Tight Script of Soccer Isn’t Hostage to Advertisers

The World Cup has shown again that soccer is very kind in its brevity. A 90-minute game takes less than two hours to finish. With its constant action and lack of natural in-game stoppages, soccer avoids the bloated commercial breaks of other sports; timeouts that turn the final minute of NBA games into dreary, real-time marathons; clock stoppages for first downs in college football; fidgeting pitchers and dawdling batters who should be on a clock; and video reviews. Soccer has its problems but the length of its matches is not one. Would ESPN and ABC have seen an average of 4.1 million viewers for the World Cup’s first 56 games -- a 44 percent leap from 2010 -- if there were timeouts and breaks that stretched the broadcasts by 30 or 45 minutes.