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