My idea posted in the other thread, have three VAR officials independent from each other and not allowed to discuss with each other. Show the offside in real time parallel (and slow motion, maybe freeze frame), don’t draw lines, just let them watch it. Then they vote off or on. Majority vote wins.
New Offside Rule Proposed
- Thread starter esmufc07
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In the latest episode of the United Hour Podcast, Nik @Rood and Imran @Annihilate Now! start with the good news by celebrating Manchester United Women's emphatic FA Cup win over Spurs at Wembley and the future of manager Marc Skinner.
Then it's the bad news and the ever worsening form of our Men with losses to Arsenal and Palace.
Finally the main debate - ETH Out now or keep him until the end of the season - if not longer. Are you Team Nik or Team Imran?
From what I've seen everytime a new offside rule is implemented to favour attackers, coaches worldwide just add another body to the increasing pile of defenders sitting back in front of their own goal.
In this particular case the new rule would favour sprinters and would harm teams that defend in a high line. Therefore those teams would drop deeper, effectively ending with the sprinters advantage and resulting in more posession based football, with overpopulated penalty areas, less transitions in midfield and -in my opinion- duller matches.
I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with today's offside rule. The game has become faster and therefore matches can be (and are) decided by razor-thin close calls, like yesterday. Therefore I like the implementation of VAR, even when it could and should be better used, faster and more accurate. Changes should be focused in making the intepretation easier for officials, therefore making them less reliant on VAR which can be too expensive to implement in lower leagues.
In this particular case the new rule would favour sprinters and would harm teams that defend in a high line. Therefore those teams would drop deeper, effectively ending with the sprinters advantage and resulting in more posession based football, with overpopulated penalty areas, less transitions in midfield and -in my opinion- duller matches.
I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with today's offside rule. The game has become faster and therefore matches can be (and are) decided by razor-thin close calls, like yesterday. Therefore I like the implementation of VAR, even when it could and should be better used, faster and more accurate. Changes should be focused in making the intepretation easier for officials, therefore making them less reliant on VAR which can be too expensive to implement in lower leagues.
We're a couple of years away from full 3D rendering + contact sensor in the ball (the way it was during the world cup) so VAR, at least for offsides, will soon be almost instant and automatic.
Your argument about lower leagues stands though, it's expensive equipements.
This wouldn't be a bad solution, except no slowmotion for me. The slowmotion is a big part of the problem with VAR, both with offsides, penalties and red card incidents. Football was never supposed to be refereed in slowmotion.
My easy fix, don't use VAR for offsides.
Totally. Rangers’ disallowed goal yesterday was a good example of the distorting effect of slow motion, where a ball winning tackle that looks fine in real time then becomes debatable after a series of slow motion replays and freeze frames.
If you can’t see an offence in real time, then it’s too irrelevant for me to be considered. When a ref analyses an incident in slow motion, rather than real time, it distorts the intent of an action that took place in real time. It introduces time and phases that didn’t actually exist in the decision-making process of the player. It also introduces an inconsistency between how the game was refereed for decades - in real time - and how it has now been judged in the last five years. It’s completely broken the handball rule and is having soul-destroying impacts on the flow of the game.
What problem does that solve though? You'll get at least as many if not more people complaining about decisions, especially in cases where the vote isn't unanimous.
We can only dream. Linesmen seem almost utterly redundant at the moment.
But it really is silly how when a VAR check is reviewing whether a player was offside or not, the question of whether the attacker has gained an unfair advantage by starting early has disappeared and it’s simply both sets of fans praying that the 1cm difference is in their favour. We all know there’s no advantages in those centimetres but VAR has resulted in the logic of the offside rule being redefined.
Not a single person prior to VAR thought half a boot ahead of the last defender was anything other than a perfectly timed run. We need to return back to those times and have offside rule intended to prevent players gaining an advantage and not to rule out perfectly good goals.
If any part of an attacking player's torso is in line/overlaps with any part of the last defender's torso, regardless as to whose legs, shoulder, head (etc) is ahead of whose - it should be onside.
If any part of an attacking player's torso is in line/overlaps with any part of the last defender's torso, regardless as to whose legs, shoulder, head (etc) is ahead of whose - it should be onside.
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I know it's very old man shouts at clouds but the old rule (before active and passive players) at least was binary, if it is what is valued.
I know you can't really ask refs to ignore offside positions on reviews but I think it should not be a sanctioned reason to go to video by itself.
IIRC originally the idea was to adjudicate matters in the box, penaltys and goal line crossing. Wasn't a fan either but I do see the rationale.
Goal line crossings are a great use of technology, they’re instant and they’re 100% accurate. I’m with you regarding the rest, which is no more than a new layer of bureaucracy to contentious decisions. Now not only do we disagree with the final call (the post-VAR ruling), but also the unwillingness of the VAR room to call the ref to the screen—see discussion of potential penalty on Højlund and many others.
I don’t really get it. We are finally at a decent point about offside rule. It doesn’t need any more rejigging. The decision is more factual that it has ever been.
Ah, my old brain mixed it up, I mistakenly remember VAR being used at one point for goal line stuff pending refinement of GLT (which so long as it is reliable and automated I don't have anything against... Though interestingly robot umps in baseball work for calling pitches but the consensus seems to be going at keeping the human ones and giving challenges to teams to request it on calls they want to contest).
Yeah I think VAR predictably just shifted the debate about refereeing instead of reducing the number of controversies all while disrupting the pace.
Maybe a few years from now we'll roll back to a narrower set of uses for VAR.
Then make it have to be unanimous. I think it’d eliminate those offsides where someone is off by a toe length. Garnacho shouldn’t have been given offside yesterday, and I’m not just saying that because we were negatively affected. I’ve said this since VAR was introduced. This whole system of drawing lines just to try and figure out if a player is 2 millimetres in front or not is ridiculous, and even using this method it’s open to interpretation when you consider camera resolutions and whichever frame the VAR footage is paused at. And even with all this fancy VAR tech, it still looks like they got it wrong. If an attacker is close enough in-line with the last defender he should be given the advantage. If three VAR linesmen separately agree he’s not obviously offside in a real time replay, that would be hard to disagree with (assuming a rule change to clarify you can’t be offside by the length of a pube anymore). Perhaps could be used in conjunction with the Wenger’s idea. Whatever they do, it’s got to change cause it’s ruining the game in my opinion.
Yeah good point, what do they actually do these days. Throw-in’s and….that’s it I guess.
Maybe they would be better used being repositioned behind the goal to observe the penalty box.
Personally I'd rather it was judged by placement of your feet and none of the body. Attackers getting punished for an armpit leaning forward when making a run in behind is depressing to watch.
Chucking cheeky elbows at yappy Scottish full-backs?
He'd have been offside defo then but that's the best way to do It
But it went against us so there must be a rule change. How about the offside rule doesn't apply to substitutes?
We’re not “at a decent point” with it though, not even close. It’s terrible, it’s inaccurate, and it affects games and the enjoyment of games negatively. It’s a corruption of the original intention of the offside rule, which was a way to prevent goal hanging, it was never about precision measurement over someone’s toe being in front of the last defender by an almost imperceptible amount.
So what's the line then? If he's offside by 3 inches, let it go? What if it looks like it could be 3 or 4? Let that go? What about 4 or 5?
At some point, there'll be a 50-50 call regardless of how the rule is and some people will be annoyed. People have moaned about offside for decades (when their team loses).
I think the argument is that people moaned back then too but at least the game wasn't stopped for a minute. There's something a little devious that officiating went from a direct, real time assessment to something conforming much more to the football representation shaped by broadcasters.
I mentioned baseball elsewhere and there's very detailed ref assessment sheets about pitch judging. I wonder if FIFA, UEFA or a national one ran studies on the accuracy of linemen for offsides when double checked by cameras.
The non-VAR proposition back then was to maybe have more refs (one ref per end for the boxes and/or 4 linemen) though it would have created issues for lower leagues probably just to find enough personnel.
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You're probably right about the time issue. I do wonder if it might be better to just get the decisions done quickly and tell fans to deal with whatever happens.
I did hate that experiment where they had two extra officials next to each goal. They never called anything.
Yeah I think the box refs were for goal line crossing (no tech yet, at least none installed in any capacity) and supposedly pens and traffic on corners ? I get the idea & some sport (like American football) do just multiply the number of refs but like you I don't remember it making a huge impact though from memory the sample was fairly small as they discontinued it quickly.
Ask the Arsenal fans if the offside rule affected their enjoyment on the weekend and they’ll tell you it was the very reason they celebrated so hard after the game. It’s just that the decision was crushing for us but it was a fair one. Rules have to be objective and if you are offside by an inch, you are still offside. I am okay with that.