Misguided innovations
With Dutch legend Marco van Basten suggesting we do away with penalties and offside, FFT revels in a history of half-baked ideas that didn’t catch on
BUCKLEY’S MONKEY BUSINESS
At Wolves in the 1930s and early ’40s, manager Frank Buckley took great delight in firing footballs at his players from a wooden contraption he called the ‘shooting box’, helping to improve their ball control and hone their reflexes. Yet that was hardly the worst aspect of training for his players. In 1937, chemist Menzies Sharp told Buckley he had a secret remedy to boost players’ confidence. The remedy turned out to be injecting them with monkey glands. After an investigation, the Football League declared that players could not be forced to take them, to the relief of Wolves’ squad.
ANTON TAKES A TUMBLE
Southend’s Anton Otulakowski attracted so much publicity with his ‘novelty throw’ that it was even plugged on ITV’S The Big Match. The Shrimpers’ midfielder – an outstanding gymnast as a youngster – demonstrated in training that with a fast run-up, and a somersault to create extra leverage, he could add up to 20 per cent distance to the throw. “The Football League gave it their blessing and I wanted to start doing it in matches,” he recalls. But there was a hitch: there was insufficient space between the advertising hoardings and the touchline at Roots Hall. So Otulakowski – who’d even done his party piece on Southend Pier in front of day-trippers – ditched his acrobatic set-piece and continued taking throw-ins the ‘normal’ way. Boring!
THE FIRST LADY OF SERIE A
“Women have exactly the same rights as men,” argued Perugia president Luciano Gaucci in October 2003, after announcing the signing of 25-year-old Swedish striker Hanna Ljungberg. “Hanna will be a role model for other female players.” So far so good, but Gaucci was forced into a hasty U-turn after Ljungberg turned him down. Perhaps it was because the not-so-politically-correct Gaucci also announced a plan to sign the Germany striker Birgit Prinz: “She is very pretty and has a good figure,” he creepily claimed. With both women suitably unimpressed, Perugia remained a male-only outfit.
EL TEL’S THINGUMMYWIG
With divergent interests including TV scriptwriting, designing board games and writing a novel, Terry Venables was every inch a 1960s entrepreneur. But one of his least successful schemes (his planned boutique with George Graham and Ron Harris also flopped) was to endorse his very own patented invention – the Thingummywig. “It was going to be a hat with a wig attached,” said the future England boss, “and I thought it would be a great novelty gift.” Sadly, no one else did, and Tel wisely came to the conclusion that chasing a career in football coaching and TV punditry would be a more fulfilling plan.
GOALS, GOALS, GOALS!
The idea to extend goal frames was mooted by North American Soccer League bosses back in the 1970s in an effort to inject “more excitement and scoring into the sport”. It came to nothing, mainly because several of NASL’S European stars, including Giorgio Chinaglia (“It’s a bloody terrible idea”) voiced their displeasure. Twenty years later, Major League Soccer’s proposal to increase the width by 18 inches and the height by nine was sadly poo-pooed by the International Board, football’s rule-making body. FIFA’S chief Sepp Blatter reassured football fans: “Nothing will change. We will not be altering the size of the ball, either. It’s tradition.”
THAMES VALLEY ROYALS
“Everything in the world that cannot pay its way must go the way of the merger to combine into stronger units,” insisted Oxford United’s chairman Robert Maxwell in April 1983, after he announced plans to unite the Us with Reading. “If we want football in the Thames Valley then it’s the only way forward.” Maxwell wasn’t the first football kingpin – or indeed the last – to propose that two clubs pool their resources. During the early 20th century, Henry Norris wanted to merge Woolwich Arsenal with Fulham and in 1986 Hearts’ Wallace Mercer advocated a merger with Hibernian to create one Edinburgh super-club. All three schemes failed; Maxwell backing down following rowdy protests at the Manor Ground and Elm Park. The deal was dead in the water, as was Maxwell by Christmas 1991.
HULL VS STOKE IN TOKYO, ANYONE?
With a 2010-11 season launch date tying in neatly with a new – and gargantuan – television deal, Premier League chief executive Richard Scudamore’s 2008 brainwave of introducing a 39th Premier League fixture to the calendar was designed to further develop the English game’s global brand. The ‘international round’ would be played in January over a single weekend across various venues in South East Asia, Australia and North America. “It will tap into the huge support in those areas,” he argued. Reaction to the 39th game concept from club chairmen and supporters was mixed, but FIFA’S top boy Sepp Blatter scuppered the whole idea, while hinting that if the Premier League wanted to continue pushing the proposal, it could harm the country’s prospects of hosting the 2018 World Cup. Despite arguing the merits of ‘a two-day football festival,’ Scudamore piped down.
WEMBLEY OF THE NORTH
In 1944, Port Vale’s chairman Alderman Holdcroft declared that the club’s new ground – Vale Park – would become the ‘Wembley of the North’. With a proposed capacity of 80,000, a 1000-space car park and a bespoke train station, the scheme would be the pride of the Potteries and turn Vale into a major football force. Yet Holdcroft simply couldn’t make the Valiants profitable and, coupled with the fact that raw materials were needed elsewhere during the post-war rebuilding effort, the grandiose plan fell well short of the mark. Vale, despite pulling in a mightily impressive 50,000 crowd for an FA Cup Fifth Round tie against Aston Villa in 1960, never reached the top flight, the station wasn’t built and the new stadium quickly assumed its ‘shabby chic’ feel.
MAJOR LEAGUE SOCCER’S PLAN TO INCREASE THE GOAL WIDTH AND HEIGHT WAS POO-POOED
DION’S GOT RHYTHM
There’s more to Dion Dublin than football, his band The Establishment and that sweet gig as a co-presenter of daytime TV staple Homes Under The Hammer. One of the coolest saxophonists in British football, the former England striker also invented the Dube, a pioneering percussion instrument. Dublin went into a hardware store on a whim one day, bought six pieces of wood, a hammer and some nails, and built a box which he started tapping away on. Following positive feedback from serious musos such as Courtney Pine and custom from greats including Stevie Wonder, he came up with the Dube: a cube with four playable sides. Available to buy from Amazon, Dion Dublin’s Dube sounds infectious. One reviewer suggested he would like “to hear Alan Brazil play it after a few shandies”.
BEAVER’S BIG IDEA
Sports cartoonist and entrepreneur Paul ‘The Beaver’ Trevillion, who’d somehow convinced Leeds boss Don Revie to kit out his team with sock tags and personalised tracksuits in the early ’70s, then turned his attentions to the potential of a European five-a-side tournament. The audacious plan failed; not due to a lack of interest from any of the players – “Georgie Best and Johan Cruyff both said in interviews that it was a great idea” – or from a keen-as-mustard TV broadcaster in ITV, who had already televised the massively popular Daily Express 5-a-side competition. It was because: “Top European clubs wouldn’t sign up due to the risk of injury to their key players. Without the stars, we’d have no TV interest,” explained a crestfallen Beaver. Spoilsports.
CROCKED FANS
“We’re going to build a moat running around the stands to keep these thugs off the pitch,” barked furious Steaua Nicolae Balcescu chairman Alexandra Cringus in 2003. “We can get crocodiles easily enough and feed them on meat from the local abattoir.” Cringus was sickened by the violent behaviour of sections of the Romanian fourth-tier outfit’s support – leading to the club being threatened with expulsion from the league after repeated pitch invasions. Cringus reckoned his idea of a croc–filled moat (heated up to keep the crocs alive, of course) was the only way that Balcescu could survive. “Either the club will die or the hooligans will if they attempt to hurdle the moat – they will be eaten alive,” he cackled. Local authorities informed Cringus that they were ‘considering the proposal’. He continues to wait by the phone...
PUT YOUR CARD AWAY
Hooliganism blighted football throughout the 1980s, but Conservative Sports Minister Colin Moynihan believed he had the solution – and the perfect platform. On a 1988 episode of Saturday morning children’s television show Going Live (yes, really), he revealed that within two years, all football supporters would have to pay a flat rate £10 fee to become a member of their football club. Anyone without photographic identification, or who had not bought a ticket for the game in advance, would not be allowed to enter the stadium. “It will wipe out trouble inside grounds at a stroke,” insisted Moynihan. Fanzines up and down the land argued that it would also eradicate ‘floating supporters’ and drive attendances down even further, and that it was actually a Government pilot for a national ID card scheme. Yet beset by arguments over who would pay the £5 million required for the technology, and continued protests by fans and civil liberty groups, the proposal was jettisoned.
RANGERS TRY TO PLAY SAFE
With the freezing 1978 winter showing no sign of abating, Queens Park Rangers decided to sheath the entire playing surface in what was effectively a giant condom. “Other clubs are already asking us how it works,” gushed enthusiastic R’s manager Steve Burtenshaw. “Everyone will be using one in the future.” Designed to try to keep the temperature at pitch level above freezing, it actually ruined the surface by blocking out air and light, prompting the club to install their ‘drastic plastic’ carpet two years later. Wisely, other outfits opted against asking Rangers (relegated in 1979 following some dismal New Year displays on a barren waste) if they could borrow their giant rubber covering, and the enormous prophylactic was presumably flushed down the nearest giant toilet in west London.
CHAPMAN’S CLOCK ENDS
Herbert Chapman rarely failed to get his way as Arsenal manager during the early ’30s, as his team landed silverware aplenty and his ideas on tactics and training took the football world by storm. But the ‘Napoleon of north London’ was blocked by the Football League when he announced his intention to unveil a 45-minute clock at the Gunners’ Highbury home. Reasoning that such a mechanism would place unnecessary pressure upon referees, the authorities gave him a definite ‘no’. Slightly miffed but nonetheless undaunted, Chapman instead ordered for a more traditional clock to be placed at the south end of Highbury. It is still ticking along at the new Emirates Stadium today, in an era when officials are of course under no pressure at all.
A GAME OF FOUR QUARTERS
As one of the founders of New York Cosmos, Warner Communications CEO Steve Ross did more than most to glamorise the burgeoning NASL in the early 1970s, using his contacts book to improve media coverage of the sport. Yet not all of his ideas caught on. His vision of carving up the matches into four quarters (to help increase advertising revenues) never materialised. Thankfully, neither did another brainwave of introducing a 30-yard line, with any goal scored from beyond said line counting double towards a team’s tally. “American crowds love to see explosive shooting from distance,” insisted Ross. One of his players didn’t agree, though. “Some of the most beautifully constructed goals are finished off with a tap-in,” argued Pele. Fortunately, Ross paid attention to the Brazilian forward who knew a thing or two about scoring over the years, hitting the back of the net 64 times in 107 outings for the Cosmos.
YOU’LL GET A KICK-IN
In a game called football, the ability of someone like Rory Delap to cause havoc by putting his hands on the ball and hurling it towards the opposition goal is a bit of an anomaly. That, presumably, was the thinking at FIFA when they decided, in the mid ’90s, to allow players to also kick the ball back into play as long as they raised their arms first. This would, they assumed, help to speed up attacking play. Yet experiments in Australia, Belgium, Hungary and England’s Diadora League (the National League South in new money) showed that the supporters, players and managers all loathed the idea. St Albans City never kicked in once throughout the entire season, with gaffer Allan Cockram threatening to fine or substitute anyone who attempted it.
THE MEN IN THE MIDDLE
How many officials do you need to referee a match? Originally it was none. After the laws of the game were codified in 1863, it was two – although they were called umpires, one nominated by each team, who only intervened when the players asked them to. One referee became official practice in 1891. But in October 1999, an Italian Cup encounter between Sampdoria and Bologna that was experimentally officiated by two referees had to be halted at half-time due to crowd trouble. The team of officials has grown in size in other ways, with the advent of the fourth official in 1991, two additional assistant referees behind the goal-line in UEFA competitions in 2009, and FIFA trialling the use of video-assisted refs at the 2016 Club World Cup in Japan.
WORTH A PUNT?
The square-toed football boot came and went faster than you can say ‘Garth Crooks’, who, coincidentally, happened to be among the former professionals endorsing this revolutionary product in 2015. The Serafino 4th Edge Power square-toed boot was designed to try to help footballers toe-poke the ball – allegedly a favoured method of scoring in Sunday League – though tests convinced Nigel Clough (then managing Sheffield United) that, with it, players could kick the ball with more accuracy, consistency and power. The Serafino was a bit of a throwback to the late 19th century, when football boots had hardened leather on the toe because that was the part of the foot players usually kicked the ball with. Despite Clough believing it “could be a game changer”, the boot raised only £6,054
through crowdfunding, well short of its £95,000 target.
KILL ALL DRAWS!
FIFA president Gianni Infantino’s plan to eliminate draws from his 48-team World Cup is merely the latest proof that football’s blazers can’t bear tied matches. By proposing penalty shootouts to resolve drawn group games during the 2026 finals, Infantino is legislating against the very thing that makes the beautiful game so compelling: its unpredictability. Infantino’s scheme isn’t new: the North American Soccer League banned draws between 1977 and 2000, with games going to sudden death extra time and, if necessary, a shootout in which five players from each side took the ball from 35 yards and tried to score. In the early ’70s, Soviet authorities were so worried about draws being fixed, they decided that teams could only draw eight (later 10) league matches per season. If they drew more than that, they didn’t get the points.
DROP THE MIC (PLEASE)
“It’s there. Adebayor! He has done it. You little beauty. Everything’s magnificent!” One Arsenal fan’s reaction as the Gunners found the net in a 2008 north London derby is one of the greatest clips from the brief history of Sky Sports’ Fanzone. The idea had the simplicity of genius: get two fans, stick them in a booth so tiny they’re all but certain to collide, and let them commentate. Some viewers could tolerate it briefly; others felt it was like watching a game with your mates. Fanzone is not officially dead – it returned for Liverpool vs Manchester United in 2015 – and there is a campaign on Facebook to revive it full-time. It has 52 likes.
THE BRAZIL OF AFRICA
With the clarion call, “Go and play like 11 Peles,” ringing in their ears, Zaire’s 1974 World Cup squad vowed not to disappoint leader and benefactor President Mobutu. He lent the team his private jet and even took a lead in designing their golden yellow shirt, modelled on Brazil’s 1970 winners. Despite Mobutu boasting that with his backing, Zaire could become “the Brazil of African football,” the team exited at the group stage following a fearful 9-0 shellacking by Yugoslavia. Ignored by Mobutu upon their return, he also withheld the team’s promised bonuses. Mobutu turned his back on football, organising 1974’s Foreman vs Ali ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ in Kinshasa instead.
“THIS DOESN’T SLIP”
“Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell, move over – Graham Taylor has tackled his first modelling contract.” So read the 2011 press release from the people who gave us Football Manager, announcing that the former England boss had designed a new item of footwear, combining the features of a shoe and a boot – the Sho’ot’ – to stop managers from slipping over on the touchline. Six years after its launch, Sho’ot has yet to star on many touchlines or catwalks. Some coaches – notably Carlo Ancelotti and Sven-goran Eriksson – are unlikely to fall as they barely move. At heart, football is a traditional business and perhaps that pretentiously placed apostrophe in the middle of Sho’ot simply put most managers off. That, or the idea was a load of old cobblers.
SEPP BLATHERS AGAIN
In 2004, Sepp Blatter outlined his plan to make the women’s game more popular. “Let them play in more feminine clothes like they do in volleyball,” said the FIFA supremo. “They could have tighter shorts, many of the footballers are so pretty these days,” garbled the former head of the World Society Of Friends Of Suspenders. Sepp continued to spout about the merits of his ‘plan’ but it went down like a lead balloon. USA skipper Julie Foudy replied, “We’ll wear tighter shorts when he does his press conferences in his bathing suit.” Thankfully, Blatter ignored her suggestion, just as female players rejected his.
FANZONE ISN’T DEAD – THERE’S A CAMPAIGN TO REVIVE IT On FACEBOOK. IT HAS 52 LIKES