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Date: 8th April 2025
There has been a bit of a debate in the last week about whether football is boring or not. Sparked by Gary Neville’s comments after the Manchester derby (which he subsequently apologised for), it led to a day of fans calling up TalkSport to describe why they agree, or not, with Neville. However, he’s not wrong: far too much football IS boring. The creeping Americanisation of the statistical side of the game, with Xg, touches in the opposition box, etc. misses the point entirely. Football became the most popular game in the world for a number of reasons. Firstly, it’s simple to play. Secondly, the basic Laws are (fairly) easy to understand and are (or rather were, until VAR came along, creating a two-tier game) universally applied. And arguably most importantly, those first two reasons created the third, namely that football is entertaining and exciting to watch. Or rather it used to be.
In my view, there are a number of men responsible for this. The likes of Pep Guardiola, Arsene Wenger and Pierluigi Collina and a number of faceless idiots at IFAB have combined to create a modern game that, while it can still be exciting at times, is, not infrequently, boring in the extreme. The ball is passed round the back, wingers recycle the ball and don’t try to take on a defender, midfielders constantly look backwards and don’t take risks. None of this is remotely entertaining. People will always tend to say, “it was better in my day,” but in this case they are right. Watching a full-back being beaten by a winger (Jimmy Johnstone, Willie Henderson, Peter Weir, Willie Ormond for those of you old enough to remember the Hibs’ Famous Five’s left winger, etc.) is one of the most exciting things in the game, yet now it’s as rare as a Bald Ibis.
There is nothing exciting about watching your defenders pass the ball slowly back and forth; nothing exciting about the ball being passed from the wing, back inside, then back outside, ad nauseam. The time it takes to get the ball up the field to the areas of the pitch where a goal might be scored, means that modern, super-fit teams have two banks of players defending their goal almost all the time. It is to quote a fan who sits near me at McDiarmid Park, “boring as ****.”
IFAB are, in many ways, the biggest culprits. Constant tinkering with the laws has made football a terrible watch at times. You can make a cup of coffee and take the dog for a walk in the time it takes some teams to progress from a goal kick to the half-way line. The changes to the handball law mean that players, fans and, arguably, referees, simply don’t know what’s happening. To illustrate, the diagram here, taken from IFAB’s guide to the Laws from a few years ago, shows part of the problem. Having changed the Law on handball, they then realised it wasn’t working, so they amended it (all those bits scored out) and have subsequently amended this part of the Laws regularly to try to make it satisfactory to everyone. As a result, hardly anyone knows what it is. We read that players don’t need to force their arms behind their backs in the penalty box to prevent the ball hitting them and a penalty being given. Yet they still do it. What was a penalty a few years ago no longer is; what was previously a booking is now a red card. The action of kicking through the ball is now penalised if it results in the follow-through inadvertently hitting an opponent, as we saw with the ludicrous decision to send off Motherwell’s Kofi Balmer in the match against Kilmarnock last Saturday (5th April) – a decision made by a VAR re-refereeing the game.
VAR, handball and penalties are bad enough, but in my opinion the most disastrous change to the Laws has been the removal of the requirement for a goal kick to clear the lines of the penalty area before the ball is in play. This has allowed master tacticians like Guardiola to get their players to pass the ball out from the back. Other teams try this and end up giving away a goal, but most fans don’t notice because they have fallen asleep, waiting to be excited by seeing their team attacking and trying to score a goal. Perhaps IFAB should have that last sentence pinned to their computers… fans go to games to get excited by seeing their team scoring goals. That’s entertainment. Passing the ball slowly back and forward, advancing incrementally up the pitch is not entertainment.
To be fair, Pep is a master tactician, but he has the distinct advantage of having many of the world’s best players in his team. I think he’d struggle to get most Scottish Premiership teams to pass the ball out from the back as successfully as Manchester City do. Instead, teams without the quality of player that is available to only the richest clubs have followed the fashion (for that’s all it is) of trying to build play up from the back, leading to ridiculous situations such as the fact that St Johnstone had more possession than Hibernian in their recent 3-0 defeat at Easter Road, in a game that most Saints’ fans will tell you was one of their worst performances of the season – as revealed by another statistic, namely that the Perth side had only one shot on goal, and that wasn’t even on target.
There are 17 Laws of the Game. Yet IFAB’s 2024-25 document on the Laws runs to 230 pages! All good referees say there is one more, unwritten Law; Law 18 being “use your common sense” – something the VAR at the Kilmarnock vs Motherwell match lamentably failed to do in my view (and, since this article was first written, the red card has been rescinded). Actions like this, plus linesmen keeping their flags down when an offside decision is stark-staringly obvious (as was the case with Adama Sidebeh for St Johnstone vs Celtic last Sunday), lead to understandable accusations that games are being re-refereed. None of this helps referees. The actions by referees and their Assistants are increasingly breaking up the flow of the game, but it’s not their fault as they are simply trying to implement the latest iteration of the Laws from the people who know best at IFAB – people who, I suspect, haven’t paid to watch a game for years and whose acquaintance with the average fan is via a spreadsheet rather than close proximity in the stands. Do they never stop and ponder what fans will think about their latest attempt to ‘improve’ football? I do wonder if they have any clue about what the fans think. As far as I can tell, fans across the world mostly hate VAR and would like to get rid of it, yet there is no chance of us being listened to by the men at IFAB who think they know best. The best games are those where you are entertained by attacking football and you can’t remember who the ref was because there was no controversy or five-minute waits for a VAR check. Is that too much to ask?
Alastair Blair, Director of Operations, SFSA
Posted in: Latest News
Tags: Scottish football