Furious fans accuse IFAB of 'killing the sport' with 'baffling' blue cards plan

Fury erupted today over plans to introduce blue cards to football, with fans, players and managers raging that the 'baffling plan' for 10-minute sin bins would 'kill the game' and cause even more damage to its entertainment value than VAR.

Arsenal legend Paul Merson said the proposal would create the 'most boring football ever', while one manager openly admitted that his side would simply 'retreat and waste time' until his side returned to having 11 players.

Fans blasted lawmakers at the International Football Association Board in Switzerland, which is set to announce today how it will trial the new measure, and accused 'rich' bureaucrats of 'stealing our beautiful game'.

Under a plan modelled on rugby, players will be shown a blue card and sin-binned for 10 minutes if they are guilty of committing a cynical foul, or if they show dissent towards the referee.

But former Chief of Referees Keith Hackett said this would simply 'accommodate weak refereeing' - pointing out that these offences can already been punished with a yellow card.

An avalanche of criticism met the prospect of blue cards in the English game today, with former England international Paul Merson arguing they would only worsen the current crisis of timewasting.

He told Sky News: 'They're trying to copy rugby, they are very good at it, they've been working on it for a long time.

'But their sin bin is massive, you're talking seven to ten points, the game opens up - it's very rare you are not going to get majorly punished. In football, you just sit ten behind the ball and the game will be killed.

'The ball will go out and they'll jog and get it, they'll waste time.

'Then someone else will be sin-binned and everybody will be looking at the scoreboard going: 'Tom is coming back on in four, so and so is back in three, what will be then? Then we will be 10 vs 10.'

Chris Sutton, another former England international, mocked football's lawmakers in a sarcastic post on X.

'Well done IFAB for complicating the game even more and prioritising a blue card over the outdated head injury protocol which doesn't put players first,' he wrote.

Tottenham boss Ange Postecoglou, Everton's Sean Dyche, and Crystal Palace's Roy Hodgson are among the Premier League managers to have all previously voiced their opposition to blue cards.

And England boss Gareth Southgate also seemed to place himself in the 'no' camp, telling Sky News: 'I would have said the game has worked quite well for a long time.

'I know we always have to modernise but I'd have to really understand how this was going to work before I could give a really strong view.

'If discipline's bad you send players off! That's quite simple really.'

Hugo Langton, Assistant Manager at Aldershot Town, candidly admitted what many football managers will be thinking - that their side would respond by a player being sin-binned by slowing down the game.

'If a player gets sin-binned and we're down to 10 men we're going to retreat, kill the game and waste time,' he told BBC Five Live.

'You'll know full well that the time is going to be added on at the end of the game when we have 11 players back on the pitch.'

Lisa, a Derby County season ticket holder, added: 'Referees struggling with red cards and yellow cards - throwing a blue card into the equation will slow the game down and upset the flow of the game.

'I understand it works well in rugby but then VAR seems to work well in rugby. I don't think there's any need to confuse referees more than they already are. It will disrupt the game even more than VAR already has.'

Speaking on GB News, Hackett, former referees' boss Keith Hackett criticised current match officials.

He said: 'It seems to me what we are trying to do is accommodating weak refereeing because the laws already allow the referee to caution players for dissent and already caution for that cynical challenge.

'So, for me, I think they're right to experiment with it and I think it will have a positive impact.

'But at the end of the day we have to take into account that fans are not going to be seeing one or two players for a period in the game and therefore this is not just a player punishment, it's a team punishment, so it should act as a good deterrent.'

The blue cards proposal provides further irritation to fans who are already furious about the botched rollout of VAR, with Premier League chief Tony Scholes admitting yesterday the technology still needs fixing five years on since it was first introduced.

Blue cards have been used this season during a sin bin trial in grassroots football in Wales, with the colour chosen to differentiate it clearly from a yellow or red card.

During the initial trial phase, top-level competitions including the Premier League will not be involved.

The introduction of sin bins and blue cards, should it reach the top level, would be one of the biggest developments in discipline in the game's history, following on from the introduction of red and yellow cards at the 1970 World Cup in Mexico.