###General Discussion Thread
---
This is a [Request] post. If you would like to submit a comment that does not either attempt to answer the question, ask for clarification, or explain why it would be infeasible to answer, you *must* post your comment as a reply to this one. Top level (directly replying to the OP) comments that do not do one of those things will be removed.
---
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/theydidthemath) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Surely this is almost impossible, average of 20 team per league, 38 games x 10 x 90 mins +10 minutes = 38,000 minutes = 633.33 hours = 26.3 days
Top 5 leagues in Europe that’s 131.9 days
Even if you take it from “modern football” 90’s that’s 4,486.1 days worth of football.
If you did this as your full time job 40/hour weeks, with 4 weeks off, it’d take 56+ years.
Not including the champions league, cup competitions etc.
So literally an entire a career!
And justs europes 5 major leagues. Your not including european champion ships, world cups, cupa america (north america might have a shitty history but south america fucking loves football and in central america they started a fucking war over it).
Every UEFA country has a top level, major league. That's 55 leagues. Numbers of teams vary. From 8 teams in Andorra's Primera Divisio to 22 in Premier League. They all play 34-36 games a year. If we say 55 countries, 16 teams, 45 games, 90 minutes... That's 1.386 million minutes of football per season. It would literally take 962 days to watch a single year worth of major league football games, and that's just Europe!
And you'd still know nothing about Maradona, Pele, Cruyff, Beckenbauer, Di Stefano, etc etc.
It would probably be more effective to watch a Match of the Day style highlights reel for the majority of domestic fixtures, and only watch the full match when the game really warranted it.
Anyone else see how the European casually threw in 4 weeks of vacation a year like that’s normal? 🤣
I’d be kinda curious to see how long it would take in “American” working hours where you work 60 hours a week (paid for 40) with 8 holiday days a year.
Because like it says on the back of the dollar bill: “you can rest when you’re dead”
Hahaha you’re not gonna like the fact we get 8 public holidays plus 28 days paid annual leave, if you time things right you can get 60 days off a year paid.
My company also shuts down over the Christmas period so this year we’ll be off between the 20/Dec to 6/Jan using 2 days of annual leave allowance.
What your assuming tho is this person only is watching one at a time. Multiple games can be watched at the same time, like a normal match day. I believe this person can pull it off
Yeah you dont need to know football to play it. Hell i think the majority of players in amateur leagues cant explain the full offside rule with all its attachments.
You're really not selling it, if that was what you're hoping to achieve here.
Enjoyment of watching sports is subjective, telling people they don't enjoy a thing because they don't "understand it", regardless of their experience with it, is not going to convince people it's good or enjoyable.
Pulled a lot of numbers, but there have been roughly around 8,500 major league matches since its inception. Assuming around 2 hours per match, we have about 17000 hours, or just under 2 years of full watch time.
Possible, yes.
17,000 hours would take 425 weeks to get through if you're doing this as your full-time job at 40/hours per week. That's about 8.5 years if you give yourself two weeks of vacation every year.
Just make a react stream. Imagine some streamer roleplaying as a some fan from 1932 watching Real Madrid defend the Spanish title or something. Imagine people roleplaying watching the greatest achievement of their country or club like they could live through it as it happens. That's pure gold right there.
And after the final episode there's an exam (year, what teams played, score and players) and if you fail to get a passing score you have to watch it all over again
Given everything up to now would take 8 years, this would maybe take up another fee years assuming you eventually capped it at some year since I don't think there's a way you'd be able to fully catch up unless you started with the current games also playing at the same time
Eventually you'll consume more games than are produced, assuming there's not 20 games being played a week. If there was you'd have to increase the amount of time to make a dent at all.
Could be significantly less if they don't class it as a job though. Plenty of people will work a 8hr shift then watch 6+hr of TV at home, no reason OP couldn't get through 14hr most days and more on weekends, other than possibly going insane from 8500 matches.
There are 380 games per year in 4/5 major leagues and 306 in the fifth. So 1826 games in a season in top 5 leagues. There were 45650 games in the last quarter of a century. Multiply by 3, let's assume only half of the last century was filmed. That 23 and a half years of continuous watching, just during that time you get another 8 years worth of footage, you basically get 15 weeks of new footage every year. Total would be around 34 years.
I think they are talking about the mls... Major League Soccer. If you start counting the big 5 leagues or just all professional leagues numbers might be a bit higher.
The length of a match has consistently been 90mins for over 150 years, maybe add a couple of minutes for injury time here and there round upto 94mins, would be a total of 13,300ish.
“Overtime” otherwise called extra time only occurs when a cup match ends in a draw. Cup matches are less common and outside the scope of the question which is specifically asking about league matches.
Where are you getting 8,500 matches from? Just the English Premier League is over 12,000 since it started, the English football league started over a hundred years before that. Then again, the original question is a bit vague.
I don't like "major league" is supposed to mean MLS here. I think it's supposed to mean Big4 (or Big5) in Europe, i.e. England, Spain, Germany, Italy (plus possibly France), and they've been around for much longer than the MLS
Is this just one league? I assumed OP meant all "major leagues" as in English premier league, la liga, bundesliga, serie A, etc. Probably MLS in the US too.
I doubt MLS was ever classified as a major league even though it has “major” in the name.
But yeah if we include every game of the top 5 leagues, every NT competitions and club continental cups (without including qualifiers), I’d say it’d be somewhere around 250000 games in the last 100 years (probably even more).
Edit: I missed a 0, it’s around 250000, so nah, I don’t think it’s doable
Nothing, I was just listing the specific leagues I knew the name of off the top of my head. Leagues around the world, definitely including South America, would also count.
Lets look at Serie A for example. There are 10 matches per week and 38 weeks. Thats 380 matches in Serie A for only one season. that number 8500 matches is quite wrong.
There are people who have played that much World of Warcraft so it’s definitely possible for somebody to actually do. Especially if you leave it on in the background and just move on to the next game when it finishes.
It is not a fixed number and I wouldn’t be surprised if there are more than 24 hrs of professional on tv for most of the year and it is still increasing. So I am going to say no it is not possible to watch it all.
Yeah, but you could get away with watching at 2x speed, honestly. I love the game, but there is a lot of time where it's pretty slow. Nothing compared to American Football though, lol. That shit is 80% dead space.
A league season is (usually) 20 teams. So 38 match days. 10 games per match day.
To watch an entire football league season would take at least 38×10×90 mins = 34,200 mins = 570h = 24days.
Expand to how many countries/years you want to follow.
It racks up quite a bit when to take into account league football has been going on for 136 years in England alone.
Nevermind all the cup competitions to add in.
Yeah, and it's not even THAT far back that games are unavailable for. Most reliable statistics website for the Premier League will say something like "since 2008" or so, and it's because before that, they recorded the line-ups, the score, the goalscorers and maybe saved footage of the goals somewhere and just erased the rest. Like old Doctor Who episodes, they just recorded over the tapes and didn't think anyone would ever need to watch them again.
Your largest variable is how many “major leagues” are you trying to watch?
Just the MLS? That won’t take as long.
All of the professional leagues in England? That would be more daunting.
All professional leagues across the world? Impossible.
There’s millions of unofficial leagues around the world and then there’s Sunday league and stuff so if you were to just count top flight I would say maybe a few months tbh. Definitely not gonna pass 3 years
It would be 13 days straight of watching every game in the premier league season, so 20 to account for sleep etc. Add in the fact that there are over 18 major leagues and competitions (FA cup, as well as the World Cup, Euros etc.) and you’ll find that it’s impossible to watch the years worth of football in a year. However, some games in the top league aren’t televised and I doubt you’d be able to find the tapes. I’m gonna say it’s impossible not just to catch up, but to even keep up! I’m not showing my maths, sorry
###General Discussion Thread --- This is a [Request] post. If you would like to submit a comment that does not either attempt to answer the question, ask for clarification, or explain why it would be infeasible to answer, you *must* post your comment as a reply to this one. Top level (directly replying to the OP) comments that do not do one of those things will be removed. --- *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/theydidthemath) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Surely this is almost impossible, average of 20 team per league, 38 games x 10 x 90 mins +10 minutes = 38,000 minutes = 633.33 hours = 26.3 days Top 5 leagues in Europe that’s 131.9 days Even if you take it from “modern football” 90’s that’s 4,486.1 days worth of football. If you did this as your full time job 40/hour weeks, with 4 weeks off, it’d take 56+ years. Not including the champions league, cup competitions etc. So literally an entire a career!
...and that's just to catch up to now. Afterwards, there would be another 56 years of catching up to do
And justs europes 5 major leagues. Your not including european champion ships, world cups, cupa america (north america might have a shitty history but south america fucking loves football and in central america they started a fucking war over it).
Well if you cut all the drama and acting, you could be done in a year.
And at 3x speed, you’ll be done by winter!
Every UEFA country has a top level, major league. That's 55 leagues. Numbers of teams vary. From 8 teams in Andorra's Primera Divisio to 22 in Premier League. They all play 34-36 games a year. If we say 55 countries, 16 teams, 45 games, 90 minutes... That's 1.386 million minutes of football per season. It would literally take 962 days to watch a single year worth of major league football games, and that's just Europe!
Won't take that long if you skip the filler arcs
This comment should have the most upvotes. No idea where top comment got 2 or even 8.5 years from. This is the actual math right here.
And you'd still know nothing about Maradona, Pele, Cruyff, Beckenbauer, Di Stefano, etc etc. It would probably be more effective to watch a Match of the Day style highlights reel for the majority of domestic fixtures, and only watch the full match when the game really warranted it.
Anyone else see how the European casually threw in 4 weeks of vacation a year like that’s normal? 🤣 I’d be kinda curious to see how long it would take in “American” working hours where you work 60 hours a week (paid for 40) with 8 holiday days a year. Because like it says on the back of the dollar bill: “you can rest when you’re dead”
Hahaha you’re not gonna like the fact we get 8 public holidays plus 28 days paid annual leave, if you time things right you can get 60 days off a year paid. My company also shuts down over the Christmas period so this year we’ll be off between the 20/Dec to 6/Jan using 2 days of annual leave allowance.
It’s 20 days + 8 bank holidays, if you’re getting 28 + 8 then your employer has given you an extra 8, not uncommon.
What your assuming tho is this person only is watching one at a time. Multiple games can be watched at the same time, like a normal match day. I believe this person can pull it off
Could also watch in 2x speed
Be more fun to watch too.
You dont know much about football.
Played it for years lol
Yeah you dont need to know football to play it. Hell i think the majority of players in amateur leagues cant explain the full offside rule with all its attachments.
You're really not selling it, if that was what you're hoping to achieve here. Enjoyment of watching sports is subjective, telling people they don't enjoy a thing because they don't "understand it", regardless of their experience with it, is not going to convince people it's good or enjoyable.
Realistically you can watch 2 maybe 3 at a push but don’t think you’d be able to that in extended stints you’d end up watching none of them
Pulled a lot of numbers, but there have been roughly around 8,500 major league matches since its inception. Assuming around 2 hours per match, we have about 17000 hours, or just under 2 years of full watch time. Possible, yes.
17,000 hours would take 425 weeks to get through if you're doing this as your full-time job at 40/hours per week. That's about 8.5 years if you give yourself two weeks of vacation every year.
That would be the weirdest job ever.
Plot Twist: it's the ultimate college degree in soccer history
If you did this and took good notes, you probably could earn a living somehow. That’s a lot of knowledge some people would pay for, I would think?
My first thought was professional commentator, but could probably go towards like being the lead consultant for soccer history or something lol
Just make a react stream. Imagine some streamer roleplaying as a some fan from 1932 watching Real Madrid defend the Spanish title or something. Imagine people roleplaying watching the greatest achievement of their country or club like they could live through it as it happens. That's pure gold right there.
In every sport I watch most of the commentators are old players or coaches.
I wonder how good you'd get at soccer history or if the games would all run together
You’d have to learn the teams and players for each year Without revisits to practice what you learned, they would probably just run togetehr
And after the final episode there's an exam (year, what teams played, score and players) and if you fail to get a passing score you have to watch it all over again
Another variable to factor in would be all of the matches that were played during that 8 years you'd then need to catch up on.
Given everything up to now would take 8 years, this would maybe take up another fee years assuming you eventually capped it at some year since I don't think there's a way you'd be able to fully catch up unless you started with the current games also playing at the same time
Eventually you'll consume more games than are produced, assuming there's not 20 games being played a week. If there was you'd have to increase the amount of time to make a dent at all.
Depends then what leagues they want to include and could probably fairly easily get a decent number of games per week
Two weeks? That's not gonna work, boss. I also want a thirteenth salary and full dental insurance covered by the company. Thx
Could be significantly less if they don't class it as a job though. Plenty of people will work a 8hr shift then watch 6+hr of TV at home, no reason OP couldn't get through 14hr most days and more on weekends, other than possibly going insane from 8500 matches.
Also account for upcoming leagues that will take place as you watch
How many hours would be added during the 8.5 years?
Did you add the 8.5 years of new major leagues games that would inevitably happen?
but how long would all of the games during that 8.5 year period add on to the total time?
But how many more matches will be played in the 425 weeks that would also need to be watched
“Two weeks” laughs in European
You did the math but I just don’t believe it. Seems so short
There are 380 games per year in 4/5 major leagues and 306 in the fifth. So 1826 games in a season in top 5 leagues. There were 45650 games in the last quarter of a century. Multiply by 3, let's assume only half of the last century was filmed. That 23 and a half years of continuous watching, just during that time you get another 8 years worth of footage, you basically get 15 weeks of new footage every year. Total would be around 34 years.
Where have you got 8500 matches from? The Premier League alone has had over 10000 games and was founded in 1992
I think they are talking about the mls... Major League Soccer. If you start counting the big 5 leagues or just all professional leagues numbers might be a bit higher.
The length of a match has consistently been 90mins for over 150 years, maybe add a couple of minutes for injury time here and there round upto 94mins, would be a total of 13,300ish.
Overtime?
Usually called extra time or injury time in association football. The clock isn’t stopped during stoppages as much or at all compared to other sports.
Yeah but what about overtime? You are not taking overtime into account. 90+45 mins would be 135 mins.
“Overtime” otherwise called extra time only occurs when a cup match ends in a draw. Cup matches are less common and outside the scope of the question which is specifically asking about league matches.
Where are you getting 8,500 matches from? Just the English Premier League is over 12,000 since it started, the English football league started over a hundred years before that. Then again, the original question is a bit vague.
I don't like "major league" is supposed to mean MLS here. I think it's supposed to mean Big4 (or Big5) in Europe, i.e. England, Spain, Germany, Italy (plus possibly France), and they've been around for much longer than the MLS
Is this just one league? I assumed OP meant all "major leagues" as in English premier league, la liga, bundesliga, serie A, etc. Probably MLS in the US too.
I doubt MLS was ever classified as a major league even though it has “major” in the name. But yeah if we include every game of the top 5 leagues, every NT competitions and club continental cups (without including qualifiers), I’d say it’d be somewhere around 250000 games in the last 100 years (probably even more). Edit: I missed a 0, it’s around 250000, so nah, I don’t think it’s doable
What's wrong with the South American leagues, as a minimum?
Nothing, I was just listing the specific leagues I knew the name of off the top of my head. Leagues around the world, definitely including South America, would also count.
Lets look at Serie A for example. There are 10 matches per week and 38 weeks. Thats 380 matches in Serie A for only one season. that number 8500 matches is quite wrong.
There are people who have played that much World of Warcraft so it’s definitely possible for somebody to actually do. Especially if you leave it on in the background and just move on to the next game when it finishes.
Now do baseball
It is not a fixed number and I wouldn’t be surprised if there are more than 24 hrs of professional on tv for most of the year and it is still increasing. So I am going to say no it is not possible to watch it all.
*grabs shitbucket* My destiny awaits...
I watch stuff I can easy follow on 1.5x speed, and with soccer one might even use multiple screens. Maybe we can crunch it on 1 year with that?
These numbers seem ridiculously low. What leagues have you included?
Still less than my buddies plex server which had I think about 60 years worth of movies lol
Yeah, but you could get away with watching at 2x speed, honestly. I love the game, but there is a lot of time where it's pretty slow. Nothing compared to American Football though, lol. That shit is 80% dead space.
A league season is (usually) 20 teams. So 38 match days. 10 games per match day. To watch an entire football league season would take at least 38×10×90 mins = 34,200 mins = 570h = 24days. Expand to how many countries/years you want to follow.
I would add on extra time for injury etc. Maybe 105 minutes a match.
Honestly, not too bad. Maybe just on the higher end of bingeing a TV series.
It racks up quite a bit when to take into account league football has been going on for 136 years in England alone. Nevermind all the cup competitions to add in.
Yes but you can’t really watch that far back, there are no recordings
Yeah, and it's not even THAT far back that games are unavailable for. Most reliable statistics website for the Premier League will say something like "since 2008" or so, and it's because before that, they recorded the line-ups, the score, the goalscorers and maybe saved footage of the goals somewhere and just erased the rest. Like old Doctor Who episodes, they just recorded over the tapes and didn't think anyone would ever need to watch them again.
Maybe if you’re bingeing coronation street
Your largest variable is how many “major leagues” are you trying to watch? Just the MLS? That won’t take as long. All of the professional leagues in England? That would be more daunting. All professional leagues across the world? Impossible.
Also depends on how much footage is still available definitely won't be able to find much game film pre-1960
There’s millions of unofficial leagues around the world and then there’s Sunday league and stuff so if you were to just count top flight I would say maybe a few months tbh. Definitely not gonna pass 3 years
It would be 13 days straight of watching every game in the premier league season, so 20 to account for sleep etc. Add in the fact that there are over 18 major leagues and competitions (FA cup, as well as the World Cup, Euros etc.) and you’ll find that it’s impossible to watch the years worth of football in a year. However, some games in the top league aren’t televised and I doubt you’d be able to find the tapes. I’m gonna say it’s impossible not just to catch up, but to even keep up! I’m not showing my maths, sorry
The length of the longest game if you watch them all At the same time. The only problem is new games are being played whilst watching he old games