A sports radio show I used to be involved in had an occasional feature called ‘Sepp Blatter’s guide to ruining football’. In it, we’d trundle down a local pub of a Saturday lunch time to ask the simple football watching folk what they thought of Sepp’s latest idea, and then gauge their reaction. Sometimes we used real ideas (‘women footballers should wear tighter shorts’), sometimes we made stuff up (‘only medically certified dwarves and midgets will be allowed to play in goal to up the scoring rate’). To be honest, the lines became a little blurred at times - most people presumed these were all things that Blatter had actually said, and most people thought it was a complete waste of everyone’s fucking time (the idea, that is, not the feature itself, although I can see how you’d confuse the two).

Anyway, for once Sepp - or ‘that crazy eyed bastard who pops up alongside beautiful women at every Fifa event’, as he is frequently known - has come up with something that everyone hasn’t immediately dismissed out of hand, which is a rarity I’m sure you’ll agree. He’s been in conversations with Leandro Negre, president of the International Hockey Federation, about how the sport gradually got rid of the offside rule. And apparently, he’s thinking about it for football. Bizarrely, in my mind, this has actually led to some sort of a debate.

Let’s get one thing straight from the start - the offside law is dodgy as hell, for a number of reasons. The primary one of these is the sheer inability of any human being with eyes that point in the same direction to watch a pass being played and simultaneously see the line of players directly in front of him. There is always, always, always going to be a split second between the linesman observing the pass and looking down the line, and that in itself accounts for a number of tight decisions going the wrong way. Then we come to this ‘inactive’ malarkey, which although I understand the argument for is both subjective in its implementation and inherently unfair on the defending side. A shot comes in and sails past a striker who was offside but standing in the middle of the six yard box - he didn’t touch the ball, but is masking the shot from the keeper ‘interfering with play’? Your interpretation might be different from mine. And why is a poor right back who is slow to react but MILES away from where the play is occurring always deemed as active even if the attacker who’s played in is on the other side of the pitch? Being able to be offside in the centre circle doesn’t seem quite right either, and there are other assorted niggles which one might want to pick up on too (personally, I’m not keen on the slightly authoritarian action the linesman has to perform to signal offside, but I feel that’s nit picking).

So yes, there are problems. And yes, there might be innovative solutions - some leagues have trialled scenarios where you’re only offside past the 18 yard line for instance. And yes, I can see the idealistic argument in abolishing the law - defences would have to fall back further, there’s be more space in the midfield for pretty passing patterns and individual skills. So shall we just go for it? Well, no. Here’s why the idea has no merit - the crucial difference with hockey (aside from the big fucking sticks, obviously) is that passes above a certain height are deemed illegal. Similarly, balls hit at absolutely tremendous speeds having been thwacked down the line are much more difficult to control. So the focus of play remains on short to medium passes to players in space - the only difference being that without an offside law, there is greater space for the players to find, meaning the game gets stretched and the scoring rate goes up. Everyone’s a winner. But in football, that simply doesn’t apply. If a player takes up some free space behind the defence and there’s no offside, you don’t have to demonstrate much skill in finding them with an incisive pass - you just have to lump it over the top. And if you’ve got John Carew up front then he doesn’t even need to be in space - the opposition can’t manoeuvre him away from the goal via any method, so just keep hitting it up to him again and again and one of them’s bound to go in. Yes there would be more goals, yes there would be more space for the midfield, but the optimal approach for teams - particularly those with less intrinsic footballing skills - would be to hit it long and hope for the best. I also have a theory (only a theory mind) that the game would effectively become 8 outfield players v 8, with at least one specialist goal hanger and someone to mark them. I mean if you can be as close to the goal as you like then it would be stupid not to put someone there, if only for rebounds etc etc. By extension, you’d be stupid not to put someone on them to try and prevent this. These players would stay almost exclusively in the penalty area, and who knows how that would affect the game.

It may come to pass, it may not. But surely, SURELY if we’re thinking about improvements to football, there’s a pretty massive box marked video technology which Fifa should have a look in first before abolishing fundamental laws of the game.

I’m pretty sure I’m contractually obliged to put a wry remark about Pippo Inzaghi somewhere in here, but I’ll leave that for you to do yourself.