In short, I argue that: (1) the offside rule should go because it runs contrary to the very nature of football, it is unjustifiably arbitrary, it no longer provides benefits to defenses or audiences, and it causes excessive and avoidable controversy; (2) penalty kicks should only be given for extremely severe fouls in the box, such as denied goal-scoring opportunities -- which would therefore no longer result in red cards -- whereas all other fouls in the box should be sanctioned by indirect free kicks.
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Against offsides
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But football has moved past the need for these strictures. The most obvious difference 90 years later is physical conditioning. The game is fast and physical in ways that were literally unimaginable to amateurs that by today's standards were poorly trained, tactically unrefined, and borderline malnourished. Now defenders can cover the box's 18 yards in under three seconds and most goalkeepers are 2 meters by 80 kilos, so the threat of the "isolated tall guy" camping by the post is not daunting. Indeed, the importance of defenses has increased in the last decades, and no successful team has been able to field a star offense while disregarding the back lines as it used to happen. This is no doubt because most improvements in both tactics and physical conditioning have been geared toward goal-scoring.
Relatedly, the offside rule forces both offenses and defenses to meet artificial constraints that they should not have to worry about. Offsides curb offensive play by introducing a kind of consideration for the opponent that is alien to the nature of the game. The philosophy of an offense is to advance the ball and to place their players in the best possible scoring position -- it is not to advance the ball and place their players while considering that certain areas of the pitch are off-limits because of some completely arbitrarily valued movements performed by the defenders. Compare the offside rule with children playing hide-and-seek. The hider jumps out when the seeker is not looking, goes for goal and touches, but he scores no points because the seeker had moved too far away from the goal. Clearly it was the seeker's responsibility to both seek and guard the goal: that is the whole point of the game! Why should it be different in football?
It is important to realize that this is not the argument that offenses are free to disregard defenders altogether: the only way to do that would be to eliminate defenses! Rather, the point is that offenses must be allowed to regard defenders only as defenders, as players along the way to goal who must procure on their own a fair chance to stop them. In other words, a defender's position should only determine his possibility to counter the attack, and nothing else; surely not whether an attacker is on- or off-side. So the offside rule deprives attackers of their playing autonomy and excessively facilitates defenders by imposing a constraint that is arbitrary and contrary to the nature of the game.
I must say something about arbitrariness, which is not the crux of my argument. Of course, all laws of the game are arbitrary in a sense. Football is non-arbitrary only if all rules are off and anything goes: kick, punch, shove, stab, ride a car, etc. For that matter, there is no such thing as a "natural" and non-arbitrary game at all, for the very concept of a game is, to some degree, constructed. I have no problem with arbitrariness itself. I have a problem with arbitrary constraints that fail to respect the (itself arbitrary) nature and spirit of the game. That is, I have a problem with arbitrary constraints that are self-contradictory.
The nature of football is, offensively, to score without unfairly hindering the ability of the opponent to stop you from scoring; and, defensively, to stop opponents from scoring without unfairly hindering their ability to score. Of course, a prohibition against "hindering" simpliciter would be self-contradictory, because trying to prevent scoring already is "hindering" by definition. Hence, the need to outline "unfair" hindering, which again happens through arbitrarily chosen limits: not too much violence, no hands, etc. It is unimportant which limits are fair or unfair and whether they are arbitrarily so, because "being offside" fails even the minimum requirement of being a hindrance, let alone an unfair one by any definition of "unfair."
When a member of the offense is offside, the defense's ability to stop him from scoring is unhindered; more precisely, it is unhindered by the offense itself, by something that the offense did. The defenders are not being held back, fouled, deceived, or anything of the sort; and surely they are not being treated illegally by any of the other 16 laws. Offside positions are but a result of the defenders choosing to be where they are while the attackers follow the nature of the game of procuring the best goal-scoring positions for themselves. Why, then, should the offense be penalized? Again, in the past the rule may have made sense because it was too easy for the offense to score, which would have been an unfair hindrance to the defense's ability to keep them from scoring. But as I've argued above, that is no longer the case.
One objection to this argument is that many defensive tactics, which are centered on the so-called "offside trap," would be rendered useless if the rule were abated. My quick response -- for the objection deserves no more -- is that it doesn't matter: let defenses reorganize accordingly, as they did in the early 1990s when back passes to the goalkeeper were outlawed. In other words, that is their problem (but I will say more about this below).
Another objection, which is similar in some ways, is that while the offside rule was designed to prevent easy scoring, over time it has indirectly affected many other aspects of the game. For example, the advent of all-court wingers (lately called "wing-backs") can be attributable to a less urgent need to cover defensive sides. However, first, wing-backs became prevalent only after the total-football revolution in the 1970s and 1980s, which is over six decades removed from the institutionalization of the offside rule. Second, wing-backs are likely to result from a more generally offensive mentality and a more pressing need to bring threats from the sides, given the decreasing popularity of pass-and-run football in favor of penetrative tactics (and, relatedly, once training regimens and the rising professionalization allowed for more offense-centered football; that is, once it became clear that the "division of labor" did not need to be quite so compartmentalized as it used to be). So I seriously doubt that the abatement of the offside rule would deprive the game of one of its more treasured tactical assets.
Yet another objection may be that wing-backs would not have risen to fame at all if offside hadn't been a factor, and that if the offside rule is removed they will be forced to be more cautious and fold back, which would result in a less spectacular, more defensive-oriented game and the loss of a major innovation. Here my reply is twofold. First, and again: so be it, and that is their problem. If they know they can no longer count on offsides, defenses will optimize their need to cover their three-quarters while also providing offensive push; in short, it would lead to just another (relatively mild) restructuring of the offense-mid-defense balance, which is not the end of the world. Second, it is extremely unlikely that the game will slow down or become duller as a result, not with so many trequartistas these days.
A little history will help here. The rise to prominence of the trequartistas (= in Italian and Spanish, "those who play in the third quarter of the pitch," between midfield and offense) is the crucial tactical innovation of the last few decades. In the mid-1990s, the traditional offensive setup of one play-maker behind either one or two strikers (think Maradona, Romario, Baggio) slowly gave way to multiple play-makers and fewer pure strikers. Ancelotti's Milan, twice UCL finalist, played Kaka, Pirlo, Seedorf, and Serginho behind the lone Shevchenko. Today's Barcelona and Real Madrid are vivid examples, for none among Ronaldo, Bale, Di Maria, Benzema, Alonso, Xavi, Messi, Iniesta, Fabregas, and Neymar is a pure striker: each team in fact plays with five trequartistas. This is but the continuation of the total-football revolution, mixing and watering down pure roles into general areas of competence with increasingly technically savvy players who can kick, run, and shove. While there is no reason to believe that this mutation will expand to the rockiest midfielders or defensive geniuses (it is difficult to imagine very successful teams without a Gerrard or De Rossi, a Puyol or a Kompany), it has surely already expanded to wing-backs. What role does Dani Alves play? Is Maicon a defender or a striker? What about Cole and Alba? And why is Lahm wherever he is at any given time? Once again, my point is simply that wing-backs are far too important and too ingrained in modern football tactics to be affected by the simple elimination of the offside rule.
Of course, an alternative to the removal of the offside rule would be to install microchips in the ball and in each player's shoes, and leave it all to the computer. However: (a) good luck with that; (b) LOL; and (c) it would only solve the excessive controversy, while leaving untouched the main problem of the useless and unfair arbitrariness of the concept of "offside."
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Against penalties
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I begin with three factual observations that, I believe, are incontrovertible. First, a penalty is a very severe sanction, one of only two that almost always results in scoring, a much higher chance of victory, or both; in this sense it is equaled, perhaps, only by red cards, which I also discuss below. Second, footballers 'fake' primarily to win penalties, no doubt in part because of the near-certainty of scoring; red cards and time-wasting account for most other instances, which have different motivations. Third, save for obstruction fouls, there is no differentiation among the kinds of fouls that warrant a penalty: a kick, a push, a handball, a headbutt, or a dangerous tackle all receive the same disciplinary action if they take place in the box.
I have little to say about the first observation and I will not debate the concept of what a penalty kick is: I'm fine with it being a solo shot from 12 yards out. The second observation is a key motivator for my argument, though by itself it is insufficient. At most, it supports a case for dissociating penalties as adequate sanctions for fouls in the box, given how easily fouls can be faked and how seldom referees detect fakes. Dissociation need not be for all fouls, either, which leads to the third observation: we need better criteria for when a foul in the box is to be punished with a penalty kick and when it is to be punished in other ways.
To propose one such criterion, it will do to go back to the basics, as I did when discussing offsides: what is the purpose of a penalty kick? Why does it exist at all? Two reasons: one, penalty kicks are supposed to restore a clear goal-scoring opportunity; two, they are supposed to deter foul play in the box, given that the spirit of the game (no unfair hindrance) is especially at risk while in the box, where antagonism is highest.
Based on these reflections, I suggest that penalty kicks only be given according to the same rationale used for showing red cards to defenders: only in case of a denied "clear goal-scoring opportunity" that happens in the box when there are no further defenders between defender and goal.
What constitutes a clear goal-scoring opportunity remains, of course, the exclusive purview of the referee. A handball on the goal line obviously qualifies; so does incapacitating a striker who is shooting on goal when there is an unobstructed line of sight between him and goal; and others yet, no doubt. This criterion would guarantee that not just any box foul can be sanctioned by the extremeness of a penalty kick, because not just any box foul does deny a goal-scoring opportunity. In fact, most do not.
When a player is kicked or pushed down at the edge of a full box, which is often the case, there are 18 more yards and a lot of defenders who can still intervene. A player who is tripped along the goal line, but far from the goal post, has virtually no chance of scoring from such a narrow angle. Most pushes and shoves are easy to resist and do not hinder goal-scoring opportunities significantly. Obviously, the knowledge that a penalty will probably not be given except in exceptional circumstances is likely to push players to fake less and to be a little more resisting to physical challenges in the box. Surely that might motivate some to procure precisely those circumstances so that a penalty may be more likely to be given... but those are worth procuring for their own sake anyway, for clearly one is then in a position of actually scoring, so that worry is unfounded.
The only major downside I see to this suggestion -- and the reason why I argue for it with less conviction -- is that it allows even more subjectivity to a refereeing system that is already the focus of infinite pressure and controversy. At least one element in the current criteria for assigning penalties admits of no discussion: if the foul is in the box, it's a penalty. While it is still debatable whether it was a foul at all, it is very rarely up for serious debate whether it happened in the box. My proposal takes away that one item of certainty and replaces it with more subjectivity: not only whether it was a foul at all, but also if it was a foul that denied a clear goal-scoring opportunity.
In partial defense of my proposal, I reiterate that this is the same kind of subjectivity that is currently expected of referees with red cards: they must evaluate whether it is a foul and, if so, whether it is serious enough to warrant a red (on many accounts of "seriousness," of which "denial of a goal-scoring opportunity" is only one: intent, brutality, danger, retaliation, etc). To the extent that referees are already used to evaluating along these lines, it is not outrageous to ask them to apply those same evaluative procedures to penalty kick decisions. Not to mention that, implicitly or otherwise, referees already take circumstances into account when deciding whether to assign a penalty: we often see a foul that would be called everywhere else on the pitch not called in the box because the referee feels that a penalty would be too severe a sanction. On my proposal, referees have more liberty than just "call it or not call it."
What happens, then, in case of fouls in the box that do not deny clear goal-scoring opportunities? I suggest that they be punished according to the old "indirect free kick" doctrine: a free kick in the box for the offense that: (1) requires two touches of the ball by two different offensive players; and (2) is defensible by the defense with a wall inside the small box, or even on the goal line. Indirect free kicks have a much lower likelihood of resulting in a score than penalty kicks, but much higher than regular play. Currently they are reserved merely for dangerous tackles and illegal obstructions, but I think that their disciplinary potential remains mostly untapped.
Thus, my proposal boils down to the fact that when a foul is given in the box, the referee must decide whether the most appropriate sanction for that specific foul is a penalty kick or an indirect free kick. Since those are already options that referees have (in the case of dangerous tackles and obstructions), my proposal would "move the line" so that many (most?) fouls in the box fall on the side of indirect free kicks and not on the side of penalties.
One final note concerning red cards. In some cases, when a penalty kick is given a red card is also shown to the defender if the foul also denied a clear goal-scoring opportunity. As many have already argued, including prominently Ian Darke, that is far too severe a sanction: one (likely) goal down and one (sure) man down is draconian and often constitutes a point of no return for the defending team. All of that for one foul, especially one that is so easy to fake? While I understand the necessity of deterrents, I understand even more the need for curbing dishonest play motivated by excessive rewards for its successful application. In modern football, that is a far more pressing concern than violent defenders.
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