Keeping time of actual play seems like it would be pretty simple and clear cut, too. You have fouls, injuries, goals and out of bounds.
Can’t go 90 minutes, though. I believe that previous timing efforts have revealed somewhere around an hour of actual play in an average game.
Let me repeat, though, until you’re sick of hearing it: NO fucking commercials.
Yes. I love this about soccer. Both playing it and watching it.
I also love watching American football, but I would not want a single bit of that style of time keeping to seep over into soccer.
The continuously variable nature of stoppage time is exciting, and also makes sense to me given the nature of the game.
We do much better than that. We’ve won four World Cups. Or, oh. . . did you mean the men’s team?
On the OP subject, I think stopping the official clock, and using a count down would introduce a lot more “clock management” to the game, which would be awful. Certainly teams use tactics to burn time off the clock, but we don’t have basketball- or American football-style tactics for stopping the clock to try to get the last scoring chance of the game. I would really hate that.
Absolutely correct.
Quite right. It’s not commercials in and of themselves that would ruin it (as horrible and inane as they are), it’d be any scheduled breaks in a game that’s meant to run continuously. It’d be (almost) as bad if they took 4 minute breaks to show kitten videos.
What an odd thing to say. Thirty years ago when we first hosted the World Cup, there weren’t very many American soccer fans and it was fairly common to hear ignorant and xenophobic comments from the dumber sports media figures and fans here. Your post sounds like it was frozen in amber about that time, but times have actually changed quite a lot. I can’t remember the last time I heard an American say they HATE soccer. For anyone under forty it’s just always been part of the landscape.
Yes, soccer is definitely more popular now, but I think it was plenty popular here in the US in the 90s. I went to a game at the Silverdome (4 miles from my house!) and it was packed, and we saw some people we knew from youth soccer there. I don’t think we would have gotten it in 94 if there wasn’t a reasonable base of fans already. I remember Detroit even having an indoor soccer team that we mainly knew of because one of the players was a coach at a summer camp and we all got one free ticket to a game.
That’s not my point. Why do people want to impose one time-keeping method on a sport that uses its own time keeping method, and has had plenty of time to independently evaluate its time-keeping method, and clearly isn’t above making changes to make the game more interesting? Just because it has a superficial similarity to basketball, hockey, and gridiron doesn’t mean that it should be the same just because all of those are the same. I stand by my assertion that it makes just as much sense to change how soccer time-keeping works than it would to play a basketball game to a set score amount rather than by time. It would be a more drastic change, sure, but it would mean there would be less of the awful clock management processes that happen near the end of the game, and teams would continue the same general strategy of preventing the opponent from scoring and trying their best to score.
If I were king, I would change basketball to be best of 11 sets or something, with each set only lasting a few minutes. That way, every few minutes, you have baskets that count, just like you do at the end of the game (assuming it’s close).
Ultimate (Frisbee) is sometimes played to a set score, sometimes timed.
The only problem I’m trying to address in football/soccer is the bullshit time wasting. If the clock only ran when the ball was in play, that time wasting would be a thing of the past. I don’t see how it would change the game otherwise – you could still end it at an appropriate time after then end of regulation – wait until the play stops or there will clearly not be a change in scoring, or whatever refs do now.
I work in a department where at least 20% of the employees are from soccer mad parts of the world (and I mean they are here on secondment, they are not immigrants) and still we have people making jokes about his boring soccer is, how the players are sissies who put the worst NBA floppers to shame,
These are not uneducated, unsophisticated people. Every single one has a college degree from a reasonably good university. Most gave graduate degrees (if you count MBAs 
Median age is early 30s. Four years ago the department head was an expat from a soccer-mad country. Everyone got World Cup fever. This time most of them either ignored the thing or mocked those of us who were into it.
I may not understand what time wasting you’re talking about. Do you mean celebrating after a goal time wasting, or an overmatched team deliberately playing slowly to shorten the game? Or maybe all the flopping and fake injuries. I don’t see how changing the clock would alter any of those behaviors.
I totally understand that, but I do think if they found a way to jam in commercials during “clock stopped” times that may make the solution worse than the problem. A better way, IMO, is to do what they did in this World Cup and have no problems tacking on 10 mins. Time wasting was very infrequent due to this.
Taking forever to do a throw-in or a goal kick or a free kick or penalty kick. You can see the team that’s behind wrestling with the goalie after scoring to get the ball back to the spot as quickly as possible – they know the goalie will take his or her time with that.
ETA: @ISiddiqui, definitely agree that there shouldn’t be commercials jammed in during clock stoppages.
Why wouldn’t they do that same thing after the clock is changed? Are you thinking that someone will have a stopwatch and determine that the goalie wasted seven seconds throwing the ball in so we’ll add an extra seven seconds? That doesn’t seem practical.
Since you have a Giants logo as your avatar, I thought it would be pretty clear. Clock isn’t running until the goal kick happens or the throw-in happens. Maybe just do it for the last 10 or 15 minutes, or wait a beat before stopping it or whatever.
They’ll still take forever to do a throw in or goal kick. I don’t see why the timekeeping would have any impact on that whatsoever. They aren’t just delaying to eat seconds, they’re trying to derail any momentum the other team might have, as well as just waiting for their teammates to jockey for position.
I don’t really get why being a Giants fan would make this clear to me, but I assure you I cannot understand your position even a little. It literally makes no sense to me.
EDIT: Are you arguing that there should be a shot clock in soccer? And a separate throw-in clock like a pitching clock in baseball? Short of that, I don’t see why a different amount of extra time at the end of the game would matter in the slightest. (In the context of dithering before putting the ball back in play. They would still dither. It would matter at the end of the game when everything gets rushed because the clock is ticking down instead of flowing normally because the ref will wait until the possession ends.)
“This is how it’s done in all these sports” doesn’t equate “better”.
The NBA has tried a version of this in their all-star game. It worked well and I think there’s a good chance that it’s a better format for the game.
No, the arguments stand or fall on their own merits. Changing to something worse is a mistake. Refusing to make a change for the better is also a mistake.
By nature I’m someone who generally sees room for improvement in most systems.
Rugby isn’t a very good analogy. The rules of rugby have been in flux for some time. Hell, rugby union was strictly an amateur sport until the early 90s.
Association football has been around for a lot longer, and rule changes are accordingly harder to make.
I can’t think of a way to make basketball worse than this one. The end of a basketball game is the most awful, fan unfriendly time in sports. It’s where 30 seconds can take 15 minutes to play, where the players inbound the ball then go stand around the foul line over and over again ticking away 5 seconds at a time until we all want to shoot ourselves.
I actually love the idea of basketball to a set score. It’s really a “it’s not over 'til it’s over” scenario, but you can’t go on a 14-0 run by fouling guys in the back court, both sides need to play clean hard ball the entire game.