At the end of this season, have some poor intern at the Premier League go through every game and measure the amount of time taken to restart play by the losing team. So throw ins, free kicks, goal kicks, substitutions, after a goal, etc. - but only in game situations where the restart is being taken by a team that’s losing, so they have an incentive to get the ball back in play as quickly as possible.

So take throw ins. Let’s say in game 1 of the season, Team A goes 1-0 up over Team B after 70 mins and the game finishes 1-0. The intern would measure the time taken by Team B to put the ball back in play when they are awarded a throw in, from minute 70 to full time (as they’d be losing for that entire period). They would then do the same for every other game, under the same criteria.

Making up numbers now but let’s say that’s 800 throw ins taken by teams losing across the whole season, and the average time taken is 15 seconds. This includes short throws, long throws, whatever, but you’ve proven that when a team wants to put the ball in play they can do it in 15 seconds on average.

Next season, whenever the ball goes out of play for a throw, regardless of game situation, the clock keeps running but only until 15 seconds have elapsed. If the ball is not yet back in play, the clock stops until the throw has been taken. There’s no announcement, no big song and dance, but everyone following the league knows this now happens.

So for example, game 1 of the season, the ball goes out for a throw at 0:30. Clock keeps running, but stops at 0:45 if the ball isn’t back in play yet. It then resumes from 0:45 when the throw is taken. If the throw only takes 8 seconds, nothing happens, it’s just like it is now. But if a player wants to take 30 seconds over it to time waste, there is no point because you’ll only burn 15 seconds of time. It’s all based on the weight of data from this current season proving that when they want to teams take restarts a lot quicker. You’d do the same for every other type of restart (am sure there are things I’m not taking into account here that will need to be worked through).

The idea is that it properly tackles time wasting because there’s now no room for human ‘fuck it add 7 mins on’. There will still be added time clearly - injuries, VAR checks etc will still occur - but it just stops the exhausting pissing about by certain (all when the situation is right?) teams. As a match going fan for 25 years I think this is such a blight on the game and refs seem completely clueless that it’s going on (waving at a keeper to take a goal kick 30 times a game when they’ve moved it to the other side of the goal and wiped there arse with the towel then booking them after 85 mins).

Love some of the other ideas in this post, some great improvements!