I don’t understand why we as a viewing public can’t see exactly when a game will end. It also doesn’t seem like the players are aware. I was watching the end of the Guana vs. Korean Republic match today and it seemed the game ended without notice. How is time kept and who decides when the game ends?
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Football has never been an exactly timed game, and it’s simply a different approach from a sport like basketball where perfectly timing a last shot with 0.5 seconds left is common. The big difference from other common team sports is that there’s no process for stopping/starting the scoreboard clock during play because the game generally flows continuously (the NFL, for example, take a different approach where the referee has specific start/stop signals and will commonly announce that the clock needs to be reset to a particular time because the scoreboard operator got it wrong).
The referee keeps the time on the field and roughly calculates* the amount the game has been stopped for things like injuries and substitutions and then adds it on at the end. The referee then indicates at the end of the half how many minutes of extra time will be played based on the stoppages through an assistant who holds up a board with the number of extra minutes.
A football/soccer game will also continue through the end of the current attack when the end of time has been reached, rather than ending at the exact time. So if there is 4 minutes of stoppage time in the second half the game will end at the end of the attack that is ongoing at 94:00. That’s not a super exact standard, but it’s generally applied consistently. The referee in South Korea/Ghana misapplied this and should have let South Korea take its corner kick (as part of the completion of its attack), which is what caused the controversy at the end of the match.
*Historically, this has been very inexact and will often be 1 minute at the end of the first half and 4 minutes at the end of the second half unless there is an injury that requires significant time for treatment or other unusual factor that causes an unusual delay. The current World Cup is using a more exact approach to timing stoppages and has been more in the 6-10 minute range. I think this is likely the proper approach because it disincentivizes faking injuries and other time wasting techniques for the team with a lead.
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