I don’t think it can be avoided and that saddens me. One of my favorite things about soccer is that it relies on players to solve problems, rather than to be pawns in their coaches’ schemes, and the more we make it easier for coaches to give direction, the less we allow players to solve problems themselves, together. But it is the players themselves that, to my eye, have made the strongest argument that soccer should be divided into quarters. There’s a real epidemic of “team timeouts” where the clock will hit the 22nd minute and the whole team will start running to the sideline for a team talk and then the goalie will sit down on the field claiming injury. We might have a chance of resisting the advertisers trying to add another commercial break, but the players too? Not a chance.
I don’t think it can be avoided and that saddens me. One of my favorite things about soccer is that it relies on players to solve problems, rather than to be pawns in their coaches’ schemes, and the more we make it easier for coaches to give direction, the less we allow players to solve problems themselves, together. But it is the players themselves that, to my eye, have made the strongest argument that soccer should be divided into quarters. There’s a real epidemic of “team timeouts” where the clock will hit the 22nd minute and the whole team will start running to the sideline for a team talk and then the goalie will sit down on the field claiming injury. We might have a chance of resisting the advertisers trying to add another commercial break, but the players too? Not a chance.