

Also, both sports have actively participated in adding more ad time. American Football has specific “TV Time Outs” sprinkled through the action. Most people don’t notice because they come earlier in the half. (The timing rules also change in the last 5 minutes of the half, although some of those rules speed up the actual gameplay to make more room for commercials).
A televised Baseball game also has much longer breaks between half-innings. Normally 2m 15s, it becomes 2m55s in the playoffs. It used to be that minor league games that weren’t televised ran much quicker, because there was no clock between innings and play started as soon as everyone was ready. But, when the pitch clock came to the minor leagues it also came with a between-innings clock, no matter whether it was necessary or not.


















The issue I have with graphs like this is that there is a very restrictive view of what “live action” means. For American football in particular, they seem to limit their analysis to the time the ball itself is “live”, in a play, and don’t count time when the clock is running between plays. And a fair amount of American football strategy, though, is the time period just before the snap where the offense lines up for their play and the defense tries to position itself to counter. It is an essential part of the game, but since the ball isn’t in motion, this analysis discounts it.
Similarly, a fair amount of the strategy in baseball is in how fielders are positioned. Its something that is hard to see on TV, although a good announcer will pick up on it and relay it to the audience.
Soccer can be fairly slow moving in comparison, even though the ball is “live” the whole time. I have seen some analysis online that state that there may only be 12 minutes or so of “attack” time per soccer game, with the rest spent on passing to set up plays and keep possession.