Speaking of offsides, the same thing haspened last night in a brazilian game between flamengo and fluminese. Two flumineselayers were in an offside position when another player took a shot. The ball hit a flamemgo player and bounced to one of the offside fluminese players who put the ball in the goal. After much VAR and the ref looking at the monitor, it was ruled a no goal. This happened in the first 6 minutes so the game went downhill from there.
That's just crazy talk. As a former soccer hater/not understander I have come to love soccer more than any other sport and the offside rule is brilliant. Yes, it certainly could use a little tweaking but it's still the best rule in sport if you ask me.
Without the offside law the game becomes a totally different beast. It would lead to less goals, in my opinion, and a lot more negative play. It would eliminate the incentive to push a defensive line forward/get involved in the attack and cause the midfield to be nothing but a tennis net as long balls would be flying from one end to the other. Imagine if hockey didn't have the blue line and icing. The game needs those rules to give incentive/reward (or at least not punish) creative open flowing play
The blue line/iceing is another rule you can get rid of but at least its consistently applied across the NHL and you dont need VAR to tell if the player is offsides or not. The first time the blue line/iceing rule was explained to me it was clear how it was applied and why. The soccer offside rule? FIFA is still trying to get it right.
A little tweaking? Something needs a little tweaking if its working. The offside rule needs to be scraped.
Just to point something out, the NHL removed the 2 line rule in 2006(ish) to increase "excitement", I am not sure how effective it was in making a higher scoring game.
they literally have video review/challenges in the NHL for offside the fundamentals, or at least spirit of offside in soccer is pretty easy to understand. The law is to prevent the offensive team from gaining an unfair advantage of having a player just hang out near the goal. The application, as is typically the case in many laws, gets hairy. I will defend the offside law in soccer from a necessary standpoint all day long. It's a work of art to find a balance in it, but I fear the sport has made it too complicated for its actual purposes.
Which is stupid. The offside rule is easy to understand but because a game was lost due to a blown offside call, we now have video replay on offside calls which slows down the game and makes things more complicated. Video review on goals, that makes sense but for offsides, idiotic. The next thing will be offsides for line changes and warm ups. Soccer needs to get rid of the offsides rule, if not permanently at least for one season to see what happens. I believe that the game will vastly improve and there will be more scoring and an end to 0-0 snoozefests. Maybe im wrong and there will be some unforeseen consequences that will make everyone realize why the offsides rule has to stay but until one of the national leagues tries it out, we will never know.
How does removing the ability for the defense to make the "available" playing area for the opposing team smaller improve the offensive side of the game? I really don't see how removing that law creates more open play/more scoring. Teams will sit back, kick the ball from one end to the other, and look to just play San Jose bash brothers in front of the goal. ******** all of that
Maybe, maybe not. I think that the midfield will really open up and it will be off to the races for forwards against the defense. Either the defense will play man to man or a zone defense. Either way, teams will adapt and i doubt we will see bunkerball. San jose bash brothers? Maybe, but until the rule is changed, we will never know. Hopefully in my lifetime, one of the major leagues will show some balls and prove me wrong.
if the offside rule is taken out I think we would see one or two offensive players hang out near the goal which would force defensive players to hang out near them and soon we would have no midfield play just boom ball hoping for a lucky strike. Not the kind of soccer I want to watch.
Whaddya think of this - do away with the time clock? Keep playing until there's no one left standing, and whatever the score is, that's the final. If we can do away with restraints on doping/PEDs, etc., that would make this even more fun - like the old six-day bike races, when athletes in their prime would just have their hearts explode because they were so wired for so long. Maybe some sort of penalty to the losers would be cool, too. Like when the Mayans used to kill the whole losing team. Let's keep this discussion going, because I think we can come up with some real good ideas the league will want to consider. Hey, I know - pro/rel in the MLS! That'd work, wouldn't it?
Or we could change the offside rule to something like the blue line rule in hockey, i.e., offsides as we currently have until the ball crosses the blue line and then no offsides. Indoor soccer sometimes does this or just eliminates offsides altogether. Either way, nobody understands the offsides rule, not the refs, not the players and not the fans. Soccer is becoming more and more like the NFL where everything that can be reviewed will be reviewed thereby slowing down the game and causing more and more controversy. We have a good example of that this game, one goal allowed with a player in an offsides position and one goal disallowed due to a player in an offsides position. I cant see any difference between the two situations except that one team was from LA and one team wasnt.
I’m enjoying the offsides debate. Both sides of the argument are making valid points. What stands out are two things: 1) everyone agrees that the application of the rule is a problem. 2) no one really knows what the outcome of eliminating the rule would be. Because of that I actually would like to see it tested somehow. Has the rule always been part of the game or was it put into place at a later time? And if later, why was it done?
I guess you have to watch Jimmy Kimmel to know who Guillermo is and why him being at a soccer game is news.
I'd be really curious to see a blue line rule in soccer. Not sure if it would be better or worse, but having to have the ball cross that line before any offensive player would be interesting. It'd be really cut and dry like hockey, and not need any kind of subjectivity like offsides has. It's something that could potentially work. It'd likely have to be about 30-35 yards out. I know it will never happen, but it's interesting to think about.
Here's a good piece on when the NASL (the 70s-80s version) did institute a blue line, at the 35-yard mark.
Here's something new, a review of the usage of VAR from MLS games, done by the referee's association. Useful context from our game is that Seba's goal was ruled offside on the field, so VAR was used to confirm that call, not to rule it out. There's some interesting audio here:
Interesting. So some league did try to implement a blue line rule and it did sort of do what the proponents intended, increase scoring. Unfortunately FIFA stuck their nose in it and shut it down just a bit too soon.
Bullshit. No difference between the LAFC and the RSL goal. The ball deflected off an opposing player and went to Bofo. Ive seen that kind play many times and the goals were never called back. PRO is just tryimg to CYA on a blown call.
Actually the two goals were not alike at all in the context of the PRO explanation given in that clip. They ruled that Kreilach kicked the ball into Attuesta and it defected to Bofo. Which is correct. Per the rules that deflection does not count as a defender playing the ball. They further stated that if Attuesta had reached the ball first, then Bofo would not have been offsides. However, in LA’s goal Toia clearly played the ball. I’m ok with PRO’s explanation within the framework they built for the clip. The clip was produced to show how VAR was properly used, and it was on that play. I’m still not ok with them ignoring the “active’ aspect of LA’s offsides. That would be an example of VAR improperly used.