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The Influence of the Construction of Time on the Major North American Sports: Will Soccer Infiltrate the American Sports Space?

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Abstract

The role of time is crucial in virtually all sports. As part of a larger presentation on the concept of time in sports, including topics such as schedules, durations and endings, this paper examines the relationship between the official time allotted to the playing of a game from the very beginning to the very end (“wall-time”), and the amount of time spent in actual play (“play-time”). After analyzing this relationship in the big four American team sports of baseball, football, basketball and ice hockey (hockey), the paper focuses on these two temporal phenomena in Association Football (soccer). It concludes that the auspiciousness of this temporal relationship in soccer bodes well for the game’s increased presence in the American sports space.

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Notes

  1. We know that despite its ever-increasing presence in places such as Arizona, California and Florida, ice hockey in the United States still remains a regionally anchored sport in the Northeast, the Middle West and the Rocky Mountain region, and does not yet have the ubiquitous geographic presence shared by baseball, football and basketball. We also know that Britain’s sports space features cricket, Association Football (soccer), rugby union and rugby league. However, with the latter two so regionally confined, we believe to be on solid ground of seeing the United States’ sports space as sui generis in this regard.

  2. For simplicity’s sake, we will refer to the surface on which these sports are practiced as ‘court’ in the case of basketball, ‘rink’ in the case of hockey, ‘pitch’ in the case of soccer, and ‘field’ for both baseball and football. We also take the liberty of equating hockey’s ‘puck’ to a ‘ball’.

  3. The 20% figure is calculated from pitch data at baseball-reference.com: https://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/MLB/2016-pitches-pitching.shtml

  4. While professional soccer games theoretically have 90 min of enforced play-time, like basketball games have 48 min and hockey games have 60 min, this is not the case in reality. The difference is that while in basketball and hockey the clock is stopped whenever the ball is removed from play, in soccer the clock keeps running, and the time added on at the end of the 90 min never makes up for the time in which the clock runs while the ball is out of play (usually around 30 min). See Boss (2013).

  5. Andrei Markovits has devoted much of his writings on sports culture in North America to explaining soccer’s diminished presence in the United States and Canada. While we cannot elaborate the details in this setting, suffice it to say that the main reasons for this absence pertain to history and different structural settings in economy and society. For a detailed discussion of this matter, see Markovits and Hellerman (2001), and Markovits and Rensmann (2010).

  6. This is based on our experience watching soccer matches in different countries and following their statistics over the past 60 years. To acquire hard evidence to support our initial guess of 50%, we looked at Opta’s data from the matches during the first week of the 2016–17 English Premier League season. We found that 52.4% of the attempted passes during those games occurred in the middle third of the field, leading us to accept 50% as a fairly accurate estimate of the amount of possession that occurs in the middle third of the field during a typical soccer match. Data were accumulated from match reports at https://www.fourfourtwo.com/statszone/results/8-2016.

  7. These statistics are calculated from data at https://www.sportingcharts.com/nhl/stats/team-goals-per-game/2016/ for the 2016–17 NHL season and data at https://www.mlssoccer.com/stats/team for the 2017 MLS season.

  8. Or participate in fantasy soccer, the dominant fantasy game in Europe with over 5 million players participating in the English Premier League’s official Fantasy Premier League game during the 2017/18 season (according to the league’s website https://fantasy.premierleague.com/).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

    Benjamin Sadis & Andrei S. Markovits

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  1. Benjamin Sadis
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  2. Andrei S. Markovits
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Correspondence to Andrei S. Markovits.

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Sadis, B., Markovits, A.S. The Influence of the Construction of Time on the Major North American Sports: Will Soccer Infiltrate the American Sports Space?. Int J Sociol Leis 3, 1–13 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41978-019-00044-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41978-019-00044-0

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