Good counts make good friends. If the 2023-2024 Ligue 1 season, which began Friday August 11 with the meeting between Nice and Lille, will be shortened – due to the passage from twenty to eighteen clubs – the matches will stretch. Because once the ninety regulatory minutes have been played, the games should continue with extended additional time.
During the Men’s World Cup in Qatar, the novelty caused a stir: matches continued twelve, ten, even fourteen minutes after the end of regulation time. A few months later, the Women’s World Cup – still underway in Australia and New Zealand – extended the games in turn. And the measure is gradually spreading at the initiative of the International Football Federation (FIFA): the boss of the referees, Pierluigi Collina, warned before the 2022 World Cup that “the times of substitutions, penalties, celebrations, treatments medical or, of course, VAR , will have to be compensated”.
During the Community Shield, a match between the English champions, Manchester City, and their runner-up, Arsenal, on Sunday August 6, the Gunners equalized eleven minutes beyond regulation time in a match that will have passed the one hundred wall ( 105 minutes). Enough to provoke the ire of Pep Guardiola, the coach of the Citizens, probably accentuated by the defeat of his people: “The matches will last a hundred minutes but we are never asked our opinion”, scolded the Catalan technician.
Manchester United’s French defender Raphaël Varane shares this dissatisfaction. In a long message posted on his X account (formerly Twitter), the 2018 world champion expressed concern about the consequences on the physical and mental health of players, already overstretched by a heavy schedule and believes that “these changes are hurtful [ At the sports “.
Actual playing time as a compass
In turn, Ligue 1 will change. The French refereeing director, Antony Gautier, confirmed it on Friday August 4 in an interview with Agence-France-Presse: the French championship will follow the trend of longer “money time” for compensate for the slightest stoppage in play.
The fatigue accumulated by these extra minutes is the main question for French teams, who will have to adapt in a championship already famous for its physical side. The first guinea pigs of this instruction were the Lille and the Nice, Friday. “I don’t know who will be up at the end”, anticipated the new coach of the Aiglons, Francesco Farioli, expecting a physical challenge of unprecedented magnitude – he who wants to set up spectacular football and therefore rich in efforts to its players. An identical philosophy drives his northern counterpart, Paulo Fonseca. The Lille coach, if he did not comment on the merits or not of this extended additional time, warned that the season could become tiring for his Mastiffs. “If we qualify for the Europa League Conference, we will have additional competition on top of an intense championship…”
If many football players are questioning themselves, the football authorities have not hesitated and put football fans in the spotlight. “If spectators are asked to pay for tickets or subscriptions to watch ninety minutes of football and a match lasts fifty minutes, there is something that needs to be reviewed,” argued Gianni Infantino, president of FIFA, in 2022, calling on the International Football Association Board (IFAB), guarantor of the laws of the game. With the effective playing time for compass – the duration of a match without cuts related to faults, ball outings, substitutions or celebrations – the IFAB has included in its rules this year the recovery of time lost during the celebration of a goal.
“We take away a particularity of this sport”
Of the ninety minutes that a match lasts, the ball is only really in play for about an hour, according to several studies by the International Center for Sports Studies (CIES). On the side of the referees, we defend this future extension of the meetings. “Everything will be linked to the events of the meeting,” said Antony Gautier. For the former international referee, “the objective will be to further promote the game and the spectacle”.
In recent seasons, the concern to guarantee matches with the longest possible effective playing time has increased considerably. For Loïc Ravenel, a researcher at CIES, this evolution is that of “football which supports emptiness less and less”. And to add that the extension of additional time is far from trivial because it will change part of the essence of football: “We remove a particularity of this sport: the loss of time which mainly benefited small teams. »
It remains to be seen how to harmonize the time added to the game because if rules have been enacted for certain phases of the game – goals or substitutions – they remain vague on others – faults or ball outings. “We’re going to come to a point where we’ll realize that the easiest way is to stop the clock every time out,” concludes the researcher – like what is done for basketball games.
The players in the French championship will now have to adapt to this new reality. Some, like Alexandre Lacazette, should even find their way there. The Lyon striker scored fourteen Ligue 1 goals beyond the 90th minute, making him the league’s most decisive stoppage-time player of the 21st century. Extending playtime should provide him with more opportunities to increase this stat.