The surprising rule change that could make football a whole lot more interesting | Football | Sport

Who remembers when football used to be fun? Watching the so-called beautiful game nowadays is akin to getting teeth pulled out. Not by a dentist, but instead by a bloke down the pub, who is using a set of power tools for the equipment. Oh, and he’s got a blindfold on as well.

If it isn’t the long throws, it’s the NFL scrimmage at corners. If time isn’t being wasted by players at set-pieces, it’s players going down “injured”, or the goalkeeper feeling an imaginary niggle so the manager can relay a piece of tactical advice midway through the match.

Watching football has become a chore, and that needs to change.

It used to be that football was the simplest pastime. Two halves of 45 minutes, no enforced stoppages, and a continuous stream of action. It was tennis, cricket, and rugby that were lambasted by some for their laborious stop-start nature. How the mighty sporting tables have turned.

But maybe the solution to fixing the sport lies with one of those games that were previously considered stodgy, compared to the free-flowing nature of football. What if it’s time football swallowed its pride and took a leaf out of rugby’s book?

Now, that’s a sentence that will likely make any self-respecting football fan jolt, and understandably so. Rugby has always been the prim and proper cousin to football, with the two cultures having been at odds since the sports were codified in the 1800s.

Yet, rugby appears to have solved the puzzle of ensuring even the most drab affair can still include plenty of drama and entertainment. And that’s through bonus points.

But what’s stopping football from doing something similar? It would probably need a workaround to fit within football’s parameters. For example, the concept of a losing bonus point (an extra point if the loss is within seven points) wouldn’t work in any capacity. The margins in football are far too tight.

But an extra point scored if a team nets over four goals in a single game? Sign us up. Just think about how much this would shift the dynamic and encourage teams to take the handbrake off.

Picture this – it’s 2-0 at half-time to a team chasing the title during a pressurised run-in. Does the manager stick or twist? Go for the jugular in an attempt to snag the extra point, or settle for the three on offer for the standard win?

You certainly wouldn’t be seeing goalkeepers pretending to be injured or two-minute-long set-piece routines if this were the case.