Everyone, in lazy idleness, allows their mind to drift. You might start thinking about what a cat’s face might look like on the body of an elephant or if we had arms where our legs should be and legs for arms. The mind just wanders into strange territory.
As FIFA’s Technical Director, perhaps Marco van Basten is just letting his brain meander from his position that requires him to “make recommendations to improve the requirements and regulations of” football, but his divergent thoughts are broadcast to a global audience. Let’s hope that every idea he’s submitted of late is simply in jest, just the absurd thought experiments of a demented FIFA bureaucrat.
Van Basten, while a legendary player in his day, appears to be trying to invent a new sport rather than improve the current form of football.
Van Basten’s football revolution, which he says is in an effort “to help the game, to let the game develop in a good way”, includes abolishing the offside rule, introducing the hockey-style penalty shootouts that were used in the early days of MLS, restricting players to 60 games a year, introducing orange cards (an intermediary between yellow and red cards that would send players to a penalty box for 10 minutes) and shoving everyone on the planet so far up his own a** that we can see things from his point of view.
Marco van Basten's radical plan for the future of football
If you think he is bonkers
If you would like to see these changes pic.twitter.com/bpkw2B2B10— Soccer AM (@SoccerAM) January 20, 2017
Alright, I made that last one up. As Rennes manager Christian Gourcuff so elegantly stated, “This is the worst crap I have read in a long time and yet I did not read it wrong. It’s immeasurable bulls***.”
Of all the proposed rule changes, the thought of taking away the offside rule, so fundamental to everything in the game, has grated the strongest.
Here’s Van Basten: “I think it can be very interesting watching a game without offside. Football now is already looking a lot like handball with nine or ten defenders in front of the goal. It’s difficult for the opposition to score a goal as it’s very difficult creating something in the small pieces of space they give you. So if you play without offside you get more possibilities to score a goal.”
Here’s Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp: “My opinion is this wonderful game that we all love doesn’t need rule changes…They try to squeeze everything out of it but I don’t think they care about the future of football. (Van Basten) can create another game. There is enough pitches around the world.”
Arsene Wenger, Slaven Bilic, Mauricio Pochettino and everyone on the planet has voiced their displeasure with the suggestions, but such vehement opposition has never stopped FIFA before.
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