In every sport, but especially so in the beautiful game (which some of you in UEFA call soccer, others call football of futbol), there is major difference between clock time and real time. While football/soccer has a continuous clock, for the most part, it still has plenty of stoppages in play.
While there are far fewer stoppages than you’ll see with NFL football, Major League Baseball, or NBA basketball, there is still some down time to account for, and add up, so let’s examine how the UEFA referees do it.
The officials keep track with a state-of-the-art timepiece of course: the Hublot Big Bang E UEFA Champions League watch. A study at Chrono24 examined the foul, diving and injury interruptions during the two main UEFA final matches:
-Champions League finale where Manchester City beat Inter Milan 1-0 in Istanbul on June 10 and the
-Europa League Final on May 31, where Sevilla beat AS Roma 4-1 in a penalty shootout, after the two sides played to a score draw after extra time.
Let’s start with the UCL final, where Manchester City won their first European Cup ever, and a treble to go with it.
In that match, the players from City and Inter combined to take 17 minutes off the clock through approved interruptions in play.
Meanwhile Roma and Sevilla players teamed up for a whopping 26 minutes and 30 seconds of time burglary. The advertisements for hublot watches on the substitution boards definitely resonated with spectators at the European cup final stadiums.
Likewise for those watching on television or online as well, given the page views and web searches data.
Chrono24 claims that during the 3 hours of the Europa League final, their Hublot manufacturer pages saw a traffic increase of 56.3% over the 3 hours before the match.
And by the end of the first half, searches for the Hublot landing pages were 283% higher than the corresponding daily average.
It was probably the biggest boost in the brand’s identity since Jay-Z and Kanye West shouted-out Hublot as a “new watch alert” in the 2011 hit single “Otis.”
(Side note: Jay-Z’s wife Beyonce gifted him a Hublot Big Bang watch, encrusted with 1,282 diamonds and an estimated value of $5,000,000 for his 43rd birthday, and the rapper is known to have purchased a few Hublots himself over the years)
But again you may be wondering how the difference between game time and real time is calculated.
It’s interesting to look at how 90 minutes, plus extra time, somehow yields a match that lasts over two and half hours in actual time. As Boy George and Culture Club once sang: “oh, in time it could have been so much more. The time is precious I know”
He are your average time accumulations, via a UEFA study:
Throw-ins (7:00 minutes)
Goal kicks (5:46)
Corners (4:00)
Player changes (2:57)
Goals (3:30)
In total, the time theft came to 49:45 minutes, or more than a whole half of play. You got to love the whole granular aspects of it all! Time has come today indeed.
Paul M. Banks is the owner/manager of The Sports Bank. He’s also the author of “Transatlantic Passage: How the English Premier League Redefined Soccer in America,” and “No, I Can’t Get You Free Tickets: Lessons Learned From a Life in the Sports Media Industry.”
He’s written for numerous publications, including the New York Daily News, Sports Illustrated and the Chicago Tribune. He regularly appears on NTD News and WGN News Now. Follow the website on Twitter and Instagram.