The stats overlay on your screen was designed for the gallery

Most in-broadcast graphics answer questions a director needs filled, not questions a viewer was actually asking.

Possession, 61 percent, up in the corner for the whole first half. Ask yourself when that number last changed your understanding of a match you were already watching.

Broadcast graphics have a production logic that has very little to do with comprehension. A gallery needs things to put on screen during dead time, needs something the commentator can read aloud when there is nothing to say, and needs sponsored real estate that can be filled to contract. Those three needs produce a specific kind of graphic, which is a stable number that is always available, never wrong, and never surprising. Possession is perfect for that. It is also nearly useless, because it does not distinguish a team dominating the game from a team passing sideways because it cannot get out.

The good version exists. Field position over time, shown as a strip, tells you the story of a half in a second. A pass map at the interval shows why one full back has been invisible. Distance from goal on shots is far more informative than shot count and nobody puts it up. These graphics get built for tactical analysis shows and almost never appear during play, because they take a beat to read and the director does not want a beat.

I would trade every possession clock for one thing, which is a live indicator of where the opposition press has been winning the ball. That is what a coach is watching. It is what changes at half time. It is invisible on screen.

The deeper habit worth breaking is the assumption that a graphic must be a number. Sport is spatial. Almost every genuine insight during a match is about where, not how many, and a shape on a pitch diagram communicates where far faster than a percentage does. Broadcasters know this because they use exactly those shapes in the analysis segment at half time, when they have four minutes and no game to cover.

So put them over the live picture. Small, in a corner, updating. The objection will be that it clutters the frame, which is a reasonable objection from an organisation that currently displays a sponsored logo, a clock, a score bug and a hashtag.