Time Wasting Is More Than a Bordalás Problem.

It Is a Spanish Problem

La Liga is back, and its first matchday brought plenty of uplifting stories this weekend: our dear
“Isinho” Palazón scoring the first goal of the season, Baraja’s revitalized Valencia that is somehow
even younger than last year, Sergi Darder now assisting and creating in Mallorca, Jude Bellingham
leading a young and energetic Real Madrid, or Isco’s MVP debut with Betis.

Yet it seems that the biggest talk in La Liga town this weekend was over a negative: how La Liga’s new
rules regarding added time led to more than 25 minutes of stoppage time at the Coliseum Alfonso
Pérez between Getafe and FC Barcelona. This amount comes as less of a surprise when you consider
who coaches Getafe: ever since José Bordalás started coaching in La Liga, his teams have been
consistently measured to be among the top time-wasters in the league. Maybe it’s not my wisest
decision to add more fuel to this discourse, but I feel inclined to contribute a few things.

Some degree of time-wasting and football dark arts is good for the sport. In an era of increasing
inequalities in football, time-wasting is a valuable tool for the underdog to level the playing. It feels
deeply hypocritical to see a Real Madrid or Barcelona fan complain about Getafe gaining unfair
advantages in time-wasting when their clubs have more than ten times the revenue and wage bill of
Getafe. And audiences are certainly entertained by *some* degree of gamesmanship.

https://twitter.com/SwissRamble/status/1576816901552238593?s=20

However, there is something like too much time-wasting and discontinuity in the game, and both
Primera and Segunda División in Spain are veering into that territory. Since 2019, La Liga has been
the lowest-scoring of the Big 5 European leagues. La Liga’s ability to attract offensive talent has
dwindled in the face of the richer Premier League and teams founded by petrostates, and that has
forced La Liga managers to build teams with a more conservative message. Coach Unai Emery
explains it clearly and succinctly in an excellent 2020 interview with El País:

The football of order that we see [in La Liga] has to do with the message of keeping a clean
sheet. You look at the opponent's goal with caution. That message has sunk in. The other
extreme, that of beautiful, attractive matches, with both teams looking at each other's goal,
transmitting energy and uncertainty for 90 minutes, goes against organization. In Spain, we,
the coaches, are very organized, very tactical, and competitive. And that is like the short
blanket dilemma. It gives us an advantage but keeps us away from spectacular football.

This conservative message has also included breaking up the opponent’s play via dark arts such as
time-wasting, which is also reflected in the numbers.

In your average elite football game, the ball will be in play roughly 55 mins of the time. Data
journalist Mark Thompson looked at data from some historical games of Pelé, Maradona, and Cruyff
and confirmed that this average also applied to their times. As pointed out by Opta Analyst, last
season the average La Liga match saw the ball in play for just 53:42 minutes, about 60 seconds less
than the Premier League (54:49) and 90 seconds less than Ligue 1 (55:20).

Segunda División is in an even worse place. The CIES Football Observatory took effective playing time
data for 36 European leagues between 2019 and 2022 and found that Segunda was at the bottom of
their ranking.

In the last couple of years, football authorities, from FIFA to the Spanish Technical Committee of
Referees (CTA in Spanish), have tried to solve the time-wasting issue by increasing stoppage time and
pushing effective match time closer to 60 minutes. The 2022 World Cup led the way with this change,
and La Liga and the Premier League have shortly followed in implementing it. This is a well-
intentioned but ineffective solution for several reasons.

First, increasing stoppage time adds more stress to the bodies of football players who already have to
deal with overcrowded schedules. This issue was well summarized in a public statement last week
from Manchester United defender Raphäel Varane, and there are even scientific papers that back up
Varane’s claim.

https://twitter.com/raphaelvarane/status/1688461768991932416?s=20

Second, as pointed out earlier in Mark Thompson’s studies, this push for 60 minutes goes against the
traditional length of a football match, which has historically averaged 55 minutes. Some leagues, like
the Spanish ones, might be below that average right now, but in general, the ball today is in play
roughly for as long as it was in the 70s or 80s. Why do we feel the need to change that?

Finally, pushing for more added time and 60 minutes of playing time does not solve the fundamental
issue with time-wasting: the frequency of interruptions in the game. Bordalás and Getafe provided
the perfect example this weekend. As pointed out by Opta, the game had an effective playing time of
60:49 minutes, yet the interruptions continued to be as frequent and unpleasant as in a shorter
game. One could even argue that adding more game time increases the number of interruptions and
worsens the problem.

https://twitter.com/OptaJose/status/1690995292168962048?s=20

Another potential solution is using the stop clock as in basketball, which Barcelona coach Xavi
Hernández has already advocated for a while. This solution does not consider that players who waste
time don’t just want to run down the clock but also break up the opponent’s play and kill their
momentum. Without the countdown of a running clock, there is a chance that interruptions of play
will become even longer and create even more discontinuity in games.

More effective solutions might involve changing some “peculiarities” of the Spanish refereeing style.
According to FBREF data from the 2022/23 season, while the average Premier League game featured
21.6 fouls per game, the average La Liga game featured 25.8 fouls. This stricter refereeing leads to
more interruptions of the game. Data journalist Bart Frouws found that in the 2019/20 season, La
Liga referees called for handball penalties almost three times more frequently than their
counterparts in the Bundesliga and the Premier League. This stricter refereeing once again leads to
more interruptions and discontinuities. One area where the refs can be more strict to make the game
more continuous is punishing more time-wasting offenses with yellow cards.

https://twitter.com/jcperez_/status/1285972386630819840?s=20

Overall, it’s important to remember that time-wasting is a fundamental aspect of football in many
ways. Especially in a sport where inequalities keep increasing, and the odds get increasingly dire for
the underdogs, we should avoid making decisions that make the playing field even more tilted
toward the strongest teams. Eliminating time-wasting entirely would be one such decision.

However, there is something like too much time-wasting and interrupting play, and Spanish leagues
have veered into that territory for the last few years. The solutions proposed by FIFA and the Spanish
CTA are well-intentioned but likely ineffective because even if the ball stays in play for a longer time,
the frequency of interruptions will continue. And as attacking talent continues to leave Spain for
richer pastures and the inequalities in Spanish football continue, managers will continue to push for
conservative tactics and the dark arts to remain competitive with the behemoths of Spanish football.
If some of these core issues are not solved, a return to more attractive football and less time-wasting
seems unlikely in Spain.