English football will have a crackdown on time-wasting this season, as Celtic and Scottish football watch-on.
Details have been emerging over the past few days about how the Premier League and English Football League will tackle the new campaign.
On Tuesday afternoon, Sky Sports reported some details about what we’re likely to see down south in 2023/24. The answer is: a lot of injury time.
They say that new refereeing guidelines, which start with Friday’s Championship opener, will see double-digit minute stoppage time periods become a regular occurrence.
One match official even told Sky that matches lasting less than 100 minutes would become a rarity.
It seems very much like we’ll be getting used to the scenes we saw during last year’s World Cup, where significant time was added on at the end of halves.
Neither the SPFL or SFA have yet confirmed whether referees in Scotland will be following a similar procedure. It would certainly be in Celtic‘s best interests if they did.
As a team, we have tried to keep the ball in play as much as possible over the past two seasons. Even this summer under Brendan Rodgers, a similar style of play has been apparent.
In January, Opta Analyst took a look at how long the ball spent in play on average in the leading European leagues.
Rather unsurprisingly, given the agricultural tactics of some of the sides we face, the Scottish Premiership was at the bottom of the eight leagues measured.
On average, the ball was in play for 52.2% of the time in 2022/23 Premiership matches up until that point. That was in contrast to 55.9% in the Premier League, 57.4% in Ligue 1 and 59.1% in the Eredivisie.
That may seem a pretty small difference, but you are talking about the ball being in play for seven minutes more per match in the Eredivisie than the Premiership.
Fans are missing out on a lot of football in Scotland, with the ball spending more time out of play than in other leagues. More added time would at least mean supporters got to see more football.
It seems like a matter of time before Scotland goes down that route. Nevertheless, it will be interesting to see how it goes in England over the coming months.
In other news, our Celtic Predicted XI for the game against Athletic Club
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