We’ve poked fun at Blatter’s incompetence, his skeevy old guy and perhaps alluded to (alleged) rampant corruption within the FIFA hierarchy, but it may finally be time to arm the masses with water balloons, shaving cream and big inflatable bats to take the FIFA compound.

After a discussion with hockey – they still play that? – officials, Sepp has gone deep into meditation to ponder scrapping football’s offside rule.


“He asked me a lot of questions about it and how successful it was, although he never offered an opinion, so it was difficult to judge what football might do,” said Leandro Negre, president of the International Hockey Federation. “But he did seem very interested in how we had implemented it.”

Were this to be anyone but Sepp Blatter, it’d be cautiously reported as curiosity tinged with mere possibility. Because it is Sepp Blatter, a man whose MO is to scour the globe for the most idiotic idea possible then run with it, there’s flying speculation football is blueprinting for a non-offside future. Which then means we’ll need to change our name to The Offside (RIP), The Onside Is The New Offside, or simply @#$% You, Sepp Blatter.

According to Wikipedia, this wouldn’t be the first attempt at a league abolishing the offside, however:


Throughout the 1987–88 season, the GM Vauxhall Conference was used to test an experimental rule change, whereby no attacker could be offside directly from a free-kick. This change was not deemed a success, as the attacking team could pack the penalty area for any free-kick (or even have several players stand in front of the opposition goalkeeper), and the rule change was not introduced at a higher level.

Problems? No!

Of course the entire thing is riddled with problems – paramount among them having Pippo Inzaghi, a man with little athletic ability to speak of, suddenly becoming the greatest player in the history of the sport (and don’t think he wouldn’t take legal action to retroactively recoup those offside goals, in the process becoming the first man to score 5,000). We simply can’t have this. In fact it’d turn the game into utter chaos at every level. A much smaller ice rink with skates is not quite the same thing as the open spaces of a football pitch, for starters. They’d also have to abolish the red card and the three sub maximum – can you imagine what would happen when another team goes down to ten men? The game would effectively, unless the ten men had Barca-esque possession capabilities, be over.

There’s been a colossal problem with football for years now, one they have every possibility to change, and yet they ignore the gaping hole in the wall to ‘cure’ a smudge on the window with a sledgehammer. Sounds about right for Sepp’s FIFA.

March 2, 2010