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The American World Cup Introduced Ad Breaks—and Everyone Absolutely Hates It (www.wsj.com)

submitted 2 days ago by geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml to c/usa@lemmy.ml

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As the World Cup landed in the U.S. for the first time in three decades, international soccer fans have been acquainting themselves with the distinctly American pleasures of barbecue, highway traffic jams and Texas summers.

But there’s one American tradition that fans of the world’s most popular sport simply cannot tolerate. This summer, World Cup games have introduced commercial breaks smack in the middle of each half.

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[–] dhork@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

The issue I have with graphs like this is that there is a very restrictive view of what "live action" means. For American football in particular, they seem to limit their analysis to the time the ball itself is "live", in a play, and don't count time when the clock is running between plays. And a fair amount of American football strategy, though, is the time period just before the snap where the offense lines up for their play and the defense tries to position itself to counter. It is an essential part of the game, but since the ball isn't in motion, this analysis discounts it.

Similarly, a fair amount of the strategy in baseball is in how fielders are positioned. Its something that is hard to see on TV, although a good announcer will pick up on it and relay it to the audience.

Soccer can be fairly slow moving in comparison, even though the ball is "live" the whole time. I have seen some analysis online that state that there may only be 12 minutes or so of "attack" time per soccer game, with the rest spent on passing to set up plays and keep possession.