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The great thing about football is that its rules have survived unchanged for over a century now.  If your great-great-grandfather was transported from the terraces of an early-1900’s football match to one of today’s Premier League grounds, while he would be taken aback by his surroundings, he would find comfort in the familiar action on the pitch.

Well, no, not really.

Football fans of that time were still reeling from such recent innovations as the referee’s whistle, goal nets, penalty kicks and two-handed throw-ins.  Confronted with modern-day football, your ancestor would be scratching his head about so many things, including:

• An unrecognizable offside law - down from three opponents in-front of the attacker, to one in-front and one level (unless they’re not interfering with play, or passive in the second phase,  or what-have-you).  The 1925 reduction from three players to two lead to a deluge of goals, followed by calls from purists for the change to be swiftly reversed.
• Shirts with names…and numbers for that matter.  Numbers were introduced in 1933, and in their first iteration, one team wore 1-11 and their opponents had 12-22.  No word on the confusion that reigned the next week, when presumably two sets of higher numbers faced off somewhere.  Numbers were finally made compulsory in 1939.
• Substitutes, which were first introduced in 1965…but only in the case of medical necessity.  This coming season will see the introduction of any-three-from-seven in the Premier League.
• The brandishing of red and yellow cards, which didn’t arrive until the late-60’s.  Driven by confusion between players and officials with no common language during the World Cup, former referee Ken Aston was inspired by the traffic lights on London’s Kensington High Street.
• References to “winning the three points” and a “relegation six-pointer” would have thrown the old fella, unless he cottened on to the 1981 rule inflating the award for a victory.
• Goalkeepers refusing to pick up backpasses.  The backpass law was introduced in 1992 - before that, defenders and keepers could play keep-ball indefinitely.

Another innovation, trialled in the Football League and Premiership in 2000, was a rule that instructed refs to march the position of a free-kick forward 10 yards in the event of dissent, including kicking the ball away, not retreating 10 yards and breaking from the wall prematurely.  It was hailed as a huge success, and then promptly killed by a FIFA committee.

All of this rule bending, tweaking and rewriting - including those of time and space to get the Old Man into a Premier League ground - just goes to show that the Laws of the Game are fluid entities.  They evolve from year to year, decade to decade.  And change is often resisted - I clearly remember that the backpass rule was not favorably anticipated, which seems ludicrous today.

So as I suggest a few tweaks to the Laws in an upcoming sequence of blog posts - Rethinking The Game - please suspend that initial instinct to dismiss them out of hand.  Who knows - maybe one day they’ll be familiar as white footballs (not permitted until 1951!)

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