In the past, there have been rumors of football matches being shortened from their traditional 90-minute duration to appeal to a younger generation, used to digesting content quickly.
But, at the 2022 World Cup, audiences watched games that just got longer – much longer.
We’ve seen officials raise their electronic boards at the end of halves throughout matches in Qatar, signaling well beyond the usual four or five minutes.
Seven or eight minutes often seems like the minimum. A few times already, more than 10 minutes have been added.
This resulted in only one of the first eight matches of the tournament being completed in less than 100 minutes.
Objective of reducing wasted time: The extended games are part of an initiative by FIFA, the sport’s governing body, to tackle the perceived loss of time and to recoup lost time for goal celebrations, reviews and video assistant referee replacements ( VAR).
Pierluigi Collina, famous former referee and current chairman of the FIFA Referees Committee, Explain before the start of the tournament, fans should expect games to exceed 100 minutes, with extra time over “seven or eight minutes”.
“It’s nothing new,” Collina told a news conference. “(At the last World Cup) in Russia, it became quite normal for the fourth official to show the board with seven, eight, nine minutes.
“We recommended our referees to be very precise in calculating the time to be added at the end of each half to compensate for time lost due to a specific type of incident.
“What we want to avoid is having a game with 42, 43, 44, 45 minutes of active play. This is unacceptable.”
However, these longer matches drew a mixed response from former players and football pundits.
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