Future of Football: What rules do you want to see implemented in the Premier League in the years and decades to come? Could heading be banned, how can time-wasting be stopped - and could football adopt a power play?
Friday 28 July 2023 07:23, UK
We asked you for your views on what rule changes you would like to see implemented in football. Which ideas did you like... And which did you send for an early bath?
Over the years, football has had to change with the times and the Laws of the Game have played a major part in that - whether it be the implementation of the back-pass rule, the introduction of VAR, goal-line technology - even substitutes, which were only brought into the professional game in 1958.
As part of our Future of Football series, one of the major strands we're looking at is how those rule changes might progress over the next few decades. That will all happen under the watchful eye of IFAB, the international body whose task is to run the rule over the laws of the game, both what works and what doesn't, every year.
Almost 7,000 of you responded to a survey we ran across Sky Sports earlier this year, asking for your thoughts and ratings on a scale of 1-10 for a variety of potential rule changes. Those were then whittled down - while adding a couple of our own - to six new additions for an 11-vs-11 game, which you can view below.
Here's what you thought of the initial suggestions, from the ones you loved to the ones you were, let's say, less keen on.
If you want any more detail on the individual rules, we've listed them all with some added explanation at the bottom of this article.
The MVP of the proposed new rules was retrospective punishing of diving, which already has some precedent but even after the addition of VAR to the Premier League still crops up most weekends. Almost 68 per cent of you ranked that as a 10/10 addition to the game.
Not far behind was the suggestion that only captains should be allowed to talk to referees. That's something already adopted in rugby union, where the importance of respect towards match officials is far more established than in football. This rule is one FIFA previously discussed implementing in 2016, but never materialised.
A 10-minute sin-bin for dissent - another rule we've nicked from rugby union, if you hadn't spotted the trend - also scored very highly, and is something which has already been brought into the grassroots game.
At the other end of the scale, there wasn't a lot of love for a 10-minute power play, where both sides pick an opposition outfield player to be temporarily removed. The likes of adding an extra point for a win and getting rid of offsides altogether were also, perhaps unsurprisingly, deemed just a little too wild.
In the age of football analytics, digging down beneath the simple figures revealed how a few of our suggestions really divided the crowd - as you can see in the chart below.
For instance, while 40 per cent of you would rather watch tennis instead of tune into 60-minute matches where the clock stops every time the ball goes out of play, 29 per cent of you thought it was the best thing since sliced clearances. Even so, it was the fifth-best ranked new rule suggestion overall.
And though 33 per cent of you rated the idea of managers having three VAR challenges per game at 10/10, 40 per cent of you gave it five or less, and 20 per cent of you hated the idea, to put it plainly.
Moving the free-kick wall back to 12 yards, making women's goals smaller and being allowed to take free-kicks to yourself also really split the room - all three of which ranked inside the top eight of the 24 rules we proposed.
These rule-change suggestions ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous, as you were more than happy to tell us in your rankings.
Nothing is ever quite the same on paper as it is in reality though. Plenty of seemingly run-of-the-mill suggestions have been tried out by IFAB down the years without catching on, and vice versa.
Look at the ABBA penalty shoot-out, in theory removing the advantage of going first, which came in a few seasons ago - but was quickly removed.
Lukas Brud, IFAB secretary, told Sky Sports the world body on changing the laws of the game never dismiss an idea out of hand - and, in fact, study all suggestions seriously and consider how they would impact on the existing laws.
"We do receive ideas and we thoroughly review things that are put to us," he said. "For instance, with the ABBA penalty idea. This was where there was an assumption that it might improve the fairness of penalties, but it created so much confusion. In the end, we said it was nice to trial it but we are not considering it going forward.
"There are other areas where we have thought we should explore thing further and trial it to see if there really is a way because we need to tackle a problem. The order of penalty kicks may not have been the major problem but where there is a problem, where we see there is a challenge to face in order to improve the game whether that is the fairness, the attractiveness or health of players, we have to look into it.
"We never dismiss an idea immediately. We always check it against what is already in the laws of the game and whether the laws of the game could potentially be improved in this area or whether there is a certain interpretation that can be applied or whether a certain addition of what is in the laws can be brought in, in order to embrace that idea as well."
Former Premier League official and the Future of Football's man-in-the-middle Dermot Gallagher:
"In the 11-a-side trial match, I liked the power play, I thought it was interesting and clever how they used it. One of the teams went a goal down, and thought they could get a goal back quickly within the 10 minutes that player was off the field.
"The team who were winning kept their paper dry and waited until later in the game, worked out who the best player was and took him off, which worked much better for them. It allowed a team to think tactically about what they were doing and they both used it very differently.
"I wonder if sin-bins will ever come into the professional game - it's so much faster than at grassroots level. How do you keep a player up to speed if they're off the pitch for 10 minutes? It may well be having exercise bikes at the side of the pitch if they did do it.
"I talk about two rules I'd like to implement all the time - at throw-ins, I think the nearest player to it should pick up the ball and throw it. It's not rocket science to take a throw-in. It really amazes me why a player has to toss it to a second and then third player.
"I've also been saying since 1995 that there should be an independent time keeper, and play 35 minutes each way. If that's too long, 30 minutes is fine. If there's someone independent, it's sorted - even now, when a referee puts up six or seven minutes to add on, there's still a lot of time wasted within that.
"It doesn't matter to any referee how long you put up unless there's a game-changing goal involved. If I put up six minutes and a winner gets scored after five minutes 50 seconds, I get grief. An independent timekeeper takes that away."
The 24 potential rule changes we put forward to you, in full, were:
