The Premier League’s crackdown on time-wasting this season has added almost 12 minutes of playing time to the average match, resulting in more action, more cards and more goals.
Club bosses were given an update on the new, stricter approach to time-keeping at a Premier League shareholders’ meeting in London on Thursday.
In the 49 games played so far, the average match duration is now 101 minutes and 40 seconds, an increase of three minutes and 36 seconds on last season. This means Premier League games are lasting even longer than matches at last year’s men’s World Cup, where world governing body FIFA pressed the need to give fans better value for money in terms of action.
Even more dramatic is the uplift in effective playing time — the amount of time the ball is in play — with that increasing by four minutes and 25 seconds to 59 minutes and 30 seconds.
These extra minutes have produced more goals, with 151 being scored already this season, 3.1 per game. And 22 of those goals have come in added time, compared to only five at this point of the season last year.
The number of yellow cards is also up but Premier League chief of football Tony Scholes told the club bosses assembled at the meeting that the match officials are convinced there has been a notable reduction in time-wasting this season.
The news will be welcomed by the International Football Association Board (IFAB), the body that looks after the game’s laws, as it has asked competition organisers to ensure any time wasted by gamesmanship, goal celebrations, injuries, substitutions and VAR checks is added at the end of each half. This request was a response to data that showed effective playing time was falling across the world.
The move has not been greeted by everyone, though, with several prominent managers and players pointing out this would lead to more fatigue, injuries and potential burnout. European football’s governing body UEFA has refused to implement the new guidelines, opting instead to tell their match officials to keep the game moving.
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What’s new for this Premier League season? More added time, more yellows for time wasting
Premier League chiefs, however, appear to be on board with the push for a more rigorous application of the referee’s stopwatch, believing the added minutes will only increase the amount of drama.
That is what keeps people watching, of course, and the club bosses at the meeting were also updated on the league’s plans for the next auction of domestic media rights.
The league’s current domestic broadcast partners — Amazon Prime, Sky Sports and TNT Sports — share the rights to 200 of the 380 games played every season, and they pay a combined £1.7billion a season.
But the market for those rights has not been tested since the last auction in 2018, as the current three-year cycle was just rolled over in 2021 to give both broadcasters and clubs some certainty after the turmoil caused by the pandemic in 2020.
Those deals expire at the end of the 2024-25 season and the Premier League will be keen to bring more money in next time. The only way they are likely to do this is to give the broadcasters more games, more primetime slots and perhaps even longer deals.
The various options were outlined to the clubs at the meeting but a decision on how to proceed has been postponed until another gathering next week.
The league remains committed to the 3pm blackout on Saturdays — a measure that has been in place in the UK since the 1960s to protect live attendances, particularly further down the pyramid — but the need to give broadcasters more bang for their bucks will see more games move away from the traditional slot.
At present, only 200 of the 380 games per season are broadcast or streamed in the UK but that will almost certainly increase, with more games on Friday, Saturday and Monday evenings. There is also a possibility of a Sunday evening fixture, although that is far from certain as there will be concerns about how fans and staff can get to and from that game.
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All of this, however, will upset some supporters who feel the Premier League has once again put the desires of advertisers, armchair fans and the media ahead of the game’s most loyal customers. The problem, though, is the game’s voracious appetite for money.
And this was discussed in another section of the meeting under the heading of “a new deal for football”, a neat slogan for the government-requested rethink of how much money the Premier League shares with the rest of the game.
This debate has dragged on since the pandemic exacerbated the huge financial divide that exists between the Premier League and the English Football League (EFL).
The top flight currently shares about 16 per cent of its wealth with the rest of the game but almost two thirds of that goes in parachute payments to half a dozen recently relegated clubs.
The idea is to cushion the blow of relegation and encourage promoted teams to invest in talent that will enable them to compete in the Premier League, thereby improving the show. The EFL believes they destroy the competitive balance of the Championship and force non-recipients to overspend to keep up.
The EFL wants the Premier League to scrap parachute payments entirely, put that money into the pot the league shares will all clubs and increase those solidarity payments to a total of 25 per cent of the leagues’ combined media income.
The government is about to introduce an independent regulator for the game that would have so-called backstop powers to enforce a financial settlement but it does not want to do that, hoping instead for a football-led compromise.
That compromise looks like is starting to take shape. The Premier League is refusing to scrap parachute payments — although it may tweak them slightly — but it will significantly increase the solidarity pot, giving all EFL clubs more support.
However, the quid pro quo will be the adoption of tighter spending controls — something the EFL readily accepts — and an agreement to move to a merit-based distribution system similar to the one the Premier League uses for its clubs.
There are still several details to hammer out, with more meetings planned in the coming weeks.
The Premier League’s ability to be more generous was underlined later on Thursday when French broadcaster Canal+ confirmed that it has extended its deal for the league’s media rights in the Czech Republic, France, Slovakia, Switzerland and Vietnam until 2028. The financial terms were not revealed but it is believed to be a slight increase on the £65million a year it is currently paying.
One subject, however, that does not appear to be worrying too many people in the English game — not yet, anyway — is the rise of the Saudi Pro League.
In a section of the meeting about the recent summer transfer window, it was pointed out to the clubs that Saudi teams only managed to sign 13 players from the Premier League, with none younger than 26 and seven of them older than 30.
And for that haul the English clubs received £239million, about a third of the SPL’s total spend on new recruits. “Thank you” would seem to be the message as opposed to “oh no”.
(Photo: Gareth Copley/Getty Images)
