When IFAB, the group who decide the rules of football, met recently for their annual get together, Athletic readers wanted changes. Tweaks to the offside rule, better policing of managers’ technical areas and VAR might have got a mention too.
Which got us thinking. What rules in football would our writers change? And what would our readers make of them? Well, here’s the answer. Try not to fall out with each other too much…
Free us from the tedium of throw-ins — Adam Hurrey
Football is a conflation of fascinating skills, with and without the ball. Throw-ins are not among them.
Now that goal kicks have been freed from their unnecessary 18-yard-box prison, throw-ins are away and clear as the most mundane task required of a footballer during a game. The repetitive tedium of having to launch the ball, more in hope than expectation, up the line is precisely why the position of full-back took roughly 150 years to become remotely fashionable.
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Yes, throw-ins can occasionally be exciting. Rory Delap’s apparently sudden late-2000s ability to launch the ball 40 yards into increasingly beleaguered Premier League penalty areas may have earned its own YouTube compilation (soundtracked by Bonnie Tyler’s Holding Out for a Hero, no less), former Newcastle defender Steve Watson briefly experimented with a somersault technique, and Dean Saunders took the most selfish throw-in of all time in 1998 by simply bouncing the ball off a stranded Port Vale goalkeeper to score from the rebound:
Generally, though, the throw-in is a universally dull formality for turning a dead ball into a live one. The full-back wipes their hands dry, surveys the horizon with almost sub-conscious look of faux-calculation, loudly enquires as to who “wants it”, before wincing with frustration at nobody “wanting it”. After about three seconds of this, a murmur of impatience swells – among both sets of fans – and the whole thing becomes, relatively speaking, unbearable. Should the thrower then try and steal a few precious yards to get out of this godforsaken trap, the opposition murmurs turn to full-on howls of injustice.
The solution? Allow players to return the ball with their hands to open play however they wish: one-handed, two-handed, cricket-style, basketball-style, underhand, overhand…whatever. Just get the ball back into play and get on with it.
(We should, though, resist the temptation to try kick-ins. More set pieces is not what modern football needs, and as the 1994/95 Diadora League experiment below shows).
Bin away goals — Carl Anka
I’d get rid of the away goals rule in extra time. I love away goals (think of them counting as 1.1 goals — the true danger is compound interest) and think they work as a great balancer, even in an age of better comfort and improvement in travels, but the idea you can get knocked out by an extra away goal in 120 minutes is a bit of a sickener (albeit VERY funny when it doesn’t happen to your team).
Introduce dribbling from corners — Oliver Kay
Change is desperately needed off the pitch to try to regulate ownership models and to bring some equality back to a sport that has come to be dominated to an extremely unhealthy degree by a small number of rich, powerful clubs in a small number of rich, powerful leagues.
But it’s very hard to see that particular tide being turned, so on a less mournful note, in terms of on-pitch improvement, how about speeding the game up by allowing players to dribble the ball into play from corners, free kicks, goal kicks and throw-ins? Like the self-pass rule in hockey, it would make the game quicker, more skilful, more spontaneous, less predictable. There would still be the option of playing a conventional corner or free kick, but this way we would get rid of some of those lengthy stoppages as precious minutes are lost in the preparation of set-plays. And throw-ins. Throw-ins look like some bizarre remnant of the public-school game it was in the 19th century. If the long-established rule allowed you to dribble the ball back into play, would anyone seriously propose replacing it with a throw-in? Of course not.
Move defensive throw-ins forward — Michael Cox
I largely concur with Adam’s argument about throw-ins, and I’d also like to see a small change to the positioning of where some are taken.
There are statistics to suggest that, when the defending team has a throw-in close to their own corner flag, they are more likely to concede a goal from that situation than if the attacking team had a throw-in in the same position. It’s often a difficult situation to get out from, not necessarily at professional level, but certainly at amateur and junior level.
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The difficulty working the ball forward from these deep throw-ins has meant some teams have decided to put kick-offs straight out for an opposition throw-in near the corner flag, before ‘boxing in’ the opposition and attempting to force a turnover.
Therefore, I would like to see teams allowed to bring throw-ins from those positions forward to the edge of their own penalty box. This makes it harder to box them in, and also means that if possession is lost, it’s in the middle third, rather than right on the edge of their own penalty area.
It should never be advantageous to kick the ball off the pitch, and football should make this very small fix to ensure this ugly practice, borrowed from the backward sport of rugby union, doesn’t creep into the beautiful game.
No more silly handballs — Daniel Taylor
Please can we get rid of the rule that means goals are automatically ruled out in the Premier League — though never the divisions below, it seems — if there is even the slightest and most innocuous touch of hand/arm/fingernail on the ball in the build-up? Yes, if there is an old-fashioned handball then, of course, the goal should not stand. But we have seen goals disallowed this season because of some purely accidental touches that would never ordinarily have been noticed until the new rule came in and VAR started ticking off what would previously have been non-controversial goals.
Example: if a defender kicks the ball against an attacker’s elbow or forearm, that attacker having his elbow or forearm closely by his side — and somebody whacks in the rebound … that’s a legitimate goal.
No yellow card bans for finals — Kieran Theivam
I’d like to see suspensions for yellow cards accumulated that result in a player missing a final abolished. The cards dished out these days can be for the most trivial of offences and for a player, especially those who don’t play for a big club, who might have one shot at playing in a major final, suspension for yellow cards seems incredibly harsh. Red cards, fine, you have to have done something fairly serious to have earned it. But it’s so easy to be booked now, missing finals because of it seems outdated. The ban could easily be carried over to the next season.
Clamp down on rolling around — Dominic Fifield
Feigning injury is already classed as a cautionable offence. Referees are supposed to flash a yellow card for unsporting behaviour. And yet how many times do we see a player go down after an innocuous challenge late on, either when their team is winning narrowly or clinging to parity in a one-sided contest, in apparent agony to prompt the official to whistle? Perhaps, when the ref trots over to the wounded party, the player gingerly hauls himself up again and, through a grimace, bravely assures him he can carry on.
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Alternatively, on ambles the physiotherapist to kneel over the stricken player and tend to his wounds, maybe helping him to his feet and leading him – slowly, agonisingly – from the field. Either way, once the referee has resumed the game, the player who, seconds earlier, was broken tends to sprint back into position in rude health. A few precious seconds have been eaten up and the team previously on the attack finds their momentum checked.
Some coo at clever “game management” (don’t get me started on players shielding the ball near the corner flag as the clock ticks down) but surely it should actually be classed as cheating. And as boring and predictable as it is infuriating. So referees should either take a firmer stance and, as the laws suggest, start booking players more regularly for feigning injuries, or other sanctions could be introduced.
For example, if a player (who has not suffered a head injury) goes down, then the official should give him, say, 30 seconds to get up and carry on with play. If he fails to do so, then he will be obliged to leave the field of play. And not for a split second until waved back on by the referee. But for, say, 180 seconds. Or five minutes. Or until a substitute is brought on. Regardless, the prospect of their team being depleted for a period might actually dissuade some from pretending they are hurt.
Crackdown on dissent and more advantage — Matt Slater
The two changes I would make would be just going a bit further with laws the game already has: a big crackdown on dissent and playing advantage. The obvious example for both is rugby union. Only captains should be allowed to talk to referees and they should do so politely. Mic-ing the refs up would be interesting… carnage for a while but I wonder if it would eventually lead to better behaviour. And I think referees should let their advantages play out a bit longer but then bring them back if no advantage arises. Football seems in too much of a hurry on that one and it often penalises the attacking team.
Stop the clock — Jack Pitt-Brooke
We need to put time back into the game. Too many matches are effectively short-changed, allowed to drift to an ending before they have been fully filled with football. Time wasting is not always intentional, but when combined with substitutions, goal celebrations, injuries, pitch invaders, managerial squabbles and the rest, we lose out on more than one third of the football that we pay for. The average Premier League game only provides 57 minutes of play.
It doesn’t have to be this way. The traditional haphazard method of time-keeping feels like a relic of the old amateur era. So as football gets more scientific, less random then surely the most important measurement of all should follow?
All it would take is a clock that stopped for every stoppage. As simple as that. Yes, games would take slightly longer at first, but when players realised the time they wasted was not going anywhere, there would be no point. We would get all of the football we pay so much for.
(Photo: Glyn KIRK / AFP)
