Football leaders are finally paying heed to The Mail on Sunday’s campaign to end ‘armpit offsides’, but there is still no clear consensus on the way ahead.
The game’s lawmakers, the International Football Association Board (IFAB), will consider the furore caused by VAR ruling players offside by a few centimetres at a meeting in Northern Ireland later this month.
And last week Premier League refs’ chief Mike Riley briefed clubs on the possibility of using a thicker 10cm line for offsides to allow for a margin of error on tight decisions.
The chorus of disapproval over marginal offsides from pundits including Gary Lineker, Alan Shearer and Danny Murphy escalated after The Mail on Sunday demonstrated in August that the margin of error is often 15-20cm, which makes a nonsense of saying a player is 3cm offside. In extreme cases, the margin of error can be up to 38cm.
Our story came a week after the season’s first armpit offside; Gabriel Jesus’s goal for Manchester City against West Ham was ruled out because Raheem Sterling was adjudged to be 2.4cm offside. But the margin of error, taking into account the speed at which Sterling was sprinting, was 13cm.
Premier League clubs then expressed their discontent and asked Riley for solutions. So far this season 25 goals have been ruled offside by VAR. Riley told clubs that with a 10cm line nine of those 25 goals — including Jesus’s — would have been given. He did the same presentation with a 15cm-wide line, showing that 10 goals would have been allowed, and a 20cm line, which would have seen 11 of the 25 goals awarded.
But the Premier League cannot move unless IFAB deem their solution viable. There is growing pressure for a rethink; UEFA do not sit on IFAB but will lobby hard to end armpit offsides. UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin has said: ‘If you have a long nose now, you can be in an offside position.’
UEFA allow their video referees a degree of leeway in Champions League matches and they will only overturn an obvious offside.
IFAB general secretary Lukas Brud appeared to be coming around to this view in December when he said: ‘If you spend multiple minutes trying to identify whether it is offside or not, then it’s not clear and obvious and the original decision should stand.
'In theory, 1mm offside is offside, but if a decision is taken that a player is not offside and the VAR is trying to identify through looking at five, six, seven, 10, 12 cameras whether or not it was offside, then the original decision should stand.’
Initially, the guidance from FIFA was that VAR was only meant to intervene for ‘clear and obvious’ errors. But it was deemed that offside decisions were definitive, rather than matters of opinion.
The Mail on Sunday’s story showed, however, that VAR cameras’ speed of 50 frames per seconds means a sprinting player can cover more than 13cm between frames. So VAR can only be approximately accurate.
There have been calls for the offside law to change so that if any part of the body is onside, the player is onside. But the easiest change for IFAB to make this month would be to decree that offsides should only be overruled when there is a clear and obvious error.
That would follow The Mail on Sunday’s VAR manifesto, published in November, when we made the case for a ‘linesman’s call’ rule: when a player is onside or offside by 15cm or less, VAR must stick with the assistant referee’s decision.
Critics have been quick to dismiss the idea of a thicker 10cm line. Lineker tweeted: ‘This can’t be serious: 10cm leeway. Who works out if it’s nine, 10 or 11cm?...If it’s not obvious, then it’s level and onside.’
It could even make for more controversy. For David McGoldrick’s disallowed goal for Sheffield United against Spurs in November, John Lundstram’s boot was in an offside position.
Because Lundstram was not running fast, we can be almost certain that he was offside, even if only by a matter of centimetres. But with 10cm of leeway, he would have been deemed onside.
Mail on Sunday expert and former referee Chris Foy said: ‘People go to games to see goals. So if a degree of tolerance was introduced for offsides, then naturally we would see more goals. At the minute, all the suggestions are hypothetical. Nothing has been decided and nothing will change this season but maybe IFAB can find a way to modify the system but keep the integrity of the offside law.’
Whatever happens at the IFAB meeting on February 29, there can be no rule change mid-season. But come the summer, we may have seen the last of the armpit offside.