Baseball: Per the 2013 WSJ study, Baseball games feature 17 minutes and 58 seconds of action. Baseball games have been increasing in length (thanks in part to the eighteen annual 4-hour marathons between the glacial Boston Red Sox and equally glacial New York Yankees) over the years. But, the amount of action has stayed roughly the same. A 1952 TV broadcast showed about 13 minutes of action but just 9 minutes 45 seconds of commercials. The latest WSJ study found that fully 42 minutes and 41 seconds of between-inning inactivity would be purely commercial time on TV broadcasts. That means there’s nearly 5 times as many commercials now than 50 years ago. 2015: thanks to new pace of play rules, the average length of a baseball game dropped by 6 minutes from 2014. 2017 update: ESPN published a study of the 2017 playoffs, which have been dragging. The average MLB playoff game in 2017 has been going 3hrs, 35mins, which is up 10 minutes from 2016 and an astonishing 21 minutes from 2015. I get that playoffs are more strategic, that pitchers are on quick hooks b/c there’s a finite amount of time, but this 3hrs 35mins is brutal.
Football: Per the WSJ 2010 study, NFL games feature about 11 minutes of action. The amount of action in football games has been roughly the same since the early 1900s. There was roughly 13 1/2 minutes of action in 1912, and slightly less in the 2010 study. Other studies have shown that football generally ranges between 12-17 minutes of action. Personally I tracked one quarter of an NFL playoff game a few years ago with these numbers: in 50 minutes of clock time we saw exactly 250 seconds of action (4 minutes, 10 seconds) accompanied by no less than 20 commercials. And this turned out to be a relatively “easy” quarter: one time out, one two-minute warning and two challenges/reviews. It could have been a lot worse. More recent studies have found that things are worsening for the NFL: WP’s Fred Bowen counted the ads in a 2014 NFL game and had seen an astounding 152 advertisements during the game. 152; that was more ads than plays from scrimmage. Update for 2015: the early returns on the first few weeks of the season show a huge up-tick in penalties, which have slowed the game by four minutes from 2014 and average times are now at 3hrs 10minutes for games. 2017 update: the NFL has made some tweaks and the average game length through 2 weeks is down significantly, to 3hrs 4mins from 3hrs 15minutes in 2016.
Basketball: NBA games average 2 hours and 18 minutes in actual time. Working backwards (since the clock only runs when the ball is in play and we know there’s exactly 48 minutes of play time) we know that there’s 138-48 = 90 minutes of “down time” of some sort in a typical NBA game. Not all of that is commercial time but all of it is inaction. I cannot find any documentation of typical number of commercials so i’ve just split the difference between on-screen inaction and off-screen commercials in the table below. If you’re a big-time NBA watcher and feel this isn’t fair, please comment as such.
Hockey: The Livestrong piece below (side note: why is Livestrong doing “ball-in-play” studies on Hockey?) quotes average NHL games being 2hours and 19minutes in the 2003-4 season. Working backwards from this, you have three 20-minute periods and two 17 minute intermissions, which leaves 46 minutes of remaining idle time. Given that the idle times in Hockey are not nearly as long as those in basketball, I’m going to estimate that about 2/3rds of that 46minutes is commercials.
Soccer: Per the Soccerbythenumbers.com website 2011 study, between 62 and 65 minutes of ball-in-play action is seen on average in the major European pro leagues per game. For the table below i’ll use 64 minutes as an average. The duration of pro soccer games is relatively easy to calculate: they fit neatly into a 2 hour window by virtue of its 45minute halves, 15 minute break and an average of 3 minutes added-time on either side of the halves. 45+45+3+3+15 = 111 minutes of a 2 hour/120 minute time period. Thanks to a bit of fluff on either side of the game, you generally count a soccer broadcast to last 1 hour and 55 minutes. In the table below i’ve assumed that a huge portion of the intermission is commercial; in fact it is a lot less since most soccer broadcasts have a half-time show and highlights. So if anything, the # of commercials in soccer broadcasts is less than listed. Post 2014 World Cup Update: FIFA estimates that the group stage games averaged 57.6 minutes of action per game (if i’m reading their stat page correctly). I’ll use this as the number going forward, even though World Cup games might be a bit “slower” than your average pro soccer game due to the careful, tactical nature of most of the matches.
