Page 6 - Soccer360 Issue 105

FIRST WORD
FOR CHANGE’S SAKE
FOOTBALL IS THE MOST POPULAR SPORT IN THE WORLD, AND FOR GOOD REASON. SO, WONDERS GABY MCKAY, WHY DO LAWMAKERS SEEM SO KEEN TO MESS WITH IT?
There’s a reason they call football exists in ice hockey, with a so-called ‘power law. Any alternations to the laws of the game
‘the world’s game’. When you boil it down to its core elements it’s a very simple sport, with the only prerequisites to participate being something one can fashion into a ball and some objects to form a rudimentary goal with. Cricket is enjoyed by billions - largely thanks to its ubiquitous nature in India - but even on a smaller scale requires, at the very least, a bat and a ball. To
play tennis you need a net and a racquet, for hockey you need a stick, even to participate in basketball you’re reliant on someone having erected a hoop somewhere near where you live.
Travel anywhere in the world, no matter how wealthy or not, and you’ll find people kicking a ball around. They may be bare-footed,
the goal posts may be jumpers, but they’ll be playing. It’s odd, therefore, that bodies such as FIFA and football’s lawmakers the International Football Association Board (IFAB) seem so keen to mess with what is very simple formula.
Early this year we heard of the proposal
to trial a new ‘blue card’, put forward by IFAB to punish dissent and tactical fouls. Under the proposal a player shown a blue card would be sent to the sin bin for 10 minutes, temporarily reducing his or her team to 10 men. A second blue card would mean a permanent ejection. Reaction to the plans was not positive. A similar system
a
play’ seeing five-on-four or five-on-three situations where one team has incurred
a penalty. It was to this that Tottenham Hotspur head coach Ange Postecoglou alluded when asked about the proposals. “Do you know what it’s going to do to our game?” the Australian asked. “It’s going to destroy it, mate. You’re going to have one team just sitting there trying to waste time for 10 minutes waiting for a guy to come on. Every other sport is trying to declutter, all we’re trying to do is go the other way for some reason.”
He had a point. There’s nothing inherently wrong with adjusting the rules of any sport - the earliest forms of football allowed players to catch the ball and drop it at their foot - but tinkering for the sake of tinkering is nonsensical. The forward pass was introduced to American football at the behest of president Theodore Roosevelt after 19 players were killed playing the sport in 1905 and made the game far faster and more exciting, banning helmet-to- helmet contact was in response to a better understanding of the long-term effects
of concussion. Both understandable, but outside of North America many find the labyrinthine rules around being down by contact, or intentional grounding, off- putting. Already the most popular sport on the planet - and by some distance - why are we looking to make association football more complex? There is also a democratic deficit at the heart of such changes to the
are made by IFAB, which consists of the national associations of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland holding 12.5%
of voting power each and FIFA, which holds the other 50%. Any changes must secure a 75% supermajority, so nothing can be passed without FIFA, but why are the votes of the UK countries equivalent to the rest of the world? Furthermore, the election processes of national governing bodies can be opaque at best. When the law on handball was changed to remove the provison that any offence had to be deliberate, did any of
the billions of fans around the world get a vote? Did the players? A seismic change
to the game the world loves was forced through by a few decision makers in a room in Aberdeen. This is not to say that there should never be any changes. The changing of the rule which stated a goal kick had
to leave the box was a sensible update reflecting the fact that teams pass out from the back with far more regularity than at any other point in the sport’s history. You could probably ditch the law that dictates a goalkeeper shouldn’t have hold of the ball for longer than six seconds without anyone noticing, given it never seems to be enforced.
Broadly though we should be extremely wary of the compulsion to mess with a simple and effective formula - and demand greater accountability for those who make those decisions.
6 SOCCER360
ABOVE:
The handball law is one example of a big change to football’s laws in recent years
TOP RIGHT:
The votes of four countries hold the weight of the rest of the world combined
TOP RIGHT, BELOW:
Referees may be brandishing blue cards one day