Changing the Beautiful Game?

Being from Canada, we’re always tinkering with our sports. Heck, check out what
we did to hockey last fall.

I’ve always been under the impression that football (meaning soccer) was a
gift from God, unchanged since it alighted on the Earth. That is until I read
this
Guardian article, which reviews the historical changes to the sport, and
suggests some radical rule changes. The rule changes are:

Video review: "Ah, splutter the luddites: wouldn’t technology slow the
game down? Perhaps, but not by much. The ball is only in play for 60-odd minutes,
and double-checking contentious decisions – a goal-line clearance, penalty
or offside appeal – would add seconds not minutes."

Clearly this writer hasn’t watched enough North American sports. I’m in favour
of using view reviews to make the right call, but the decisions rarely take
seconds. They can, on occasion, take 8 or 10 minutes. If you introduced this
rule, you’d also have to introduce a clock stoppage policy.

Penalty boxes (or, uh, ‘sin bins’): "The almighty gap between a yellow
and red card actually makes it rational for defenders to body-check, scythe
and take out opponents in promising positions, picking up a professional yellow,
because conceding a goal is far worse. That can’t be right. The possibility
of 20 minutes in the sin bin – with a yellow card chucked in – for cynical
fouls would change a player’s incentives and, ergo, their behaviour too."

I don’t watch much rugby, so I don’t understand the amount of impact this penalization
has on a large team. In hockey, a powerplay results in a goal roughly 1 in 5
times. Mind you, in hockey, one team has 80% as many skaters as the other. In
football, it’d be 90% as many, uh, out-players.

Bigger goals: "After all, the average man stood at just 5ft 2in tall
in the latter part of the 19th century when goalpost sizes were laid down
in law – while the average Premiership keeper is now 6ft 3in. At the very
least you could test it at semi-professional level, with perhaps a minor adjustment
to move the posts six inches higher and a yard wider."

This seems like too simplistic a change, and will do nothing to address the
turgid play and professional fakery.