Professional sport is entertainment with extra steps. Same reason why Norwegian women's volleyball team was fined for wearing shorts instead of bikinis.

I think it was beach handball

Could be. I don't really concern myself with the minute details of the game.

The rulebook says that they have to wear tight-fitting top and bikini bottom, which must not be more than 10cm (4 inches) on the sides.

It’s also other sports. Basketball has a shot clock for a reason. American football also forces a play to begin within a certain amount of time. In fact I would say that football’s rules are almost a contrived set of constraints that force engagement and exciting action continuously.

Except when football's rules force delays to allow TV commercials.

Now, if we could just enforce some speed in baseball, and bring the average game length down nearer two and a half hours.

As a British person visiting the US a few years ago, I was invited to watch a televised game of Baseball. The game would stop for what I thought was a random amount of time, asking my host what the hell they were doing - it turns out they were stopping due to the commercials within the TV broadcast. Honestly don't know how you guys put up with that level of advertising...it would drive me mad.

In the UK I've not watched a TV commercial in years (there are none on the BBC, Netflix, Prime or Disney+). All major sports events that are of importance are on the BBC. These are all paid-for subscriptions. I assume to watch Baseball on TV you would have to subscribe to cable? And to have ads on top of your paid subscription just seems greedy.

I've been somewhat taken aback that having paid for a subscription for Eurosport (in the UK) to watch more than the two Olympic streams that the BBC are permitted, I still have to watch adverts.

That is fascinating. As someone who doesn't watch sports, I just assumed the match continued during advertisements. Does everyone just stop and stand around during breaks? Is there a director scripting the action, somehow?

I sort of want to attend a match in person to find out, now.

The TV production squeezes commercials in during stoppages. But American football has a large number of stoppages (between every play, during timeouts called by the players/coach, after scoring, when a player has an injury, between quarters) so there are lots of chances to squeeze commercials in. They have also added stoppages basically so they can squeeze an additional commercial break, such as the "2 minute warning" at the end of the half, which is just an automatic timeout (and inevitable commercial break). Some say that the addition of video review (where referees review a contested call) was an excuse to add more commercial breaks.

There is no director, but there is a huge production team synchronizing everything and making sure that they squeeze in as many commercials as possible without missing any of the action.

> An average NFL broadcast lasts well over three hours, yet it delivers a total of only 18 minutes of football action.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-much-football-is-ev...

It’s more that the sport is strategically designed for lots of downtime. The match does sometimes continue during ad breaks, but only as long as the ad needs to finish playing. Aside from the “downs” system that stops the clock almost every play, the coaches are awarded gratuitous and lengthy timeouts with which they use strategically to do things such as interrupt successful streaks from the opposing team. And yes, during those plus the 4 quarter breaks there is a lot of just standing around.

The game is more stop than start, by a long margin.

Once I got into more free flowing sports, like soccer and rugby, I can't really watch American football anymore.

Same goes for basketball, where the last few minutes of game time are stretched out by timeouts, free throws, and video reviews.

The rules of the game aren't forcing ad breaks; the networks themselves are. Ultimately the broadcast director is in charge of the actual flow of the game, and tells the ref when the ads are finished so they can start the next play.

Well, the two minute warning...

It's interesting to see the power dynamic here. Here in the UK there would be riots if soccer games were broken for ads (I'm really not exaggerating). Over COVID, a short timeout was added in the middle of each half, and this was conditional on there being no ads in the UK.

That said, I watch a fair amount of NFL and with the intensity of play I'm quite grateful for the pauses. American ads are irrelevant to me anyway.

I don't know, it's a sport that's supposed to test athletes against each other in certain skill sets. Finding ways to win with less exertion and less athletic (i.e., less risky) moves is sort of hacking the game and losing the point. If a guy came at you with a sword in real life (not sure how often this happens but still), you can't necessarily count on being able to get them to agree to rest for a round.

Ya maybe they should change the rule to: whoever loses has to die. To make it more like real life.

I don't know that the lack of this particular feature is contrived to make matches more entertaining for the fans.

Like it or not, most of modern sport is for media. Almost all people at Olympic level are paid by media and marketing to perform for media and marketing. Some are paid by states to perform for their media and propaganda.

I think this is largely the point of competitive sports, the performance for a crowd. Sports which are done purely for those doing the actual activity are great, but tend to be more recreational than competitive.

I still find it fascinating (and linguistically a bit of a struggle) that sport and exercise are even different words in English. In my native German, there's only "Sport", which is used both to describe physical exercise as well the uncountable English "sports".

This is also why professional wrestling is fake. Originally it wasn’t, was too boring, and changes were made to liven it up.

Wrestling originally was an exercise. And it wasn't an exercise in staring at your opponent.

It only became boring when the stakes got very high and your entire career could be decided on a single engagement and people started overthinking it.