Say what you like, but he’s still Arsène Wenger. We know the company he keeps at Fifa these days, and it’s depressing, but he’s still forgotten more about the game of football than most will ever know.
So it is Wenger that wishes to reacquaint football with the essence of offside. Its point. Its basic fairness. Offside isn’t about toenails, shirt sleeves, armpits or any single part of the human body. It’s about the whole man — and daylight. Clear and obvious daylight. It’s not about measurements that couldn’t possibly have been envisaged in 1866. Offside rules were written with reference to what could be seen with the naked eye, in real time. That is the spirit of the law. Everything else is a modern construct that is increasingly ruining the game.
• Wenger to press ahead with radical ‘daylight’ offside rule
We can’t uninvent VAR, but we can modify its influence. We can’t turn the clock back, but we can make our present more accepting of our past, of why the laws were set down and what was intended at the time. Offside was clarified in 1866 and, when it was, the precise detail of the infringement was plain. A player was offside. Not a bit of him. Not a digit, even a limb. The man. And as John Logie Baird did not demonstrate the invention known as a television for another 60 years we can presume this man was going to be clearly visible and nobody would be guessing or drawing lines, even in their head.
Here’s Rule 6, from the time: “When a player has kicked the ball, any one of the same side who is nearer to the opponents’ goal-line is out of play and may not touch the ball himself nor in any way whatever prevent any other player from doing so until the ball has been played, unless there are at least three of his opponents between him and their own goal …”
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And the reason Rule 6 was so important was that another big change arrived in the same year: the forward pass. Until then, football was like rugby, backwards only. When Charles W Alcock became the first player to be caught offside in a match between the Football Association and Sheffield on March 31, 1866, it made the news.
And offside has evolved. In 1873, it was decided a player was offside when the ball was received; in 1880 players could not longer be offside from goalkicks, or from corners in 1881, and throw-ins from 1921. Players could no longer be offside in their own half from 1907 — we think Ange Postecoglou plays a high line — and the first real grey area appeared in 1920 with the phrase “interfering with play”. Three opponents became two in 1925, and Newcastle United get the credit for developing the first offside trap. The next big change was in 1990 when level became onside, courtesy of the Scottish FA, and then 13 years later the International FA Board (Ifab) came up with Frankenstein’s forward and began breaking footballers into body parts, and we’ve been heading downhill ever since.
“Consideration should be given to the position of the attacker’s feet and body in respect to that of the second-last defender …” is where it all starts to go wrong, modified two years later to “… football is played with the head, body and feet. If these are nearer the opponents’ goal line, there is a potential advantage. There is no advantage to be gained if only the arms are in advance of the opponent …”
This is what turned offside calls into MRI scans and has sent every fan, in every stadium, into spasms of impatient anguish when a goal is scored. Can I celebrate? Is it a goal? What are they seeing at Stockley Park? Imagine how confident we could all be again if offside returned to something visible? That is what Wenger is proposing: clarity for all. Advantage to the attacking team, power to the people.
He is not alone in seeing this advancement. Graeme Souness, several years ago, advocated changing offside priorities so that if any part of the forward player was onside, he was legal. Wenger’s daylight interpretation is pretty much that. Obviously it needs certain caveats. Arms don’t count. A player cannot turn side-on and leave a trailing arm behind and seek even greater advantage. The law would already be weighted in favour of the forward without offering an extra yard. And VAR still has its role, but serves the swiftest assessment, a matter of seconds, if referees don’t complicate it.
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“This will be terrible for the game as teams will defend completely differently,” Jamie Carragher wrote on social media. “Lots of low blocks and teams being negative. How would you defend a set piece? We don’t need more advantage for the attacker, the game is seeing more goals scored than ever.”
And no one wants football becoming basketball, with every forward incursion a success, but is that really what will happen? Football has absorbed some pretty dramatic changes over the years — the alteration to the back-pass rule being a huge one — and coaches adapted too. Yes, a short-term fix may be to switch the high press for the low block, but then the smartest minds will develop other plans.
As for repelling set pieces, maybe defenders will have to go back to old-fashioned defending, rather than grappling opponents to the ground. As always, the best thinkers will survive and good teams won’t suddenly be losing 5-0 every week, no more than outlawing goalkeepers picking up a back-pass in 1992 derailed the career of Paolo Maldini, who was great before it and great after too.
Wenger’s biggest obstacle comes from the usual forces of reaction. There have been trials in Sweden, Italy and the Netherlands with positive results, but Ifab is likely to want a repeat in better, senior leagues as well. Luis Figo, the head of Uefa’s football board, is not an advocate and, just as lawyers like nothing more than legal argument, so referees appear to enjoy those lovely grey areas in which they can all wade and professionally opine. Where’s the fun in a call a press-ganged dad, running the line at a Sunday morning under-12s game could adequately make?
Yet over a century of precedent and common sense is on Wenger’s side. If he makes it sound simple, that’s because it is. “There is room to change the rule, and not say that if a part of a player’s nose is offside, then he is offside, because he can score with the nose,” Wenger explained. And there will be cynics who think he’s only saying that because he’s got a big nose. But he’s got an even bigger brain.
West Ham could have been relying on selling Paquetá – clubs should be protected from unforeseeable scandals
Spot-fixing is match-fixing. That is the problem if Lucas Paquetá is found guilty. He’s not Ivan Toney or even Sandro Tonali. He didn’t have a punt on a football match, which is still considered a serious offence. He didn’t even have a punt using inside information about form and fitness issues at his club, which is worse. Nor did Paquetá actually fix the winner of any match — the gravest gambling crime of all — but he stands accused of fixing outcomes within it. Punishments in this area are potentially career-ending. Paquetá is 26 and a starting player for Brazil.
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It would be a brave call for the FA’s ban to be measured across years, and would probably need Fifa backing and end up at the Court of Arbitration for Sport, but it is certainly not unthinkable. Precedents suggest spot-fixing attracts exemplary punishment.
Yet where does this leave West Ham United, specifically in terms of profit and sustainability? It must be an increasing concern, given punishments for breaching financial rules are also draconian.
Everton lost a player to an unforeseeable scandal. That player was bought for significant money — in the ball park of Paqueta’s cost to West Ham — and his sale could have been key to complying with financial regulations. But he was written off and this random calamity was not taken into account when Everton’s numbers were picked over and found wanting.
Will it be the same if Paquetá is guilty? There was talk of an £85 million move to Manchester City, placed on hold pending the FA investigation. Now that investigation has produced charges. West Ham could have finances reliant on that sale. If Paquetá is banned for many seasons, and his contract simply expires, they will write off a record signing. And there is nothing to govern this? Nothing to be factored into any calculations? Shouldn’t there be? An equivalent of the catch-all “act of God” clause — or must clubs now base their finances on absorbing a write-off of assets in circumstances that could not possibly be foreseen?
Why stop at one? What if your star player is part of a ring? Should clubs have to make their sums add up in the event of half the first-team squad being banned for ten years? What happened with Everton should have sounded an alarm. It didn’t, because everyone thinks it can’t happen to them.
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Atalanta win shows why they are worthy of spot in the elite
It is little more than four years since Andrea Agnelli, then president of Juventus, denied the right of Atalanta to compete in the Champions League. A lot has changed since then. Agnelli tried to form a breakaway Super League, was thwarted and later resigned his position at Juventus amid financial scandal. As for Atalanta, they qualified for the Champions League three seasons straight from 2019-20 to 2021-22, and will be back again next season, having won the Europa League. Juventus last won a European trophy in 1996.
With respect to the incredible achievement of Bayer Leverkusen this season, ending Bayern Munich’s reign of terror in Germany, Atalanta were not just deserving winners in Dublin, they were the people’s champions too.
Shortly before Agnelli gave his speech about the worthlessness of sporting meritocracy at the Financial Times Business of Football Summit in 2020, Atalanta played the first leg of their Champions League knockout tie with Valencia, winning 4-1. It has gone down in history as one of the most significant Covid superspreader events. Celebrating what was then Atalanta’s greatest victory, coach Gian Piero Gasparini joked that his employers could at least have given him a glass of champagne, not fizzy water. It was pointed out that this was champagne. Within weeks the town of Bergamo, where Atalanta play, was in the grip of an epidemic so grave that hospitals, morgues and cemeteries ran out of space. Atalanta’s success, that Agnelli so begrudged, came at a terrible price.
His argument at the time was that Atalanta were enjoying a little moment and should not be able to access the Champions League when a bigger, more historic, club such as Roma could not. That Atalanta were a better team than Roma back then — and in all but one of the seasons subsequently — did not matter. The elite should be protected from their own mediocrity. Yet Atalanta were not unworthy. “Why can’t Atalanta grow to be a more admirable force in Italian football than Roma have been for decades?” I wrote at the time. “They just need the chance.”
Fortunately, they got it. Without meritocracy, sport is nothing. There are not too many first-time winners of European tournaments, these days — in the Europa League, Villarreal were the last to do it in 2021, Shakhtar Donetsk in 2009 before that — so Atalanta’s triumph should be heartily celebrated. Particularly when some would not have them there at all.
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Government regulator is making threats even before project gets started
Well, that didn’t take long. Football’s government regulator wasn’t even off the ground – delayed until after the general election, as it stands – when its jumped-up interim chief Martyn Henderson began throwing his weight around.
Speaking at a conference hosted by the equally preening Fair Game pressure group — whose last brilliant idea was to kick Aston Villa out of the Champions League if eighth-placed Manchester United won the FA Cup — Henderson issued what was nothing short of a threat. He put the cost of a government regulator at £10million a year, mostly paid by the Premier League, and said if clubs challenged its rulings incurring further costs, that would be covered by an additional levy on football. In other words, if the regulator has your finances wrong, disputing this will cost you.
And others, of course, because we all know who ends up paying. “If we find the resources we’d planned weren’t sufficient, it’ll be for the regulator to raise those through a levy on the industry,” Henderson said. “So it’s not a cost that’s coming on the taxpayer, apart from those people who might be paying for tickets to go to matches. So that’s not my biggest concern, honestly.”
And that’s what you asked for at the famous fan-led review, wasn’t it? Dearer tickets. And for your club to eat dirt courtesy of puffed-up government mandarins like Henderson.
As for costs, in Whitehall, spirals come guaranteed. “We have a team of two dozen now,” Henderson added. “We are looking at 50 by the end of the financial year, and assume we will get to 100 at the end.” One hundred? There’s only 92 clubs. That’s some man-marking system.
Yet, like every government project, this will include teams of spin doctors and policy wonks and any number of other unnecessary civil servants, propping up Henderson and his cohorts as they go about their business of running football as badly as every other regulated industry. Still, we all know who wanted it; so at least you’ll know who to blame.
FA will face new masters
Back in January, Stuart Andrew, the sports minister, said he would be holding the FA to account over its failure to ban transgender women from the female game. Guess what? Nothing happened. The FA decided to wait this lot out. Now, Lucy Frazer, the culture secretary, has repeated the empty threat.
Wherever one stands on the issue, the idea of more political grandstanding from a government with all the long-term prospects of Abraham Lincoln picking his tickets up at the box office, is quite laughable. Frazer’s going. They’re all going. This government has failed even to meet the deadline for a football regulator, given a review process promised in the 2019 manifesto. The FA will discover what football’s new masters want after July 4. Not long to go now.
Premier League silence over Ashworth is wrong
Where is the Premier League in the conflict between Newcastle United and Manchester United over Dan Ashworth? Why aren’t they investigating? It seems pretty clear that there is a case to answer.
There is an email chain that suggests Omar Berrada — who is on gardening leave from Manchester City and should not be working at all — approached Ashworth on behalf of Manchester United last February. If so, that’s a tap, which is illegal, and also a breach of Berrada’s City terms. Yet, from the Premier League, nothing. No complaint has been made is the official explanation, but why should it require one?
That leaves the League open to rich clubs paying hush money to smaller rivals, which is what Manchester United may end up doing. Surely it would be preferable for the League to act independently, conducting an investigation into Manchester United’s behaviour, with the potential for sanctions, whether Newcastle are happy with their settlement or not? This suggests Manchester United, or any big club, can make just about any problem go away by writing a cheque. It’s not healthy.
