For me however, the big issue is not time-keeping, it's VAR. And this is a weird one for me to complain about cos I like it in principle. Having a replay to overturn clear and obvious errors. To me that's fine, things such as the famous "Hand of God" when ten seconds after the goal had been given every single person in the world knew that Maradona had punched the ball into the goal... everyone in the world knew that he had cheated and that the world cup quarter final was about to be decided by a goal that shouldn't have stood. And I think that makes the sport look stupid - I was a kid then and I honestly thought that the game would be replayed or something to right this unequivocal and egregious wrong, and when I used to play football in London we somehow got to chatting about that and other members of my team, displaying the same childish logic had had exactly the same expectation. Whatever, to me VAR should correct clear errors, when one replay shows beyond doubt that the ref got it wrong, but it's being horribly misused - despite the stated aim being to remove clear errors, it's actually being used in the pursuit of impossible perfection - the goal goes in and there is a VAR check which can stop the game for literally minutes, they watch hundreds of replays from every angle and then finally decide that the player's foot was in front of the defender by 2mm when the ball was kicked and so technically he was off-side.... goal disallowed and game's momentum wrecked.
Someone being 2mm offside is not cheating, they didn't time their run to the thousandth of the second to get that 2mm advantage, the ref didn't make a clear error in not spotting something that was way beyond the capacity of the human eye to see. To me, morally, such a goal should not be disallowed. What they should do is have (say) five people watching the replay, after any incident or decision they have 15 seconds (or some other SHORT period) to push a button saying "overrule" if they are certain the ref got it wrong. If more than half of the VAR officials press that button in the allotted short time then the decision is changed, but if the majority of them could not be certain in that time that a mistake was made then - if there was an error - it was not a clear and obvious one and so the ref's decision should stand. At the moment there is a huge problem where they are using VAR to try and introduce absolutely one-hundred percent error free games, which a) cannot be done cos some things people will argue about decisions after a thousand replays and b) the stopping spoils the game and c) you're getting great goals wiped off that morally should stand even if technically someone was offside by an amount which cannot be detected by the naked eye.
It's incredibly frustrating for a team to stick the ball in the net, it's a beautifully worked goal, the crowd go absolutely fucking wild, players going mad with celebrations - in short, the moment for which people play the fucking game - and then the ref is "wait up everyone, maybe at some point in the build up that guy had his toenail in front of the defender" and then the whole stadium has to sit and wait for some anonymous idiots to watch and re-watch it hundreds of times and then make a call. If the goal is wiped out then it's terrible, but even if it stands then that beautiful moment of ecstasy has been tarnished and tainted....
@WashYourHands would probably call it "ruined orgasm" and he wouldn't be wrong.
Point is, they gotta change this, that is the problem with the game right now, timekeeping issues are definitely a very very distant second.