The Problem of Time Wasting

Tick tock.

Photo by Donald Wu on Unsplash

Football fans will criticise other sports for their stop-start nature. They don’t flow in the same way, they can be too sterile. A series of events, rather than end-to-end, continuous chaos.

Except that this is what football has become in the Premier League in 2026. “There are so many other games, especially currently in football, that are not, in my opinion, a joy to watch anymore,” Arne Slot said in November. “It’s become more and more time wasting.”

Supporters spend so much money to follow their team, through tickets and television subscriptions, yet see so little play in return. In terms of pounds per minute, you’d get better value from a dodgy premium rate phone line.

Thanks to the data on the 365Scores website, we can now see how Liverpool’s matches have been affected by time wasting this season. To give you an extreme example of the statistics available for review, here’s a screenshot from the page for the Reds’ 3-2 win at Newcastle back in August.

The numbers are extraordinary. The ball was in play for less than 45 minutes in a match that ran to over 109. In other words, the clock was ticking for over an hour in which absolutely no football took place.

There were 100 stoppages in play. Referee Simon Hooper, he of the good process, signalled 13 minutes of stoppage time and played on for 19:23, but the ball was only active for barely half of the announced added time.

Newcastle took an average of 69 seconds per free-kick, 43 for each corner, 32 for their goal kicks and 24 per throw-in. The latter is taking longer on average this season than in any of the preceding nine, but the Magpies still took about six seconds per throw above that rate.

The Reds played their part in the time wasting - it’s impossible not to - though aside from using up 47 seconds on their one corner, their average was shorter for the three other types of restart listed.

Despite this being Liverpool’s shortest league match in terms of how long the ball was in play, other games saw more stoppages. Some saw wider gaps between the wasted time totals on each side. There have even been matches in which the Reds were more culpable for it than their opponents. The contrast between the figures for the Premier League and Champions League is razor sharp.

It isn’t quite a fair comparison. Time wasting will likely increase in Europe with each advancing round. It may lessen in some league games later in the campaign when little is at stake.

Even so, the Reds’ matches in the Champions League have averaged 81.8 stoppages when there have been 93.2 domestically. However, the ball in play margin isn’t too wide. If you’ve watched every Liverpool match in the Premier League, you’ve seen the ball in play for 56:22 per game. You only got another 50 seconds for your TV or ticket fee in Europe.

There is another difference. The Reds have been the greater offenders for time wasting in their international matches, unlike in the league.

There are two reasons this makes sense. The most obvious is that they have a much better win rate in Europe. They will be happy to wind down the clock rather than rushing to restart play as often. It’s likely that the ‘Other’ in the 365Scores data includes goal celebration time, of which Liverpool have enjoyed more in the Champions League.

The other factor is that their possession average has been six per cent lower in that competition. Time wasting inevitably rests more with the side that has less of the ball. They need to take time out of the match to catch their breath.

The correlation between possession and share of the lost playing time is close to non-existent, as much sense as the idea might make. A broad trend remains though. Many of the matches in which the Reds have accounted for over 50 per cent of the time wasting have been the games in which their possession was at their lower end.

These percentages hide how much potential playing time disappeared into the ether. We saw that Newcastle wasted 36:34 at St James’ Park, yet the two teams collectively spurned less in the matches at Arsenal (35:14), Marseille (35:04) and Frankfurt (34:33).

The 5-1 win over the latter is also notable for seeing the fewest Game Stops of the season (67). There was one every 86 seconds of the match, considerably less often than the 54 second average in the Manchester United defeat. That match was stopped on a remarkable 115 occasions, the most of 2025/26.

With the draw at Fulham seeing the fourth least time lost (37:38), you might think wasting time has been less of an issue on the road. The next six best matches all took place at Anfield though. Thanks in no small part to the Magpies’ antics on their own patch, the average is higher for away games (44:18) than at home (41:49).

Don’t dismiss the part Eddie Howe’s men played in wasting time in their recent 4-1 loss in front of the Kop too hastily. They hold the Anfield record for 2025/26 too. Leeds United also feature twice in the top 10, as many times as the Reds themselves.

"It's not always possible for a team to get pace in the game or to get things going if the other team tries to do everything to get that pace out of the game,” Slot said ahead of the recent match with City. The above data proves his point if you mentally review the games, as the Reds were frequently dragged down to the level of their opponents in them.

This data was laboriously compiled, copied down for each match individually. The next step is to repeat the process across the whole Premier League, to see how Liverpool compare to everyone else. Finding out which referees are more prone to allowing slow restarts should be interesting too.

It will take a long time to pull the information together, so watch this space. Maybe I’ll start gathering the statistics during the 100-odd stoppages that will inevitably occur in the Reds’ next match.