The maxi recoveries of the World Cup in Qatar are made for streaming football – Corriere.it

THEThe World Cup in Qatar was shaken by the amount of recoveries, decided by Fifa: 24 minutes between the first and second half in England-Iran! They wrote critically about it Courier Paolo Casarin and Mario Sconcerti underlining the substantial failure of the initiative which tended to restore effective playing time. Perhaps it is worth adding a few purely television notes.

The World Cup live and today’s matches

In order to reach full television, the sporting event has been fringed by a technology that did not originally belong to it: replays, slow motion, superimpositions, the multiplication of points of view, slow motion, lastly the VAR. Above all, some sports have been “transformed” to meet programming requirements: penalty kicks after extra time, the tie-break, the new volleyball score, just to name a few examples. But the big streaming platforms are no longer slaves to the schedule, to rigid programming times: once the last 40 km of a cycling race were broadcast, now the complete broadcast is broadcast, from start to finish. For a platform, the longer the event lasts, the better it is for its ratings.

The stretch of matches has two main origins: the Var and the Covid, with the change of five players. We no longer watch one game, but two, if not three. Changing half of the team means changing the course of the event, above all in favor of those who can afford luxury spare parts. Here then is that the long recovery becomes a sort of supplement, an appendix. The match doesn’t necessarily have to end because another program is broadcast afterwards: theoretically it could last forever, like certain tennis sets that never end. If we go back to the three substitutions, we can get passionate again about the rhetoric of the 90th minute and not put the fan’s mental strength to the test. Otherwise the recovery will inevitably be the third time.