The Stopwatch and the Match That Never Ends

The Stopwatch and the Match That Never Ends

The England–Iran match at the 2026 World Cup lasted 117 minutes. Across that span, the ball was actually in play for only about 60 minutes. I sat in the stands at Khalifa, not looking at the scoreboard but at the watch on the referee's wrist. People call me a man who writes on the edge of the grass. I only record the breath of the ball before it rolls. That night, the breath of the match was smothered by accumulated minutes.

That is the image I have carried through years of watching football: a clock that never stops, a referee who holds power over time, and a pitch increasingly filled with empty spaces. We are used to calling it 'stoppage time'. Perhaps it should be called by its true name: time that was stolen, then returned grudgingly, in the form of numbers no one can verify.

When football learned to count again

In 2026, FIFA instructed referees to calculate stoppage time more precisely, adding up every interruption: goals and celebrations, substitutions, penalties, VAR reviews, medical treatment. Qatar 2026 became the tournament of unusually long matches. England–Iran had roughly 27 minutes of added time. Netherlands–Argentina went past 100 minutes. Fans were astonished, irritated, and unsure what was happening.

The wave rolled into domestic leagues. From the 2026-24 season, the Premier League tightened its stance on delaying tactics, and average stoppage time soared. In many matches the second half ran past 50 minutes; some went beyond 60. Yet when people measured actual ball-in-play time, the answer stayed familiar: about 55 minutes out of 90. In some matches the ball rolled less than 45. That ratio has barely changed in a decade, despite every reform.

I spent many evenings in Lyon rewinding footage and timing matches by hand. The results were not very different across the major leagues. Modern European football runs on pauses: slow throw-ins, slow free kicks, goalkeepers holding the ball, VAR reviews, players down on the turf. Emiliano Martínez became famous for his delays at the 2026 World Cup — each time he set the ball down, picked it up, changed his angle, the whole stadium seemed to hold its breath. Every such pause is a piece of time pulled out of the match.

The stopwatch as a tool of governance

What stands out is how FIFA and IFAB handled the problem. They chose a procedural fix: extend stoppage time to 'repay' the time that was lost. This is governance by process — measure, accumulate, compensate. In theory it is fair. In practice it places the referee at the centre: they decide how much to add, and therefore they become the target of every argument.

I once watched an assistant referee in the VAR room after a Ligue 1 match. He sat still for a long time, eyes fixed on the screen, hand noting the time of each incident. When I asked what he thought about stoppage time, he only said: 'You want me to add it precisely, but do you know what adding precisely means?' I have carried that question for years. Adding precisely does not create time; it only gives a name to the time that was taken away.

Alongside that, a more radical proposal has been floated: switch to a stopped clock, with 60 minutes of actual ball-in-play time, the clock pausing whenever the ball goes out or play is interrupted. IFAB has discussed the idea several times. It is intellectually appealing: transparent, free of the referee's discretion, making every minute on the pitch equally valuable. But it is also a revolution in identity. Football is the only major team sport that still keeps a running clock. That continuity is what creates its rhythm, its tension, and its tragedy.

This is where I began to see a familiar problem. An efficient mechanism has been built to cure a structural disease. Football does not lack time; it lacks space to play. The calendar is packed, the number of matches is rising, the gaps between games are short. The ball is in play less because players no longer have the strength to play fast for 90 minutes, because teams are rewarded for breaking rhythm to optimise their advantage, and because the VAR apparatus needs time to operate. The stopwatch is only a mirror reflecting those causes.

In the analysis I read, one line made me pause: the greatest risk is not speed but legitimacy. In football, that is painfully true. Fans do not object to stoppage time because they prefer slow football. They object because they do not understand where 27 minutes came from. A mechanism that is not trusted will not be accepted, however mathematically correct it may be.

There is another aspect rarely discussed: operational capacity. A referee must track 22 players, control the match, and remember the time of dozens of interruptions. As stoppage time grows, their workload grows with it, while the number of assistants and tools barely changes. That is an imbalance between authority and capacity — something every organisation has experienced. You can give someone the power to decide time, but you cannot give them the ability to count precisely without resources.

The counterintuitive view: longer matches do not make football fairer

There is an unspoken belief that adding enough minutes will make football fair. I think the opposite is truer. Extending a match does not remove the incentive to delay; it only shifts it. Knowing the game will run longer, a leading team still has a reason to slow down from the start, because the cost of delaying is spread across a longer total. The stoppage-time mechanism turns time into a currency, and like any currency, it gets speculated on.

More dangerously, longer matches harm the very people who create them. Luka Modric has run close to 13 kilometres in a major match well past thirty. Double that span, and by the 100th minute the body has nothing left to give. Muscle injuries cluster at the end of matches. I have seen players go down in the 100th minute, not from a collision but from exhaustion. Ghost football is when the pitch still holds a match but no one has the strength to truly play it.

And there is an aesthetic consequence. Football is at its best when it flows. Stoppage time was always an odd moment — time outside time. When it swells into nearly a whole half, it stops being an exception and becomes part of the match. Some call that fairness. I see the laziness of a governance that refuses to touch the root cause: the calendar, the number of competitions, the number of matches, and the power of television rights money.

Perhaps I am being too literary in saying this. But I believe that when someone tries to frame the time of a football match into a precise number, they are admitting they do not control what is stealing time.

What we still keep

A single touch is an unfinished poem. The ball rolls away, but the writer stays. I do not want football to have a stopped clock, and I do not want it stretched until players collapse in the 100th minute. What I want is a proper argument about causes: why the ball rolls less each year, and who benefits from it. The Moscow rented room had no window, yet every night I saw the World Cup shining through the crack of my pen. That night, I saw a 117-minute match, and within it a 60-minute game that was never played. The question left is not how many minutes to add, but whether we still want time to belong to the match, or to the people holding the stopwatch.