Caught in 4K: How would football’s rules be different if they were designed with cameras in mind?
By Noah Eliot
This tweet from Michael Goodman piqued my interest. It could be because Video Assistant Referees (VAR) have laid bare the substantial grey area that exists within many of football’s rules. Some on which are remnants of the games origins in British schools. Association football was created as a distraction for unruly boys in English boarding schools in the 1860s. The game’s audience has grown beyond schoolteachers at their wits end, but the audience is now frustrated for very different reasons. High-definition cameras and super slow motion allow a global audience to pick apart the controversies of the modern game. Which makes it interesting to consider how the game’s design may have been fundamentally different if its future popularity and technological scrutiny were understood in its infancy.
To me one thing that could fundamentally change is the offside rule. It makes sense that if any part of a player’s body that could legally produce a goal were beyond the last defender they would be offside. In a time without high-speed cameras and replay angles, a snap judgement by a referee or linesmen/women would necessitate a weak test that is easier to assess. In the chaos of a football match it would be easier to see if one player were clearly ahead of the other, than say to see if their last foot were still onside. However, in the age of VAR, the original rule has increasingly meant that goals are chalked off due to minute transgressions. Thus, when it comes to offsides VAR has clearly led to less not more goals in a sport that is already low scoring. This is largely due to overpowered camera quality being used to assess a rule that is a low bar for transgression. But what if that powerful technology could be used under a rule that is more conducive to legal goals?
With greater technology it may make sense to change the offside rule to be if a player’s last foot were planted onside, they would be considered to be onside. This largely imitates the offside rule in ice hockey, where your last skate must be on or before the blue line when the puck cross that line. Now in hockey the blue line has been extended as a vertical plane, like the goal line in most sports, such that a players last skate can be onside if it is on the line even if lifted in the air. This was done to address courted controversy with hockey’s offside rule when it introduced video review, as the previous understanding of the rule led to too many disallowed goals via review. I would argue that in football the player should be expected to have their foot on the ground only because it would prevent odd movements to hang a leg onside or sprint onside too easily. However, in football I do not think this could be valuable way to address issues with VAR as this altered offside rule would flip the impetus to be more in favour of legal goals than the current rule.
This is because it would remove the focus on fractional offsides and instead focus on the possibility of players being fractionally onside. Now instead of a player’s toe being offside via still pictures, they could be onside by the slimmest of margins. Thus, turning a weak test for offside goals into one for onside goals. It can be argued if this would be to punitive towards defending teams, but in a low scoring game the enforcement of the offside rule under VAR can be seen as overly punitive of attackers. Overall, we would be changing the rules to harness the powerful cameras we now have to see marginal onsides in a way that was not previously possible. We would still eliminate egregious offsides where the player’s whole body is offside. While also simplifying what is considered an onside goal for video assistant Referees. This is one way to use technology to increase goal scoring and clear up the grey area in rules that were not made with current technological capabilities in mind. However, it is only one such option, I would be curious to see if there are any other ideas that come to mind when considering how football rules would be defined if cameras were known about from the start.
