1) The 10-yard advancement rule
The famous Gary Lineker wisecrack is not, of course, strictly accurate. If he had wanted to be punctilious about it, the celebrated crisp peddler would have said that “football is a simple game. Twenty-two men chase a ball around for about 67 minutes and spend the other 23 minutes before Germany’s win jostling, gesticulating and gobbing off as much as possible.” Back in 2000, the Premier League was granted permission to try to minimise guff and unpleasantness by giving referees the authority to move a freekick 10 yards forward as punishment for dissent, kicking the ball away and so forth. A longstanding feature of sports such as rugby, the scheme had been trialled by the FA in the Auto Windscreens Trophy and found to be an effective antidote to bothersome behaviour. In 40 matches in that competition, 850 freekicks were awarded, 16 of which were followed by “advancements” – players, it seemed, quickly figured out that they were best served keeping their mouths shut and one referee noted in his report that “dissent has become non-existent 30 metres from goal.”
That mostly held true following its introduction at league level, but not always. “Players are clever and they quickly realised that at times the new rule could be turned to their advantage,” says Jeff Winter, who was one of the Premier League’s top referees at the time. He recalls a Manchester United-Sunderland match at Old Trafford in which the home team were awarded a free-kick about 26 yards out, prime David Beckham territory. “A Sunderland player deliberately broke from the wall before the free-kick was taken, knowing that the referee would move it forward to the edge of the area [the rule stipulated that the edge of the area was the limit of any advancement] and Beckham would have less space to get the ball up over the wall and down again. He didn’t score. Other teams encountered a similar problem. It would have been better if the referee was allowed to give teams the option of accepting the advancement or not.”
Winter says another issue was that referees were only allowed to move the ball forward if they also booked the offending player. “This amounted to a double penalty and there were times when that seemed excessive so referees applied neither.” Apart from those quibbles, Winter, like most people in the Premier League, considered the scheme to be a step in the right direction. So there was surprise when Fifa decided to scrap the rule in 2005. “We were just told ‘it’s not happening next season’,” recalls Winter. “It was disappointing not to be given any real explanation nor an opportunity to give feedback as to how it could be improved.”
Keith Hackett, the chief referee back then, had similar feelings and suggested at the time that the reason for the abolition was that players in countries that had no rugby culture could not understand the principle. ”It is a disappointing decision because while the law was not used a lot, it did have an impact on the behaviour of players,” said Hackett. “The referees over here found it acted as a deterrent. The problem, as I understand it, is the countries who do not have any familiarity with the concept couldn’t get their heads around the process.” We might even wonder whether Fifa feared that discouraging dissent on the field could help consolidate dictators off it. Because, of course, that is the last thing Fifa would want to do. PD
2) American penalty shoot-outs
American sports are, as we know, positively allergic to draws. Baseball, American football, basketball and ice hockey games will go on until the end of time rather than everyone just accepting a noble stalemate, shaking hands and going home. For the first few years of the North American Soccer League, they put up with these ‘ties’, but by 1975 they were done away with, initially with extra-time and standard penalty kicks (even in league games), then in 1977 a new sort of tie-breaking method was introduced, based on NHL penalty shoot-outs. A player would start with the ball 35 yards from goal, and would have five seconds to score past the goalkeeper, using whatever (legal) means necessary.
And it proved pretty tricky, as this particularly shambolic example of the genre from 1980 displayed, with even the likes of Carlos Alberto scuppered by the prospect of having more time to think, to have doubts, for the goalkeeper to bear down on you and any number of other distractions. The NASL championship – the ‘Soccer Bowl’ – was actually decided by this method in 1981, when the Chicago Sting beat the New York Cosmos 2-1, when even all-time leading NASL goalscorer Giorgio Chinaglia couldn’t find the net.
Call it arrogance to try and ‘improve’ a sport that had been doing OK for a century, call it an attempt to relate football to established native sports, call it a genuine innovation that had a chance but didn’t quite take hold. This alternative did carry some merit, though, not least because it made the battle between attacker and goalkeeper a shade more even, with little expectation that a standard penalty will be saved and thus put enormous pressure on the kicker, whereas this was more balanced. It required more skill, which is not to say penalties themselves do not, but more poise was needed than simply leathering it and hoping for the best.
Johan Cruyff, playing in America at the time they were introduced, was a fan. “I would suggest that the rest of the world follow the lead of the NASL and replace penalties with the shootout when a game is tied after regulation and overtime,” he said. “With penalties you’ve always got problems about whether the goalkeeper moved. You don’t get this with the shootout.” Rodney Marsh, a Tampa Bay Rowdies player for four seasons, concurred, quoted in Ian Plenderleith’s book ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Soccer: The Short Life and Fast Times of the North American Soccer League’ as saying: “Fifa should adopt the 35-yard line shootout. Penalties are not conducive to skill, players just stepping up and smashing the ball at the goal until somebody misses. It’s far better to have players dribble up from 35 yards and shoot – that is skill. It’s fantastic to watch.”
Still, despite this positive feedback, the 35-yard shootout didn’t catch on, and more or less died with the NASL in 1982. It was revived for the first four years of Major League Soccer, but was scrapped in 1999. NM
3) Two points for a home win
Vinnie Jones didn’t get where he is today by being thick. The first sign of the cinematic sensation’s ability to exploit a niche came in 1985 when he was part of the Wealdstone side that made canny use of administrative tinkering. The Alliance Premier League, as the top non-league division was known at the time, had taken a novel step in an attempt to stimulate more attacking play. As with the Football League, the three-points-for—a-win system was introduced in 1981-82 but the APL reckoned that this did not improve entertainment, as the attitude of travelling teams was too negative. So for the 1983-84 season teams would get two points for a home win and three for winning away.
Teams duly started to attack more away. Maidstone United, who had been runners-up in 1982-83 despite winning 17 of their 20 home matches, only won 12 of their home matches the following season but finished top thanks to their improved away record – under the old system of three points for all wins, they would only have been second, a point behind Nuneaton Borough. Wealdstone, third in 82-83, were slower to change. Their results were similar in the year after the modification and while that would have been enough to keep them third under the old system, they slipped down to fourth place in 83-84. The following season they showed that they had cottoned on. They completely reversed their pattern of two years previously by pursuing away victories much harder than home ones - and they were champions despite winning just eight of 21 home matches; Nuneaton, invincible at home, were second, while Bath City, who would have won the league under the universal three-point system, came only fourth.
The thing was, however, that the change had not really fixed the perceived problem, rather it had just switched it around. People were unconvinced of its merits. Enfield won the title in 85-86 by a big enough margin to make them champions under both the new system and the old one. And the following season the league reverted to three points for all wins. PD
4) Golden goal
The Golden Goal rule was an abomination, introduced on the back of a false premise. The premise was that teams who played with fear would become emboldened by the prospect of sudden death. You see the problem. But Fifa didn’t so they pressed ahead and implemented change in 1993, decreeing that the first goal scored in extra-time would be the winner. Apparently the governing body figured that the incentive of being sure to avoid a penalty shootout would encourage sides to go for all-out victory but, of course, it tended to have the opposite effect, with teams increasingly wary of making a mistake from which there could be no possible comeback. Most reasoned it would make more sense to wait for the shootout and take their chances from the spot.
Rather than a prolongation of the action, extra-time periods took on the air of interludes. The rule produced a couple of memorable moments, but watching France against Holland in Euro 1996 or against Italy at the 1998 World Cup was like observing a group of inmates pacing up and down their cells as they waited to be sprung or hung. Drama, of a sort, but not exciting. Even when teams did enter into the right spirit and the golden goal brought a memorable moment, it felt unsatisfying: David Trezeguet’s decisive strike for France against Italy in the Euro 2000 final was glorious but possibly deprived us of a classic on par with the France-West Germany World Cup semi-final of 1982, when the Germans recovered from 3-1 down in extra-time to win on penalties.
No rule is ever so bad that tweaking it cannot make it worse. The silver goal, introduced by Uefa in 2002, was an irritating fudge. And a modification for the 1994 Caribbean Cup brought a monumental farce: in an effort to incentivise attacking playing in extra-time, tournament organisers decided that golden goals would count double for goal difference purposes: so when Barbados were beating Grenada 2-1 with minutes to go, they realised it would be in their best interests to score an own goal to make it 2-2 before full-time so that they could then score a golden goal in extra-time, giving them a goal difference from the match of +2 rather than the +1 that they would have got from a 2-1 win. The remaining minutes of normal time were, then, anything but normal, as we have mentioned here before. PD
5) Kick-ins
The thing about football is that, even if a thing is shown not to work a number of times, people will still stubbornly demand that it’s tried again and again until, well, until it does work. Or not. Even with this in mind, it was rather surprising to see Arsène Wenger, of all people, advocate the introduction of kick-ins to replace throws back in 2009. “The rule I would change would be maybe to play throw-ins by foot,” he mused. “Why not? I think it would make the game quicker. For example at Stoke, for Rory Delap it is like kicking the ball. It is a little bit of an unfair advantage. He is using a strength that is usually not a strength in football. Football is the most popular team game in the world and one day some crazy guy said ‘we don’t use the hands’. How could you have imagined on that day a game that is completely natural to play with your hands would become the most popular sport?”
Of course, what has been done will be done again, there is nothing new under the sun. Kick-ins were trialled in the mid-1990s, proposed at a Fifa meeting in 1994 with everybody’s pal Sepp Blatter proclaiming that “in two years the kick-in will replace the throw-in in the laws of the game and then we will have an even faster game than we have now.” Perhaps Blatter was just trying to reclaim the roots of the game; after all, the original set of laws written in 1862 made no provision for a throw-in, and it wasn’t until 1882 that it was declared a ball departing the side of the pitch shall be returned via the double-handed throw.
Still trials were launched in the Belgian and Hungarian lower leagues, but also in the Diadora League in England (the seventh tier), which for the 1994-95 season would play guinea pig. It did not, to say the least, go down well, with some managers blindly refusing to allow their players to take kick-ins, and the new rule only served to do what most assumed it would – encourage long punted balls downfield.
“”Blatter’s vision for the next century was played out in a picture of the last – brambles spilling on to crumbling terraces, the proper platform for spectators,” wrote Jeremy Alexander in the Guardian, after attending a game between Tooting and Hayes in August 1994. “’Worst rule ever invented,’ said one player. ’A load of rubbish,’ ventured another.” The experiment didn’t last, but as Wenger displayed, it’s probably only a matter of time before someone suggests it again. NM
6) Goalkeepers handling the ball outside the penalty area
Leigh Roose was, by 1900s standards, something of a character. Roose was a Welsh goalkeeper who played for, among others, Everton, Celtic, Aston Villa and Arsenal, and who enjoyed injecting a little levity into proceedings. During games Roose would hop onto the crossbar while the ball was at the other end of the pitch. After missing a train in 1906 he hired his own locomotive and carriage, sending the bill to his club. In 1912 he was named by the Daily Mail as London’s second most eligible bachelor, after the cricketer Jack Hobbs.
The other thing Roose was known for was inspiring a change in the laws of the game. When football first crawled into being with the codification of the first standardised rules in 1863, there was actually no such thing as a specialist goalkeeper, with anyone allowed to catch the ball, but not carry it. However, in 1870 an amendment to the laws was added: ‘The goalkeeper may, within his own half of the field of play, use his hands, but shall not carry the ball.’
For the next 40-odd years (and, admittedly, it might be a slight stretch to call 40 years shortlived), football trundled on fairly well, making additions here and there, but the goalkeeper rule remained – until Roose came along. Roose’s ruse was to exploit the loophole in the ‘no carrying’ law by bouncing the ball up to the halfway line, battering opponents out of the way as he went, from where an attack would be launched. This, as you can imagine, proved unpopular, with several opposing clubs complaining to the FA, to the point that when Roose retired in 1912, the law was altered. “The goalkeeper may, within his own penalty area, use his hands, but shall not carry the ball.”
“Leigh revolutionised the way the game was played in England,” his biographer, Spencer Vignes, told the BBC. “Before Leigh, goalkeepers were just shot-stoppers, if they came off their line they had no protection from being punched, shoulder-charged and trampled by the forwards, in a game which was vastly more physical than today. Usually they were too terrified to come out of their goal, even though - in those days - they were allowed to handle the ball anywhere in their own half of the field. But Leigh was such a physical specimen that he could take on the forwards at their own game. He’d flatten the striker, catch the ball, and carry play up field like a rugby fullback does today. So...the rules were changed so that keepers could only handle the ball inside the penalty area.” NM