OpinionCoronavirus lockdown is ideal time for Fifa and football to rethink the laws of the game

On April 1, 1995, the BBC’s Football Focus turned its lens on the West Ham United training ground. Nothing unusual in that it was Saturday lunchtime and the biggest English Premier League preview show in the country, although the Hammers did not have a game until the following Saturday. What was unusual, though, was that the interview with West Ham manager Harry Redknapp focused on the “new goals” that his goalkeepers were training with – two feet higher and four feet wider than normal – the “measurements of the new goals to be introduced by Fifa”, the show said. The following Saturday, Football Focus revealed that the “new goals” were indeed an April Fool’s jape and goalkeepers could rest easy. It worked as a joke because it is obviously ridiculous but you can also see how bigger goals would improve football as a sport. Sure, you can point to the irony of the bigger goals April Fool being broadcast before a 5-1 win for Arsenal over Norwich, a 4-3 win for Wimbledon at Leicester City and a 7-1 win for Nottingham Forest at Sheffield Wednesday. But taking the average goals per game of 2.65 for all seasons (including this current unfinished season) since the Premier League launched in 1992-93, it has been lower than or equal to the average in 16 of the 28 seasons. Goal haters, and they exist, can point to the last five seasons – and 10 of the last 11 – being above average but as Homer Simpson said, “people can come up with statistics to prove anything.” Goalkeepers have become larger and more athletic over the last 150-odd years since the Football League first codified the Laws of the Game in 1863 but the goals are still eight yards across. Crossbars have been set at eight feet since 1872, 10 years after they were first introduced for an FA Cup Final. The ball is still the same size, too. Surely the advantage has passed to the goalkeeper in those intervening years – and that is before the addition of ever bigger gloves. Changing the rules of the sport – or Laws of the Game as the International Football Association Board would prefer you call them – has become a hot topic on social media amid the enforced lockdown because of the coronavirus pandemic. There are plenty of opportunities to do so in a sport that has not changed from that depicted in the recent Netflix series The English Game, set in the late 1800s. Football on film falls badly short of the real game’s drama So – ignoring technology – what could be done that would change the game for the better? How about scrapping offside? The offside rule was first introduced in the earlier rules of football, where some British public schools banned players being in front of the ball, which continues in rugby to this day. It was aimed to prevent “goalhanging” – with “goalhanger” an insult that lasted well into the school playgrounds of the 1990s. But, it is almost impossible to imagine that any elite team would sacrifice a player to essentially man-mark the opposition goalkeeper – a tactic various versions of Football Manager encouraged and one which Italy striker Filippo Inzaghi seemed to be the last real life exponent. It would cost them elsewhere. Yet ending offside should increase goalscoring chances and open up the field of play. Maybe start with no offsides for the last 10 minutes of every match? If offside is sacrosanct, there are other areas that could be changed. Throw-ins are a farce. Futsal got rid of them for kick-ins in years back and it improved the small-sided game. They used a four-second rule to keep the game moving, too. Football could opt for a below head- or knee-height rule. This would improve the game at every level, and reduce the gap between the elite, where obvious foul throws routinely go unpunished, and the grass roots game, where actual football is lost to handing over the ball from one team to the other as a litany of bad throws are flagged. Replacing penalties from 12 yards with players dribbling from the halfway line – as the MLS did at its outset – would increase enjoyment for everyone bar the penalty taker. Swapping penalties for free kicks, or even free shots inside the area, from wherever the foul was made would also add interest. Rolling subs has kept the grass roots game alive. The same idea would work at the elite level – with it becoming easier to give players game time. Why not allow managers to use all of their bench or even the whole squad in every game? Similarly, let players dribble from dead balls – corners, free kicks and the newly replaced throw-ins. Worried about time-wasting? Stop the clock every time the ball goes out. Make halves 30 minutes and let that be the actual game time, in contrast to now where a 90-minute match could feature less than half the time with the ball in play. How about a sin bin to allow an advantage for a set time period after foul play while not changing the odds for the rest of the game? Add another card between red and yellow. A caution used to be easier to get from the police than a referee but now they dish them out like business cards at a conference. Fire, fighting and robots – the world’s weirdest football games There are plenty of ways to improve the game and that’s without thinking outside the box – as much fun as it would to be put the mascot in goals for penalty shoot-outs. A change is as good as a rest, as they say, and we’re all bored of football’s enforced rest.