No, it’s not trivial. I’m just guessing at what that poster would think was long enough to build up an interesting attack. In American Football, for example, a team will have the ball for several minutes of clock time on average.
I agree with you. Nobody would claim that attacks aren’t set up in basketball and they have a limit on how long each possession can be.
Oh, right. Ehm, I can’t think how to respond to that without sounding ungrateful.
This question is seriously bizarre to me. I grew up watching hockey* and the entire reason I love it is the relatively low scoring. You may see just a bunch of guys passing the puck back and forth, but I see complex interactions between offense and defence in a great game of keepaway.
And honestly, my absolute favorite part of a hockey game is when all three offensive forwards are right up near the net (along with the opposing team’s defence, of course) and play becomes frenzied, with incredibly quick shots on goal, rebounds, passes, more shots, quicker movement… and no goal is scored. It’s like a contact-adrenaline rush was beamed to you through your tv. And when you have two great teams, the offensive and defencive skills on display can be absolutely breathtaking.
I can’t imagine replacing that with empty nets. Eeesh.
I totally agree. I’ve mentioned before that perhaps the most memorable sequence in a game I’ve ever seen is the last two minutes of the 2004 NCAA championship between Denver and Maine, despite not having a rooting interest in the game. Denver is clinging to a 1-0 lead, and takes two quick penalties, leaving Maine with a two-man advantage for the final minute and a half. Maine immediately pulls their goalie, resulting in 90 seconds of 6-on-3 hockey and a superb showing by the Denver defense to deny Maine.
Thanks for admitting it! 
Eh, OK.
My 10 seconds might have been short, but as you are doing, I actually timed it for a few spans for a few games after it dawned on me that it wasn’t so much the number of goals as the quick break down of possession.
I think it’s a legitimate observation, and just so you know I’m not trying to claim “my sport is better than yours”, I will offer up the following:
Some people argue that american football has too many stops in the action and there is no flow, especially compared to rugby.
I see their point and completely agree with it.
But I don’t want to change american football because the aspect of the game I most enjoy is not the flow aspect that only happens in short bursts and then stops…what I enjoy is the chess game nature of the sport, the strategy used by each team to use their strengths and attack the opponents weaknesses, coupled with physical play. If there were changes that reduced the start/stop nature of the game while preserving the chess game aspects, I would be interested in seeing if that created a better product from the fan perspective.
So I’m interested in those kinds of observations and analysis…soccer does alternate possession very frequently, which is a negative for me…so why is that not a negative for the fans, what are the aspects that are more important to you than that one?
Possession stats for MLS in the US
The average time an individual player maintain possession is 1 to 2 seconds, multiply by number of passes in the linked histogram and you will see that 10 seconds is not an extreme claim (it was based on the few portions of games I timed), and 20 seconds would probably cover 95% of possessions.
No it wouldn’t. Now go invent your own game and let us enjoy this game as it is. It was fine before you started watching it, and it will be fine after you stop (this week).
Just because you don’t recognize strategy does not mean it is not there. You do get to see strategy unfold, that’s what you see all the time when you’re watching football. When a team loses possession, that means their strategy did not work. Or at least not as well as the other team’s strategy, which was to regain possession. It does not mean they were ‘dithering around’, though.
“dithering around” was a term quoted from a poster that is a soccer fan (I believe), it wasn’t intended as a judgement of the value of the activity.
I freely admit I don’t recognize strategy beyond a basic level, but I know it’s there…my point was that the rapid change of possession didn’t allow me to get a sense of building excitement that the play may or may not work out.
Is there something that gives you that sense despite the rapid changes in possession? Or maybe that sense (that I tend to get from american football) is not as important to you as a fan of soccer and other attributes are more important?
What I’m saying is that “Rapid change of possessions” is not an accurate descriptor of what happens in the sport. Not in any abstract sense, but also not in comparison to other sports, several of which I enjoy quite a bit; soccer’s probably third or fourth in terms of how much of my time it occupies. I see your charts and I’m not going to argue about the numbers because I didn’t see those games. But I have seen lots of games, and just to check whether or not I’m crazy for thinking that what you’re saying is crazy, this is what I did: I went to Youtube and I typed “full match” into the search bar. The first match result was the 2011 Community Shield, Man U vs. Man City. I watched the first ten minutes in full and transcribed possession as follows:
Man U :43 ends in foul
Man U free kick cleared at 1:30
Man U ends 2:01
Man City downfield kick ends 2:11
Man U giveaway 2:42
Man City giveaway 2:47
Man U shot blocked for corner 2:53
Man U shot saved 3:27
Man City cross cleared 4:05
Man City wins corner 4:20
Man City corner cleared 4:46
Man U giveaway 5:03
Man City wins throw 5:20
Man City giveaway/ Man U giveaway 5:35
MC wins corner 5:40
MC Corner cleared 6:09
Man U fouled 6:25
Man U giveaway 7:10
MC fouled 7:16
MC offside 8:13
MC wins throw 8:38
MC throw giveaway 8:56
50/50 ball Man U foul 9:13
MC wins throw 9:36
MC giveaway 10:10
I don’t have any reason to believe that particular match is any freakish outlier, although I’m certain it was played at least somewhat less frantically than an MLS match. Either way, it was the first match that came up. There are a few different ways to define a possession, like your link says, so you could, if you wanted, exclude all the time that the ball is out of play, or be hyper-vigilant about ending a possession if a defender gets a foot in or something, so maybe I would say there were a total of eight to ten “possessions” in those ten minutes and you would say twelve or thirteen. But now that I have a concrete example I would argue the same thing I argued before: if the complaint is that possessions are too short for a buildup in attack compared to the way other sports work, that is a crazy complaint. It’s like the opposite of what characterizes soccer.
Man U had the ball uninterrupted, save for a foul, for the first minute and a half. They still had it thirty seconds later except for the ball being briefly cleared from the penalty area. I would say that there were maybe three instances in those ten minutes where a possession lasted less than ten seconds. Based on these numbers I can’t imagine what sports you’re interested in that provide more steady strategic development. American football possessions take longer, sure, but that’s only because of timeouts and huddles. Other than that, where are you going to see one team controlling the ball for nearly the entirety of the first three and a half minutes of a game?
You do get a sense of building excitement, it just cycles much more quickly than in American football or baseball, where a team’s possession can drag out for 15 minutes. You can see players driving forward, passing back to try to get more space, lining up for the cross, etc. That gives the sense of building excitement. Yes, it might be over in 20 seconds, but it can start up again just as quickly when they reset their attack, or they can leave the defense too open and the other team can suddenly counter and the excitement comes at the other end, etc. It’s constantly moving and anything can happen at any time for either side.
You may disagree with my conclusion about whether it’s exciting or not, but the stats are pretty clear.
Even if you just look at total time divided by average number of possessions (213 per game per team for EPL teams) it comes to about 12 seconds.
So, if you think what I say is “crazy”, you will have to disagree with the soccer experts also.
Ok, thanks for a thoughtful response.
So, it sounds like you do enjoy the rate it builds, it just happens to be faster, shorter and more frequent than my favorite sport.
I was thinking maybe the individual short bursts may not have been that exciting but that there was some bigger picture where you could see the strategy unfolding, like gradually getting players out of position, or something like that.
Are they? Where are they, and what are they clear about? I went looking and found this, which puts MLS possessions per game at around 140 per team last season, and doesn’t make any effort to explain what that means in real terms. You haven’t either.
More to the point, though, whatever we’re defining as “possession” and however we quantify it doesn’t change the way the game plays out on the pitch. The kind of helter-skelter pinballing back and forth you seem to be envisioning is just not how soccer fans experience the sport. If the ball was really on spending a second on a player’s foot per touch, I would hate watching soccer. But it isn’t, which is what I tried to demonstrate with my little play-by-play.
Why is it so many Americans think high scoring = “exciting”? A freaking 0-0 tie can be (and often is) the most nerve-wracking match you’ll ever watch.
Similarly, if high scoring is exciting, why would Americans prefer baseball - in which sides can go a whole game without scoring a run or even hitting the ball (a “rare” event that happens an average of twice a year in major league baseball) - to cricket, in which a match aggregate score of over 1000 runs is by no means remarkable?
Ok, for MLS teams at 140 per team per game that’s an average of 19 seconds per possession, which is a number you already labeled as “crazy”.
For EPL teams it’s higher average, see chart.
possession
Either way, I don’t know how you can possibly be arguing this, it’s just math.
The averages, again from the experts watching non-American soccer showed a histogram with 90% of player possessions in the 1 to 2 second area and a small number longer than that.
I’ve watched professional soccer often enough to know that frequently the ball is passed off quickly, and sometimes it isn’t. Your one play by play doesn’t change the stats or my own experiences.
If you want to argue about the stats you need to find something that counters my point, not supports it like your 140 average.
But again, the stats aren’t that important other than as a jumping off point as to why I don’t get that sense of building excitement…you may be looking for something else or get that sense some other way or, like chizzuk, you may get that sense despite a duration that I find to be short (in other words, maybe it doesn’t feel short to you).
Despite playing baseball from the age of 8 until 18, I find it a boring game to watch.
Although, on a sunny day, it can be a fun way to socialize and drink beer.
I agree with your comment and would extend it to “football” over the winter months. Point being, as much as fútbol gets so much flack in the US as a boring game, you get at least four times the action – never mind simply playing time – in it than you do in either American sport.
Basketball, I think, is a whole’ nother ball of wax. Love the game as an long gone semi pro myself (no 3-point line in my pre-historic heyday; 'xtly my forte), but neither NBA nor FIBA rules avoid the fact that, for the most part, you needn’t watch for the first 3-1/2 quarters to get to an (artificially) created nail-biting end. Chock full of commercials of course…which wouldn’t be the case if they simply enforced the rules from the start. Most games would be over by the 4th quarter if they did…a commercial tragedy of huge proportions. 