Paul Gardner IFAB’s inertia & overly active VAR
In 1925 the International Football Association Board – IFAB, the people who write and, when necessary, revise the playing rules of football – took decisive action to halt a trend that many claimed was killing the sport. Teams were using the offside trap to squelch attacking moves before they could get going. Fewer and fewer goals were being scored.
So IFAB altered the offside rule, making the offside trap a much more risky manoeuvre for defenders. The move paid off immediately. Under the old rules, in 1924-25, the four divisions of England’s Football League produced 4,700 goals. The following year, under the changed rule, that went up to 6,373.
What IFAB had done was to pay attention to a fundamental aspect of football – indeed, of all competitive sports – the balance between attack and defence. Football was out of balance; it had become too difficult to score goals.
It wasn’t long before defensive tactics (notably Arsenal’s “third back” game) were developed to once again reduce goalscoring. Deplorably, IFAB lost interest. Never again has it paid any attention to the offence-defence balance.
With the result that goals have slowly drained away. The statistic for goals-per-game in the World Cup starkly tells the dismal story: first five World Cups (1930-1954): 4.4 goals per game; in the last five (2002-2018), that figure has dropped to 2.48.
Nearly two goals-per-game have been lost, but IFAB has done precisely nothing to stem the haemorrhage. It has totally lost sight of the vital importance of balance in the sport
– it has, in effect, been asleep since making its splendid 1925 rule change.
Technology – marked by the arrival of VAR – may shake IFAB into life, but I doubt it. Even where IFAB has managed to lay down sensible VAR guidelines, it fails to enforce them. An obviously useful tool has been allowed to spread itself into areas where it doesn’t belong. Millimetric (dubbed, justifiably, sillymetric) offside calls abound and invite scorn and derision.
The “VAR Protocol”, which is now part of the IFAB-published “Laws of the Game” says, with commendable clarity: “A video assistant referee (VAR)... may assist the referee only in the event of a ‘clear and obvious error’” Surely, failure to detect a 10mm offside infringement by a big toe cannot possibly be a clear and obvious error? Yet that is exactly the sort of ridiculous call that has come to typify VAR.
Of course IFAB should intervene. Then again, maybe not. IFAB has stepped in to clarify the definition of handball – and has succeeded in turning what merely puzzled into what now utterly bewilders.
Causing bafflement among those trying to make sense of the rules is far from being the worst of IFAB’s drawbacks. Decades of sloth have nurtured a quite extraordinary – and dangerous – laxity in the enforcement of some of the sport’s rules.
The rules in question are not new. They date back to the very beginning of the sport. They are intended, as are most of the rules in Law 12, to greatly limit the extent of physical contact.
IFAB seems unaware that these anti-violence rules apply to all players – including, crucially, goalkeepers.
Thus, goalkeepers are consistently allowed to violently jump into their opponents, often causing serious head injuries. Goalkeepers are also routinely permitted to dive head first at an opponent’s feet – a reckless manoeuvre, clearly a contravention of the rule against “playing in a dangerous manner”, where the goalkeeper is the player most at risk of injury. The rule specifically states that the play “threatens injury to someone (including the player themself).”
The idea that goalkeepers are allowed to wipe out any player who gets in their way is now so widely accepted that it looks almost like
Nearly two goals-per-game have been lost, but IFAB has done precisely nothing to stem the haemorrhage
a game-wide conspiracy among IFAB (which refuses to ensure that its rules are enforced), referees (who simply ignore the rules), and coaches and players (who rarely complain).
Just listen to the words of Brad Friedel, the American goalkeeper who spent most of his career playing in the English Premier League. This is Friedel, in his role as a TV guru, having just watched a goalkeeper leaping, with raised knee, to smash into an opponent: “That is outstanding goalkeeping...a big strong punch, a big strong body, big collision...exactly what you want...”
The alarm bells on these fouls rang loudly in the 1982 World Cup, when West Germany goalkeeper Harald Schumacher brutally “assaulted” France’s Patrick Battiston and sent him to hospital with serious head injuries. Schumacher went unpunished.
IFAB had nothing to say about the incident. The mayhem continued, reaching its obvious and wretched climax in 2017 when a professional goalkeeper was seriously injured after diving into the swinging feet of a goalmouth melee. He was rushed to hospital, where he died. The tragedy happened in Indonesia. Again, IFAB – indeed, the whole sport – simply ignored it.
Inevitably, as goalkeepers have recognised their relative immunity to punishment, their play has become more reckless. A couple of months back Everton’s Jordan Pickford launched himself into Liverpool’s Virgil van Dijk with a crudely violent tackle that will see Van Dijk sidelined for months with a serious ACL injury. A blatant red-card foul, but Pickford escaped – and VAR failed to even review the tackle.
Of course, it is not just in the pro game that tragedy strikes. Teenage boys were killed in goalkeeper collisions in the USA in 2015, and England in 2018 (one of them was a goalkeeper).
Despite the mounting evidence that sports need to do all they can to reduce head injuries, IFAB has done nothing. Yes, football – the one sport in which the head is widely used to play the ball – has introduced a “concussion protocol”, but that simply ensures better treatment after a concussion has occurred. It does nothing to reduce the frequency of head injuries.
Only rule changes will do that, but IFAB will not act. It will not even act in the case of goalkeeper violence, where the necessary rules are already in place.
The inaction of IFAB and FIFA is exposing football to the distinct possibility of damaging legal action over serious injury or death.
The only way that I can see football responding to the threat posed by concussions is to abolish the archaic and smugly somnolent IFAB and to replace it with a body that will not only safeguard the rules, and keep a watchful eye on the balance between attack and defence, but will also act humanely to ensure the safety of its players.