Goalkeepers who waste time by holding on to the ball are to be penalised with the award of a corner, the law-making International Football Association Board (Ifab) has confirmed.
The new law, which will be rolled out across the game this summer, will mean goalkeepers have eight seconds to claim and redistribute the ball before they are penalised, with the referee giving the keeper a five-second countdown to warn them of incoming punishment. This will replace the current system whereby a keeper has six seconds to move the ball on, and is punished with an indirect free-kick if they do not.
“Goalkeepers holding on to the ball for too long have been a bane of many people’s lives for quite some time, so some action has been taken,” said Patrick Nelson the chief executive of the Irish FA, who chaired Ifab’s AGM in Belfast on Saturday. “The results of the trials have been very, very positive, so we’re going to move forward and put that into the laws of the game as soon as possible.”
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Ifab is to implement the change following trials at more than 400 matches, including in the academy competition Premier League 2, amid a sense that the previous law was not being properly enforced. Officials see the change as potentially revolutionary, as it will be the first time an infringement in live play will be punished by something other than a free-kick or penalty.
David Elleray, the former Premier League referee and now Ifab’s technical director, cited Brighton’s victory at Manchester United last season as an example; whereas the United keeper held on to the ball for an average of 4.8sec, the Brighton goalkeeper’s average was 14.8sec.
“Good law changes are where you have a very strong deterrent which everybody implements and then the problem effectively disappears,” he said. “If it speeds up the game, if it’s more positive, it means that it could be one of those very effective deterrents.”
A new approach to time wasting was just one of several incremental but potentially transformative developments that were announced. Another is confirmation that trials of a new approach to offside are to continue, with the possibility that the law ends up finding an attacking player onside if any part of their torso is in line with a defending player.
Currently a player is offside if any body part that can legally score a goal is in advance of a defender. Current trials, championed by Fifa’s chief of global development, Arsène Wenger, are flipping that approach and finding attackers onside if any part of their body is in line with a defender. But moving the line back, to where the player’s torso is in line, is gaining favour among law-makers, with the rationale that not only would it be a more balanced cut off point, but that the torso is easier to capture using tracking software, potentially allowing for quicker decisions.
A further incoming change is a rule to allow referees to wear body cameras in Fifa competitions. Already successfully trialled at grassroots level in England, with the aim of pushing back against player abuse of officials, the system will now be tried at the Club World Cup this summer. Here the expectation is that the technology can aid not only referees but television viewers, with footage set to be used as part of coverage to provide new angles on in-game incidents.
“The body cam for referees is to be tested at at the Club World Cup in order to provide additional footage, which can then also increase the quality of the production and be of interest,” said Mattias Grafström, the secretary general of Fifa. “Maybe it’s more in the replays where we will provide it. But we certainly feel this adds something to the TV viewer experience.”
