"Effective" Time

90 Minute Game?
Understanding The Game At A Deeper Level

One of the stats sites I visit offers this glimpse into the J-League (Japan's top league), and how much time the ball is actually in play - much of the beautiful game is really the ball being stood over by a player about to take a free kick, or throw in or other while some slob rolls around on the ground in agony.

Here's the link (click here) for the soccermetrics post...but essentially it correlates strongly to some posts in this space: click here to see what my numbers showed.

This diagram pretty much shows it all; in the J-League, the ball is in play, live, for about 50-60 minutes per game...virtually exactly what we found at the U12 age group last year!  So rare to find anything about a youth-level activity that mirrors so closely the adult version.  And anyone who's watched a pro match lately knows that possession rates hover pretty evenly around the 50% mark (though we have to be careful about what's counted as possession- I prefer to only count the time the ball is in play in a team's possession, nutshell version...most statisticians just go on absolute numbers regardless of ball in play or not).  End result in both cases, however, is pretty much that each team get's a third of the time on the clock in possession of the ball.

In an older post Haverford was charted as having 104 possessions, all ending in turnovers, plus two that ended in goals.  So in 60 minutes of "effective time" the Fords had 104 opportunities to go to goal; we took 31 shots that night, and scored 2.  Hit the woodwork 3 or 4 times too, so it could have easily looked a bit more impressive.  

In the post published previously on 192 Square Feet, the focus was making the point that players get better in environments in which they get many touches on the ball (and presumably many chances to defend against a player on the ball...it's a two-way game, after all) but here the idea is of a more tactical level.

If you know there's only 60 minutes of actual ball-in-play action, how does that factor into your desire to counter-attack, possess, press high up the field, or other such decisions?

From a great PDF from FIFA (a little dated now, but recent enough to sketch out the point):

That's a lot of action in 60 minutes of live ball time...clearly it would pay to both skew the possession in your favor, as well as find ways to make a higher percentage of your team's possessions turn into 'threats on goal.'  

Final analysis: it's a much shorter game than it appears, chances are extraordinarily difficult to produce, let alone goals, and minute details may shift a game significantly in a team's favor.  Thinking about it this way makes the pressure a top goal scorer feels more tangible- and makes the performances of consistent scorers even more remarkable!