Postecoglou is right – after 250 rule changes in a decade, leave football alone ...Middle East

Take a glance through the football rulebook and there’s a glorious irony about the introductory page titled, The Philosophy and Spirit of the Laws.

It’s not so much a “book” these days. International Football Association Board (IFAB), the body in charge of the rules of the game and arbiters of what is and isn’t allowed in it, have created a handy Laws of the Game app. Which is actually pretty good – it has a 4.3 star rating from over 2,000 reviews.

“Football is the greatest sport on earth,” it begins. “It is played on every continent, in every country and at many different levels.

“The fact that the Laws of the Game are the same for all football throughout the world, from the Fifa World Cup through to a game between young children in a remote village, is a considerable strength which must continue to be harnessed for the good of football everywhere.”

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Scan down a few more paragraphs and it adds that “Football’s Laws are relatively simple compared to most other team sports”.

And then follows 116 pages of complex rules and regulations, full of bullet points and graphs and diagrams, and offside armpits.

The idea that children in remote villages are following these guidelines invokes images of kids checking off the five bullet points that constitute handball, or three players at the side pretending to be Video Assistant Referees sat in a Stockley Park booth.

And if the rules weren’t confusing enough already, IFAB keep changing them. They keep tweaking and tinkering, forever sawing off bits here, extending over there, tightening screws and hammering in nails.

In the last five years they have altered 67 rules. These range from small changes, such as making language more concise (even then: is this strictly necessary to do every year?) to lists of bullet points redefining handball, or offside, or what constitutes deliberately playing the ball.

Take last season. They added a separate bullet point for goal celebrations “in the list of causes of time lost for which the referee makes allowances” – that was the moment players were effectively penalised for enjoying goals a bit too much.

And whichever killjoy was in charge that year also added a “clarification the goalkeeper must not behave in a manner that fails to show respect for the game and the opponent” during a penalty shootout, sucking more life out of it all. Who doesn’t want to see a goalkeeper try to put off a penalty taker? Isn’t that part of the fun?

On the subject of penalties, last year the term “kicks from the penalty mark” was finally replaced by “penalties”. Although why anyone felt it necessary to refer to penalties as “kicks from the penalty mark” in the first place is beyond me. Why use one word when you can use five, eh?

The year before there is “clarification that the referee tosses the coin to determine the ‘ends’ and kick-off”. Did we seriously need that clarified?

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In 2020-21, they added that “the goalposts and the crossbar may be a combination of the four basic shapes”. A year later it was decided: “Goalposts and crossbar must be the same shape.”

The tinkering is comical. It would’ve been fantastic to see the team that put two different sized goals at either end in the 2020-21 season, that still adhered to the four basic shapes and therefore not a breach, just to mess with their opponents.

2021-22 was the year they included “the law 12 definition of where the arm ends (bottom of armpit) for the purposes of determining an offside/onside position”. And that was the moment offside armpits were cemented in the game, a metric used in jumpers-for-goalposts games and amateur pitches the world over.

There are never-ending tweaks to rules about handball, offside, VAR, penalties, stoppage time, substitutions, fouls, goal kicks, free-kicks, throw-ins, kick-offs, corners, red cards, yellow cards.

From 2016 to 2020 there were more than 170 changes. Did football really require somewhere in the region of 250 tweaks to its rules in a decade? It seemed to have fared pretty well during the century-and-a-half it was played before that.

It does make you wonder if maybe it isn’t the referees’ fault so much of football discourse has become about officiating errors. Everyone keeps shouting at them and nothing seems to be improving. Could it be the rulebook? One minute it is in a referee’s hand, the next it is slipping through their fingers like sand.

Some of the many rule tweaks in the last decade

Ange Postecoglou had a point when he gave an impassioned plea for people to stop messing with football after Tottenham Hotspur beat Liverpool in the first leg of their Carabao Cup semi-final. “Just leave the game alone for a bit,” he said.

And hats off to Postecoglou for speaking out when an officiating mistake had won his team the game. Liverpool manager Arne Slot was furious Lucas Bergvall wasn’t sent off for a second yellow card for a challenge before scoring a late winning goal. Too many coaches lash out only when it costs them.

“I think there’s a lot of confusion at the moment, that’s my belief,” Postecoglou added. “The way the game is changing on the basis of technology. Why isn’t anyone speaking up about it?

“Especially in this country – you guys think you’re custodians of the game, you’ve got a song that says ‘it’s coming home’. This is your game. And yet it takes an Aussie from the other side of the world to be the one that’s most conservative about changes.”

Consult the relevant passages in the Laws of the Game app and what referee Stuart Attwell should’ve done with Bergvall remains entirely unclear.

Only a few days before, Postecoglou had complained, after being left bewildered by a decision not to award a handball in the build-up to Antony Gordon’s equaliser in a defeat to Newcastle United, that “it’s very hard at the moment, it’s very confusing, to understand certain elements of the game”.

When even the managers are struggling to keep up, maybe it’s time to slow down.

“Football must have Laws which keep the game fair – this is a crucial foundation of the ‘beautiful game’ and a vital feature of the ‘spirit’ of the game,” reads another passage in IFAB’s rulebook.

“The best matches are those where the referee is rarely needed because the players play with respect for each other, the match officials and the Laws.”

In the game the rulebook has created, matches seem further away from that definition than ever.

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