The World Cup approaches, very strictly structured and tightly organised on the pitch – yet certain to provoke controversy when decisions in matches are seen as unfair.  When football began – with spontaneous kicking of a pig’s bladder, there were no rules.  Well, maybe a few – first remove the pig, for example.  Then we had the crucial game-defining concept of two teams facing each other, aiming for the goals at each end. Then probably limits on acceptable levels of violence.  The structure of the game emerged through a process of improvisation in response to the need for a better, clearer, fairer game.

What happens if you improvise a game of football today.  You get jumpers for goalposts and agreed-yet-arbitrary boundaries.  And because players now have a good sense anyway of the ‘rules’ of football, the game flows without the need for a referee.  The biggest difference in games I’ve experienced is between refereed games and unreferreed games – which is about the process of applying the rules.  In park games, when teams apply the rules themselves, I experience a lot of  which ‘fairness’ and ‘natural justice’ and very little disputing of the decisions that we all see so often in refereed matches.  Of course there can still be the occasional dispute, settled by a ‘who has the biggest dad’ method of arbitration.

My enjoyment of top games is often spoiled when unfairness in application of the rules changes the course of a match.  A goal is wrongly disallowed.  A player is sent off undeservedly.  I also dislike players constantly debating the referee’s decisions – which are never subsequently changed.  If the authorities wanted referees to have rugby-like acceptance of decisions, they could impose this quite easily by increasing (and actually applying) punishments for any protests lasting longer than say a 10-second period of acceptable frustration.

Better still would be to reduce pressure on referees in order to increase the fairness of the running of a game.  Have less riding on each decision.  For example, a sin-bin should replace yellow cards (utterly useless to the current opposition, which is bizarre, considering the cards are awarded only after a significant breach of the rules, which is just the moment at which I’d want a bigger benefit in compensation) and sendings-off for the whole of the rest of the game (red cards).  Instead of being as pivotal as such decisions are currently, sin-binning for perhaps 10 or 20 minutes would give a reasonable advantage to the offended team.

This kind of improvisational approach to the rules would return the game closer to its fluent roots, improving it for players, officials and frustrated spectators.

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