This shouldn’t annoy me, but it does. DEAR GOD why on earth does the timer for for Futbol go up? Who on earth thought that this was a good Idea?
I mean, what is the thought process on this, and how much more of a game do I have?
I mean It makes NO SENSE on earth.
I don’t know for sure but my guess would be it’s to accomodate extra time. Especially as it would impossible to show a negative number on an analogue clock, which most grounds would have had back in the day.
We just did this thread in the last month, and the answer is for penalty/extra time. Only the ref knows exactly when the game will end because he’s keeping track.
But that’s my point.
There is NO indication of how long the game, or its respective fractional parts will last.
Sure you can, take a look at this exampleof an old fashioend analogue scoreboard clock for soccer. Once you hit 45 normal time is over.
There is an announcement from the sideline about how much extra time will be added (on a hand-held scoreboard) that everyone can see. If it’s four minutes then the game will end when the clock hits 49:00, assuming no more delays.
You’d have to think that to some extent it’s also to minimise time wasting when the end is nigh. After all, it would be a trivial exercise for the referee to signal time off and time on so a countdown clock could operate.
For each half it goes up to 45, then you add on whatever added time is indicated.
Sometimes it is fairly straightforward and you only have to add on 1 minute, occasionally it gets a little tricky with 2 or 3 minutes. Once I saw 6 minutes!!! There were furrowed brows on the terraces that day I can tell you.
What the hell is Futbol? Is that a made up word? I can just about accept ‘soccer’, but considering the name is a reference to kicking a ball with your foot, I can’t see what’s wrong with calling it football.
I wouldn’t mind seeing the clock in soccer behave like time clocks in other sports but I don’t see why it should cause so much distress. I’ve grown to appreciate it, in fact, because at least, with no time stoppages, there aren’t commercial breaks every fifteen seconds.
I like the rule change that reveals how much stoppage time should be added but I still think this only solves less than half of the problem. I still think it is basically arbitrary. I doubt the ref actually calculates how much time is actually wasted and adds that at the end. It’s probably more along the lines of “lots of time wasting: let’s add five minutes; not that much time wasting: let’s add only one minute.”
The real problem I see is that this doesn’t really do much for time-wasting because, regardless of how much time is added, the leading team can still waste time during the stoppage period and we all know that no time is added on to the added time segment. So in this case, the offending players can get away with more shenanigans.
Even with extra time, I think counting down would be easier. Count down from 45, when it his zero, start at the extra time and count down again, just have an indicator whether it’s regular time or extra time, not unlike indicating halves or quarters or periods or innings in other sports. It just seems to me that it was easier to just leave the clock running and add to the end in the past when the technology wasn’t there, but now that it is, I don’t see why they can’t update the rules to take advantage of it.
I can understand the clock going up to accommodate for the extra time, but what I don’t understand is why they don’t just stop the friggin’ clock when there’s a delay. Gridiron football has no problems doing so.
I assume the reason for not stopping the stadium clock is probably rooted in FIFA’s ideals of having the rules the same at all levels. It’s much easier to say “the referee tracks official time and the stadium clock is ‘close enough’” than it is to do the process in American sports, where you need a trained clock operator, and still time adjustments are requested over the referee’s microphone fairly often. While the top competitions could certainly provide the staff, or the technology to allow the referee to start and stop the clock on his own, this is not realistic everywhere.
I’m actually astonished that the clock counting up issue is brought up as some obvious flaw in football (although I should not be surprised at what people who spell the game as ‘futbol’ come up with, I guess :rolleyes:).
It only solves half of what problem, exactly? The vast majority of football fans seem to be perfectly content with the way things are. I, for one, think that time keeping in football is mostly fair, there’s ways of penalizing teams that are obviously wasting time, and it has the major advantage that you know in advance that a game will take somewhere between an hour and 50 minutes and 2 hours*, which makes TV scheduling etc so much easier. I think that people in this thread arguing for change need to do a much better job of showing that there is a problem to begin with.
As for the extra time - it’s not the ref that does those calculations, it’s a fourth official. The ref is free to disregard the fourth official’s advice and add as much or as little time as he likes, so what you say about how this measure does little to end time-wasting does not hold up.
No, you’re right. I don’t think it’s a problem that with a one goal lead and five added minutes, a team can tie its shoes for four minutes and thirty seconds of that time and get nothing but a stern warning from the referee, or the occassional yellow card.:rolleyes: God forbid they stop the clock to fix that problem. As for keeping it consistent between the top levels and lower levels, anyone can buy a cheap chronometer with a handy stop button at any electronics store
Because Football is played by real men while wearing pads and helmets. Futbol/soccer is played by 6 year old girls. 
Real answer: I think Futbol is the spanish spelling.
You are aware that the referee can (and often does) stop his watch if he thinks a team is wasting time, even in extra time? I personally like the somewhat open-ended nature of the end of the match, and I think most soccer fans agree.
Well, hyperbole aside, the problem is fixed in that such behavior is already penalized, for one thing, and the ref already has the power to add time to make up for wasted time. Beyond that, there’s still wasting because teams don’t mind the consequences, so I guess you could penalize it more harshly, but even so wasting is hardly as egregious as you make it out to be, and in my mind massive rule change is not justified, and would not make football more enjoyable to watch. There would still be a lot of stopping the game, for injuries, etc., and teams might still have incentives to stop the game, for instance to break another teams flow or something, so it would not exactly be a problem-free solution.
I agree, too. There are many positives about the time situation in soccer. I just wish there was a better way of taking care of time wasting (intentional or not) during the stoppage time period. And I’m not convinced that the referees have a standard way of keeping time. According to the rules, each ref can determine whenever he thinks the game should end. So he can use a stopwatch or a continuously moving watch or whatever.
Actually, under NCAA rules (and I think high school as well), if there is a scoreboard clock, the time counts down, and when it hits zero, the half ends. Rather than adding extra time, the referee signals the clock to stop and start.
When MLS first started, the clock did count down from 45 minutes (I can’t remember if it got to zero and counted back up, or stopped at something like 2 minutes). According to an article I read in (I think it was) Sports Illustrated, the league switched to counting up from zero to accommodate its fans, most of which are (or at least, at the time, were) of Latin American heritage, and they are more familiar with the clock counting up.
One thing I have noticed with the “time kept on the field” method; you never see the half end just as somebody is taking a shot. If three minutes are added to a half, and a team is making a move towards scoring when the clock reaches 48:00, the match keeps going.
