Time & Perspective Quote by Cobi Jones

Cobi Jones is celebrating a sport growing up in public, trading improvisation for legitimacy. The line reads like a mundane rules update, but that plainness is the point: soccer in the U.S. spent years trying to make itself “make sense” to American spectators by sanding down its weird, global edges. Having the referee keep official time on the field sounds like an obvious correction, which is exactly the quiet jab. It implies that what passed for professionalism before was awkwardly mediated, as if the game needed translation.

The bigger punch is “shootouts have finally been banned.” Jones isn’t talking about the penalty kicks that define modern tournament drama; he’s referencing the old NASL-style shootout, a made-for-TV gimmick designed to eliminate ties by turning endings into breakaways. Subtext: stop trying to outsmart the sport. Let soccer be soccer. For an athlete whose career straddled eras of American reinvention, the word “finally” carries the relief of someone who lived through the experiments and watched the game’s credibility get negotiated in rulebooks.

There’s also a cultural politics here: timekeeping and endings are values. Putting the clock with the referee signals trust in the sport’s own authority rather than an external scoreboard’s command. Banning the shootout is a small institutional surrender to tradition - and, in Jones’s tone, a victory. It frames soccer’s American project not as innovation, but as catching up to a global standard and admitting that authenticity is the better sell.