Cav's Place

Back in 2023, I was saying that football should learn from how handball handles playing time. And I still fully stand by that statement and think that it’s the proper way to do it. But I must admit that the rule changes meant to reduce time wasting implemented at this World Cup are working out really well, clearly increasing the actual playing time while reducing the amount of added time… At least so far, since players may start to find loopholes, and some have already done so, but the improvement is massive when the ball has to get back in play quickly, substitutions can no longer drag on and, I’d say most notably, players need a very good reason to request medical assistance, seeing as they’ll need to stay out of play for a while after doing so. I’d still favor the idea of play not being stopped for substitutions, which would really force players to run out, but the impact and the “mechanics” of substitutions in football may make that difficult, at least at the moment.
And then there are also the changes to increase the power of VAR, adding more things that can be reviewed, and the improved systems are making the checks much, much faster as well, all of these being absolute positives, with no caveats, so my only problem with VAR remains the very fact that limits do exist and it’s not a “challenge” system, where the coach and/or possibly the team captain have a certain number of “challenges”, which when brought up will require the referee to watch the replays of whatever moment generated the challenged decision and only get used up if proven wrong. Admittedly, there have been experiments with this, but there were still limits and those experiments don’t seem to have been continued.
The one unpleasant new rule are the “hydration breaks” that are, very clearly, ad breaks introduced primarily for the benefit, and probably at the pressure, of American TV stations which are used to such a system for sports and unwilling to deal with long stretches of time without ad breaks, the existing rule that stated that cooling breaks had to be permitted during each half when the temperature was truly high being enough if hydration was the actual purpose. And the fact that these breaks are also used by the teams as technical time-outs makes the new rules that state that other moments of stoppage time can’t be used in such a manner seem weird. But what I see as a huge missed opportunity is the fact that time isn’t actually stopped during these breaks, which therefore result in a “default” three minutes of added time for each half, any actual added time being added on top of that. I mean, those are obvious breaks and if there was a moment to introduce the concept of actually stopping time in football, they were the perfect opportunity. And time should obviously also be stopped during VAR checks or when the medical team is on the field, so it won’t still fall on the referee to take those moments into account and lead to questions about the amount of added time, especially when teams need it… Like it was in this morning’s Algeria – Austria match. Then again, I for one have serious questions about that match, despite the apparently dramatic ending. But that’s an entirely different matter.
Getting back to the point of this post, there are some questionable elements and there is still room for improvement in case of the rest, but these changes actually seem to go in the right direction for once and actually work out really well in practice, so I’m hoping to see them implemented as general rules of the sport as soon as possible, preferably from the start of the 2026-2027 season. This doesn’t mean that FIFA isn’t still rotten to the core, of course, and that can be seen in so many ways, but in case of these particular elements, they’re getting it right and I have to recognize the fact.