How much sleep could you lose to the FIFA World Cup?
Soccer fans have no choice but to watch each and every world cup match – after all the FIFA World Cup only comes around every four years.
In the space of one month there has been a massive 48 matches in the first round, four quarter finals, two semi-finals and of course the final coming up. That a total of 53 soccer matches to watch in one month- around 1,76 matches per day to be accurate.
Whilst that may not seem too bad… we need to take into consideration the length of each of these soccer matches. As Sam Borden wrote for the NY Times after the US lost to Portugal ‘Soccer’s elastic definition of time means that no player on the field, no fan in the stands and no announcer on television has any earthly idea as to when the last kick of the ball will come’.
So whilst technically each soccer match will consist of two 45-minute halves with 10 minutes of half time (a total of 100 minutes or 1 hour 40 minutes) there will be matches that require added time, extra time and even penalty shoot outs (a whopping total of up to 160 minutes or 2 hours 40 minutes).
So let’s be fair and round off each match to two hours.
With 53 matches we could be watching a whopping 106 hours of soccer this world cup… that’s 4,5 days of soccer!
In South Africa where the most tantalizing matches are scheduled in the late evenings we are looking at losing 90 minutes of sleep per evening. That’s a lot less sleep than we need when compared to the 7-8 hours we need each night to live well!
If you are feeling tired, take heart. We are four weeks in to celebrating this beautiful game and the glorious final is in sight. You can rekindle your love of sleep while waiting for the FIFA World Cup to kick off in Qatar in 2022.
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