Major League Soccer has had discussions with the International Football Association Board, global football’s rule making body, about trialing the use of a stopped clock in matches.
A continuously running clock that does not stop for fouls, set pieces, injuries and the like is foundational to the way time has been kept in the sport almost from its inception. However, the use of a clock that stops is commonplace in other American sports like basketball and gridiron football. It was even briefly used in MLS itself from its 1996 founding until the end of the 1999 season, and is still used in US college soccer.
Paul Grafer, vice-president of competition for MLS, told the Guardian that reintroducing a stopped clock is “one thing that we often talk about” when discussing the future of the game.
“When are we going to move away from all of these stopgap procedures and see if we can address gamesmanship and match manipulation by having the referee have a [stopped] clock?” Grafer said. “We’re open to trials around the world, and working with Ifab.”
In a statement, Ali Curtis, MLS’s executive vice-president of sporting development, confirmed to the Guardian that the league has had “preliminary conversations with Ifab around future areas of innovation, including concepts such as a stopped clock, increased transparency around timekeeping, and other measures designed to improve consistency and fan understanding”.
Ifab most recently debated the use of a stopped clock in 2017, deciding instead to tinker with the rules in more subtle ways. The organization introduced measures to combat time-wasting ahead of the 2022 World Cup, with referees adding previously-unheard-of amounts of stoppage time to the end of matches.
Sources within Ifab told the Guardian this week that the organization shelved those initial stopped clock efforts out of concern that the unpredictable length of games would create issues for broadcasters. Others at Ifab expressed a more philosophical concern: that the idea of a 90-minute match was simply sacrosanct.
A source within Ifab said on Tuesday that, in their view, MLS would face an uphill battle in terms of implementing any significant changes to timekeeping.
“[Ifab] allows and introduces trials if there is wide interest in a topic,” that source said. “This one has very little support at the moment.”
MLS has in recent years become a proving ground of sorts for rule changes and technologies that have eventually earned global adoption. This summer’s World Cup will feature new measures aimed at combating time-wasting surrounding injuries and substitutions, measures which were first pioneered in MLS Next Pro, MLS’s developmental league. The rules were later adopted by MLS itself before Ifab added them to the laws of the game.
The league was also among the first globally to work with Ifab on implementation and testing of VAR, having partnered with the lower-division USL to do so in early 2017. The league eventually adopted the technology in all matches ahead of the 2018 season.
Any adjustments to timekeeping would probably follow a similar path.
“We’re always in conversation about potential trials and rules so it would be one where we would be formally submitting a proposal and seeking their acceptance,” Grafer said. “Our usual operating procedure is to trial these new rules in Next Pro. It’s the perfect incubator for those types of opportunities. We’d then look at the data and see if it’s good for the game.”
The current conversation around using a stopped clock is not a new one in MLS circles, or even internationally. On its founding in 1996, MLS not only stopped the clock during pauses in play, but also had the clock itself count down instead of up, another convention still used in college soccer in the US. In its planning stages before the inaugural season, MLS also considered using a 60-minute iteration of the stopped clock and went as far as to trial it in the lower-division USISL in 1995.
MLS did away with its countdown clock after the 1999 season along with the 35-yard shootout, which the league had previously used to decide tied games in the regular season. “Our core audience has spoken,” MLS Commissioner Don Garber, then in his first season at the league, told media at the time. “And we have listened.”
Nearly three decades later, elements of the league’s old timekeeping standards are coming back into view.
“These discussions [with Ifab] are exploratory,” Curtis said. “But they reflect a broader commitment across the global game to examine how the sport can continue to modernize while preserving what makes soccer unique.”
