FIFA President Gianni Infantino would like to introduce effective playing time in the 2022 World Cup, an issue Milan coach Stefano Pioli has been pushing, but the statistics show Serie A has the ball in play for longer than the Premier League.
The idea would be to keep track of how many minutes the ball is actually in play and set a specific limit to ensure that amount of football is played during a match.
That would mean games likely lasting a lot longer than 90 minutes to make up for all the stoppages.
It’s hardly a new debate, as Milan boss Pioli has been pushing for it over many months, maintaining that is the best way to ensure fairness in modern football.
“I would make three main modifications to the rules,” said Pioli back in September 2021.
“I’d work on effective playing time, add a time-out in the first half and, seeing as we like attacking football, ensure once a team has gone past the halfway line, it cannot pass the ball back over.”
Pioli has raised the subject of effective playing time on several occasions since last season, most recently following the draw with Udinese.
“It’s not possible that the effective playing time for that game was 45 minutes. It’s half a match, it’s not fair to play only 45 minutes out of 90.
“If the referees don’t whistle as much, the players will get straight back up and not lie there rolling around to waste time. That is the fault of the referees even more than the players.”
The Milan coach also said Italian teams would always struggle in Europe because they have less effective playing time than most other top leagues.
The CIES Football Observatory crunched the numbers and showed that was in fact not the case at all.
Since 2018-19, Serie A had an average effective playing time of 61.35 minutes per game, which is the highest of the European top five leagues.
The German Bundesliga averages 61.28 minutes, the English Premier League 60.59 minutes per game, Ligue 1 in France 60.32 minutes and LaLiga in Spain just 58.36 minutes.
The main European League with the worst effective time average was the Scottish Premiership on 55.38 minutes, despite their reputation for fast-moving and physical games.