Yay or Nay?

FIFA are considering scrapping the offside rule

FIFA president Sepp Blatter has discussed what would be the most radical rule change in the sport for decades.

Blatter has apparently spoken to the president of the International Hockey Federation, Leandro Nagre, about how hockey abolished the rule in the 1990s.

"He asked me a lot of questions about it and how successful it was, although he never offered an opinion, so it was difficult to judge what football might do," said Negre.

"But he did seem very interested in how we had implemented it."

The offside rule in hockey was abolished in 1998 after a trial period two years earlier, a move which has been credited with making the game more free-flowing and exciting as a spectacle.

Veteran BBC sports commentator Barry Davies firmly believed that it would be a great move for football.

"I would love to see it given a trial in the lower leagues," he said.

"It would probably take a long time for players to adjust. It's also very demanding physically, but I was amazed at how quickly hockey adapted and there's no doubt the game is better for it."

Davies believes that the abolition of offside is not the only rule that football could borrow from hockey, suggesting that the green card - which leads to a two minutes in the sin bin for players - would also work well.

Absolutely not. I don't think a johnny foreigner like Blatter has any right to suggest such a thing either.

Say goodbye to high defensive lines, say goodbye to counterattacks. It would be bullshit.

F*cking hell why don't we make footballers wear skates and carry sticks as well.

NAY!

What are Pippo's wages like?

Nay, nay and thrice nay!!!!!!

It would end up with half the players in each box, they would all be 7 feet tall and the ball would be hoofed from one end to the other.

Murray wrote:Nay, nay and thrice nay!!!!!!

It would end up with half the players in each box, they would all be 7 feet tall and the ball would be hoofed from one end to the other.

that would be english WORLD DOMINATION

you are so great on hoofing

they tried something a bit like this some time ago and it was a massive flop, a rule was introduced that you couldn't be offside from a free kick, they tested it in the Conference and it was a absolute farce.

Özil wrote:

Murray wrote:Nay, nay and thrice nay!!!!!!

It would end up with half the players in each box, they would all be 7 feet tall and the ball would be hoofed from one end to the other.

that would be english WORLD DOMINATION

you are so great on hoofing

And don't forget the facking runners

Rio England Braptain wrote:

Özil wrote:

Murray wrote:Nay, nay and thrice nay!!!!!!

It would end up with half the players in each box, they would all be 7 feet tall and the ball would be hoofed from one end to the other.

that would be english WORLD DOMINATION

you are so great on hoofing

And don't forget the facking runners

You beat me to it

Jaime wrote:F*cking hell why don't we make footballers wear skates and carry sticks as well.

I guess the Penguin was referring to field hockey, because:
a) offside is alive and well in ice hockey, and it's very different from the football one
b) comparing football to ice hockey would be too much even for the lard-based brain of the Penguin.

Field hockey instead bears some similarites to football and indeed they abolished the offside rule years ago.

Apart from the fact that ideally I wouldn't allow the Penguin to have a say on anything related to the game, even the colour of the referee panties, there's something intriguing about imagining football without offside.

It would completely change the game, and that's way scary, but if you think about it a great part of the tuggish / athleticist modern approach to the game relies upon concentrating the players on a narrow horizontal strip of the field.
Saturating spaces, frantic pressing, doubling and tripleing on the player with the ball, zonal marking... all of this implies the existence of the offside rule.
Without offside there would be obviously deep defending and much more space around the action, and probably we'd see much more thight manmarking, with a more skill based approach to dribble to gain a man advantage, thru passes and squad movements to find a path to the goal.

Of course, it's not offside which changed the modern game, as it always existed, but extremization of tactical and physical training.
Within this mindset, we'll probably see human walls in front of the goal and kick and run on the counter, with unpenetrable boxes and chances of scoring only with long range effort and set pieces.

Shows what I know about hockey. Nothing.

hehe. to be fair, I just been once at an ice hockey game and I only tangentially know about field hockey because my girlfriend's father used to play it in is youth. I was curious about the game but it's difficult to extract info from that man, I only see him at dinners once in a while and he regularly falls asleep just after eating =D

I could maybe see a case for having the line for offside further up the pitch (e.g. have a line halfway between penalty area and halfway line) but scrapping it completely would change game too much..

I can just imagine Michael Owen standing on the goal line all game being a nob.

Sin bins, on the other hand, would be good. Surprised this hasn't been implemented already. It would be a little complicated with three cards, but certain decisions would be a lot better...

e.g.

Denying goalscoring opportunity = pen + spell in sin bin, rather than losing the goal and losing the player for whole match.

You could set it so petty things like kicking ball away, taking shirt off would no longer be half a red card, but halfway to a trip to sin bin.

Also it'd be ideal for situations where players have a bit of 'handbags' where it's hard for ref to judge who exactly did what - just send main perpetrators to sin bin to cool off for 10 mins.

Plus it allows refs to be more consistent over a match. A red card effectively varies in how much it affects the team depending on when it is given - a red card at 10 mins means they play with 10 men for 80 minutes, a red card at 70 mins means they play with 10 men for 20 minutes, so it's no surprise refs are more reluctant to do the former. A sin bin system has advantage of being a fixed term (except if it happens in the very closing stages)..

Sin bins? Meh! Just leave it how it is

TM wrote:Sin bins? Meh! Just leave it how it is

Bet some people said that about the introduction of substitutes..not all change is bad by default.

Worth a trial but im not to keen. Can imagine teams being down to 9 for periods and just causing havoc.

debaser wrote:Sin bins, on the other hand, would be good. Surprised this hasn't been implemented already. It would be a little complicated with three cards, but certain decisions would be a lot better...

e.g.

Denying goalscoring opportunity = pen + spell in sin bin, rather than losing the goal and losing the player for whole match.

You could set it so petty things like kicking ball away, taking shirt off would no longer be half a red card, but halfway to a trip to sin bin.

Also it'd be ideal for situations where players have a bit of 'handbags' where it's hard for ref to judge who exactly did what - just send main perpetrators to sin bin to cool off for 10 mins.

Plus it allows refs to be more consistent over a match. A red card effectively varies in how much it affects the team depending on when it is given - a red card at 10 mins means they play with 10 men for 80 minutes, a red card at 70 mins means they play with 10 men for 20 minutes, so it's no surprise refs are more reluctant to do the former. A sin bin system has advantage of being a fixed term (except if it happens in the very closing stages)..

I can see the arguement for "hockey yellow cards", always thought they were a clever way of varying punishment depending on the seriousness of the offence.

Also like the Hockey rule where the refree can "upgrade" the spot of the freekick by 10m in cases of dissent/misconduct. That could bring more discipline to the game.

But I am against abolishment of offsides - it will make football worse rather than better IMO.

L r dd wrote:Worth a trial but im not to keen. Can imagine teams being down to 9 for periods and just causing havoc.

Yeah it's an idea worth thinkering but there are issues.

First, it really calls for stopclock time, as it would be a mess to calculate the 5/10 mins whatever with interruptions.

Then there's the nature of the game, the flow of play and the roles.

It's much easier in football to downtempo and stall the play than in other games with sin bins.
If a team has a player out for five mins they could well sit down and backpass for the whole time which is not such an entertaining perspective.

Then there's the roles issue. I mean, when one of yours get redcarded you can shuffle players around, depending from who's sent off, but often it requires substitution for keeping the team balanced.
You can deal with 10 minutes wth players off positions, but depending who sits on the sideline it can get ugly.
Suppose you end up with both centrebacks on sin bin, if you don't sub anyone it could be a nightmare, if you do you get a weird set up when you get back to full team, requiring shuffling or further subs.

And of course goalkeeper would need to be threated as a special case. You wouldn't want to stay ten minutes with a field player in the goal, neither you would like to have two keepers in the team after that. So a keeper sin bin would burn two subs and greatly disavantage your team.

abundance wrote:

L r dd wrote:Worth a trial but im not to keen. Can imagine teams being down to 9 for periods and just causing havoc.

Yeah it's an idea worth thinkering but there are issues.

First, it really calls for stopclock time, as it would be a mess to calculate the 5/10 mins whatever with interruptions.

Then there's the nature of the game, the flow of play and the roles.

It's much easier in football to downtempo and stall the play than in other games with sin bins.
If a team has a player out for five mins they could well sit down and backpass for the whole time which is not such an entertaining perspective.

Then there's the roles issue. I mean, when one of yours get redcarded you can shuffle players around, depending from who's sent off, but often it requires substitution for keeping the team balanced.
You can deal with 10 minutes wth players off positions, but depending who sits on the sideline it can get ugly.
Suppose you end up with both centrebacks on sin bin, if you don't sub anyone it could be a nightmare, if you do you get a weird set up when you get back to full team, requiring shuffling or further subs.

And of course goalkeeper would need to be threated as a special case. You wouldn't want to stay ten minutes with a field player in the goal, neither you would like to have two keepers in the team after that. So a keeper sin bin would burn two subs and greatly disavantage your team.

Yeah, implementation is always a challenge. Even the best of ideas if implemented wrongly can lead to chaos.

Lets look at the worst case scenario you mentioned above, for eg, I am sure managers would gladly waste 2 subs (in case of a GK sin bin) rather than having their keeper sent off (1 sub and playing the game with 10 men). So keeper sin bins could be judiciously used for cases where currently keepers are harshly sent off.

Yep, I guess mostly it boils down to wheter the sin bins are used as harsher yellows or more forgiving reds.
In the latter case they could bring more balanced punishment, in the former they'd probably end up killing abruptly some entertaining matches.

Yeah there would definitely need to be lots of considerations, but it would at least be flexible - e.g. maybe you could say only 1 player sin-binned at a time (unless there is not enough time remaining) to avoid 8/9-man chaos. Or allow a temporary sub in case of keepers being sin-binned (i.e. you sacrifice an outfield player for 10 mins but it reverts when main keeper is back, perhaps costing 1 substitution rather than having to sub a keeper on and off).

Main danger to my mind is it getting too complicated (think how Graham Poll struggled with the simple 2 yellows and you're off system!), and you'd have to try it in actual games to see how refs cope and the best way to work it. Abundance makes some good points and there are bound to be other things which wouldn't really come up until you'd seen a system in action.

abundance wrote:Yep, I guess mostly it boils down to wheter the sin bins are used as harsher yellows or more forgiving reds.
In the latter case they could bring more balanced punishment, in the former they'd probably end up killing abruptly some entertaining matches.

I'd see it somewhere between the two. i.e. keep yellows for the minor things (persistent little fouls, dissent, etc) but leave reds only for the most major, violent actions (throwing a punch/elbow, utterly reckless challenge). Sin bin could be used for the worst yellow-card offences and also many of the current red card fouls.

But it would make for a complicated system.

Jaime wrote:F*cking hell why don't we make footballers wear skates and carry sticks as well.

NAY!

Wrong hockey, ice hockey still has offsides.

debaser wrote:Yeah there would definitely need to be lots of considerations, but it would at least be flexible - e.g. maybe you could say only 1 player sin-binned at a time (unless there is not enough time remaining) to avoid 8/9-man chaos. Or allow a temporary sub in case of keepers being sin-binned (i.e. you sacrifice an outfield player for 10 mins but it reverts when main keeper is back, perhaps costing 1 substitution rather than having to sub a keeper on and off).

Main danger to my mind is it getting too complicated (think how Graham Poll struggled with the simple 2 yellows and you're off system!), and you'd have to try it in actual games to see how refs cope and the best way to work it. Abundance makes some good points and there are bound to be other things which wouldn't really come up until you'd seen a system in action.

That is a very important point, not just from a refree point of view. One of the reasons football is so popular as a sport is coz its relatively simple to understand. The more complicated rules you bring in, the less spectators you will attract in the future.

I agree. My main impressions of the sin-bin system come from rugby, but it's a completely different sport. Most penalties in rugby can be warned against in advance. The referee will usually highlight an issue in a ruck, and if the players are stupid enough to persist, they will be punished. The immediacy of football makes it much harder to warn against such penalties. The other problem is the lack of consistency that would come with such a system. It's not difficult to envisage controversy arising where one of the top teams has a player who should be sin-binned, the referee shows leniency, and the player then scores or sets up a crucial goal. If referees think they come under severe scrutiny now, it will only be worse with a sin bin system.

edit: And as Bluenine says, one of the best aspects of football is that the rules stay the same (more or less), and issues tend to work themselves out. Compare that to the constant meddling in rugby, and the complete cock-up that is the ELV rules which have detracted from the overall experience of international rugby.

What if 5 players on one team were sin binned at the same time? That would be game over as there must be at least 7 players on each team. I know it's unlikely but all scenarios have to be considered before changing the rules.

bluenine wrote:
That is a very important point, not just from a refree point of view. One of the reasons football is so popular as a sport is coz its relatively simple to understand. The more complicated rules you bring in, the less spectators you will attract in the future.

Simplicity has little to do with it quite frankly.

Football set its roots globaly quicker than every other sport, went professional quicker than the majority of sports and had massive media exposure in it's main markets a long time before most sports. It's a team sport and has a convenient format, 2-3 hours, but after that there's no real difference between Football, NFL and field hockey at the end of the day.

Sheffield gunner wrote:
edit: And as Bluenine says, one of the best aspects of football is that the rules stay the same (more or less), and issues tend to work themselves out. Compare that to the constant meddling in rugby, and the complete cock-up that is the ELV rules which have detracted from the overall experience of international rugby.

Well, when the Rugby media see negative risk averse stratergy's they blame the ELV's, when the Football media see negative risk averse stratergy's they wank over how good a manger Mourinho, Benitez and Ferguson are. When the Rugby media sees a total mess in a controversial area they try and fix it, when the Football media sees a total mess they stick there hands in the ears and claim it evens itself over the course of the season. You can attribute blame to new things quite easily if you want to and especially when your standards are working miracles as is the tone with the bashing of the breakdown/Euro.

Only FIFA knows why Footballs the only sport in the world, to my knowledge, in which there's injury time instead of stopping the clock so the chance of them being open to other changes is rather remote. If this offside change actually helps break down overly defensively sides then I'd be for it, but I'd expect it to work the other way.