When watching sports on TV how much action are we really getting?
Soccer has the highest ratio of game action segments to stoppages of any of the top popular sports
Yes, we’re officially in the holiday season now, but Christmas comes in October if you’re a sports fan. It’s the time of year all four major North American men’s sports leagues play concurrently.
This year we even got what’s known as a sports equinox1, including a best-of-7 World Series matchup between two storied teams in the Los Angeles Dodgers and New York Yankees, along with the traditional fall sports slate of football (of multiple kinds), hockey and basketball.
So naturally I spend a ton of time watching sporting events around this time of year. On a recent weekend I woke up early and watched soccer — from various European leagues — American football (pro and college), baseball, hockey and basketball all within the same weekend.
Consuming all of these games on TV got me to thinking: which is actually the most enjoyable sport to watch when you’re sitting on the couch? And can we quantify some of the trends many sports fans notice — like does college football really take longer than other sports to play with all its timeouts, or do the final minutes of an NBA game take longer than others?
Now, the question around watchability is obviously subjective, but for me personally I get frustrated with the amount of commercials that litter every NFL and college football game. It sometimes seems like they’ll go to commercial after just a single play. Contrast that with soccer, which has just one break in the action for halftime (that you can completely avoid since you know when it’s coming)2.
So to answer these questions I tracked every moment of live action, stoppage in play and halftime break from multiple games broadcast recently3. That data gives us a chance to see what percentage of time fans actually spend watching the action on the field instead of the latest advertisement for, say, Buffalo Wild Wings or DraftKings.
Unsurprisingly soccer gives us the highest percentage of time watching the action unfolding on the field vs other sports. During the October El Clasico match between Real Madrid and Barcelona 86 percent (94 minutes or one hour and 34 minutes of real time) of the ESPN+ broadcast4 was spent on the game while the remaining time was spent on commercials and halftime analysis by ESPN FC’s studio analysts. A running clock and no stoppages for advertising allows for a straightforward and enjoyable viewing experience for fans of the beautiful game.
You can see the breakdown of how much time was spent in actual game action vs non-action between the Spanish rivals below. Two 45-minute halves — plus two minutes of stoppage time in each frame — sandwiched a 15-minute break for halftime.
And that’s it.
Contrast that with a typical American college football game:
Several minutes of game action are interrupted early and often by myriad of stoppages: commercial breaks, injury timeouts and replay reviews. The longest sustained segment of time where the CBS broadcast didn’t cut to commercial in the Oct. 28 Illinois-Oregon game was 13 minutes of real-time action in the third quarter5. The halftime break was the longest segment of any at 20 minutes.
While soccer is the quickest in terms of real time, college and NFL football take the most time to play out. This matches my intuition — broadcasters allot nearly four hours for football games while they only need two hours for soccer. The football games I tracked on this particular weekend lasted 194 minutes of real time (or three hours and 14 minutes) if measured from the moment they kicked off until the final whistle was blown. The Real Madrid-Barcelona soccer game, as mentioned above, took under two hours of real time, while the basketball and hockey games took just under two and a half hours. The World Series game between the Dodgers and Yankees lasted just under three hours of real time.
One of the more surprising findings for me was the Oct. 26 hockey game between the Vegas Golden Knights and San Jose Sharks placement third from the bottom in action to non-action ratio and the lowest overall in net action6 — I figured a free flowing game like hockey would be closer to soccer. But two lengthy intermissions leaves hockey fans with nearly a two-thirds ratio of action to non-action when watching on TV, similar to the split for other major sports save soccer.
Soccer had the highest net action score for this particular set of games with one hour and 19 minutes of live game action, followed by baseball (1:14) and basketball (1:11). On the other end of the spectrum hockey clocked in at 50 minutes of game action. That and the Week 5 Sunday Night Football NFL game between the Dallas Cowboys and San Francisco 49ers were the only games under one hour of live play.
That being said, hockey had the highest average amount of game action per segment of all the sports other than soccer. I’m defining a segment as either live action or a stoppage in play where the broadcast cuts to commercial break.
As I hypothesized college football had the most amount of breaks with 24 total stoppages for TV timeouts. The game also had the most amount of action “segments” with 25 such restarts after the commercial breaks, but the lowest average time spent in play. Hockey had the least amount of segments — other than the soccer game — with 11 action segments and 10 stoppage segments. The NBA game between the Minnesota Timberwolves and Denver Nuggets featured quite a few stoppages at the end of the game due to timeouts, but featured fewer overall stoppages compared to the football and baseball games.
Overall, the North American based sports I watched on this particular weekend averaged around a two-thirds action-to-stoppage ratio, while soccer saw an 86 percent action share. So if you’re looking for a life hack on how to watch more sport and less commercials, I encourage you to tune into more soccer.
This took place on Monday, Oct. 28th where the NBA and NHL regular seasons were getting into their early season schedules, there was an NFL Monday Night Football game on and Game 3 of the World Series was taking place. There were even MLS playoff games on as well.
I feel like this is where I could have inserted one of those European Mind/American Mind can’t comprehend memes, but couldn’t think of how to integrate it into the story, so I’ll leave it to the reader to imagine.
Thanks to streamers YouTubeTV and ESPN+.
The methodology I used was to track each minute of one representative game from each sports mentioned above. This was done starting from the beginning of the respective match/game (eg. when the puck was dropped in the hockey game) until the game ended. Action is defined by any time the broadcast was not on break for in-game commercials and intermission pauses.
This methodology obviously doesn’t account for variation in broadcasts of these sports that can arise from different networks broadcasting a given sport, or even the stakes of the game. For example, I don’t think it is fully fair to compare a World Series game, which will have longer breaks to fill more high value ad inventory, with regular season games in the other sports. But that’s what I had to work with. The full dataset with this analysis can be found in this Google Sheet. If you’re interested in the nitty gritty of the analysis you can find that here on my GitHub.
This doesn’t take into consideration actual time spent with the live play vs breaks between downs. Just official stoppages like timeouts, commercials, etc. If I was able to do this analysis (maybe someone can feed the video feeds into ChatGPT or something some day) it would surely show American football having the least amount of time spent with the ball in play.
Net action is calculated as total minutes of in-game action less stoppages such as commercial breaks, halftime and injury timeouts.