The tactic is almost as old as the game itself: A football (soccer) team is leading by one goal with five minutes left and the ball goes out of bounds. Before throwing it back in to restart play, a player from the leading team walks slowly to the sideline, has a word with the coach and ties his shoes before taking a good, hard look around the field searching for the "right" teammate to throw it to. The goal of the delay tactic is clear: Limiting the other side's chances to even the score.
On the other hand, if the team is trailing by one goal, the team will do whatever it can in order to put the ball back into play as quickly as possible, in order to increase their chances of levelling out the score. This, and other time-wasting tactics, have been an accepted, if infuriating (to the losing team) part of the game.
But when do delay tactics cross the line from wise game strategy to unethical behaviors? The question stands at the heart of a new study by Dr. Elia Morgulev of the Department of Business Administration at BGU's Guilford Glazer Faculty of Business and Management and Prof. Yair Galily of the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya. Together with programmers from Sportsmatrix, an online analysis service that focuses on match performance, opposition analysis, trend analysis and consulting the researchers built a unique database that includes information about some 36,000 stoppages of play during the 2014-15 English Premier League season.
The researchers agree that analyzing intentional stalling tactics can be "a subtle, complex, and nuanced activity." But they ultimately assert that despite the existence of grey ethical areas, some clear conclusions can be drawn.
"In some instances, deliberate time-wasting in football is not against the rules and is an acceptable strategy - for example, taking the ball to the corner flag late in a match in order to create a situation where the ball is stuck, or simply engaging in an endless chain of neutral passes.
"In other instances, time-wasting is illegal but players are fully willing to accept the punishment (if one exists); for example, goalkeepers who are supposed to receive yellow cards for delayed goal kicks. Furthermore, delayed actions can be caused by strategic or tactical movements on the field and other natural stoppages (such as throw-in takers or goalkeepers waiting for players to reach a position or to move to a certain zone," the researchers said.
Their analysis of the stoppages, published in the current edition of The Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, showed clear patterns of stall tactics by teams trying to preserve a lead in the final minutes of a contest. For example, goalkeepers were likely to delay putting the ball into play when their teams were leading by two goals, and by even more time when their teams led by just one goal. The results showed that on teams that were trailing by one goal, goalies averaged about 18 seconds to put the ball back into play, as opposed to 32 seconds for goalies of teams leading with time running out.
Similarly, leading teams took nearly twice as long as trailing teams to take free kicks after offside and were 45 percent slower in restarting the play with a throw-in.
Prof. Yair Galily, the head of the Sport, Media and Society (SMS) Research Lab at the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya, stresses that hesitating when re-starting the game (via free-kicks, goal kicks, throw-ins and more) allows teams to waste precious minutes. Although this is illegal, he notes that the rule is not typically enforced by referees: Since the founding of the Premier League in 1992 no player has been kicked out of a game for wasting time, despite the large number of allegations that have been made.
"Our findings are relevant for current educational approaches that radically over-stress the value of winning," says BGU's Dr. Morgulev, who also serves as the head of physical education at Kaye Academic College in Beer-Sheva.
"Professional soccer players are important role models for children, teenagers and even for adults. When they fall down intentionally, when they fake injuries, when they waste time in order to run down the game clock it sends a message that winning at all cost is acceptable. That is completely antithetical to the concept of fair play and to the kind of ethics we want to encourage in sport."
