Highlight packages keep cutting away from the best bit

Automated clipping has learned to find the goal and has completely failed to find the pass that made it.

Here is a small thing that has been quietly getting worse. Open any official highlights clip of a goal and watch where it starts. Almost always about four seconds before the shot.

Which means you get the finish and nothing else. No sight of the winger who pinned the full-back so the run inside was available. No sight of the midfielder dropping between the centre-backs to drag a presser out of shape. You see a man strike a ball into a net, in isolation, as though it happened for no reason.

The cause is not mysterious. Most short-form clipping is now generated from event data. A system flags the goal timestamp, subtracts a fixed offset, adds a couple of seconds after the celebration begins, and pushes it out. That offset has to be short, because the product is built for a vertical feed where the median viewer decides in two seconds whether to keep watching. A ten-second build-up is a churn risk. A ball hitting a net is not.

So the clip is optimised for something other than understanding the game, and if that were the only place it lived I would not care much. It is not. Those clips are now what most people see of most matches. Whole competitions are experienced as a sequence of finishes, and it is producing arguments about football in which nobody has watched a single defensive shape.

Basketball has the same disease in a worse form, because there the automated clip is usually the dunk, and the dunk is the least interesting thing in a possession that involved a slip screen and a defender making a decision two passes earlier.

The fix does not require new technology. It requires someone to decide that the build-up counts. Cut from the turnover, not the shot. Where the move started with a goalkeeper's throw, start with the throw. Let a clip run twenty seconds when twenty seconds is what the move needed, and trust that the people who want a dunk compilation can find one.

A few club media teams do this, and you can tell within one clip which ones employ somebody who actually watches football. They are also, unsurprisingly, the accounts people go back to.