We take it youve all seen Gerard Piques latest cough to Save Football. If not, apologies for we are on to stir you from that wonderful knowledge.
In a perhaps unimprovable summary of the legitimately unhinged worldview that might loosely come under the umbrella term Modern Football, the Barcelona and Spain legend lamented :
It cant be that you go to a football stadium, spend 100, 200 or 300 and the match ends 0-0.
Something needs to change. One plan to acquire would be that if the match ends 0-0, the team did report zero details.
Its brilliant, in its way. He is therefore, but close to getting it at the start it. But nearby. But while there may appear to be another, afraid we recommend simpler, way to stop people having to pay 300 to enjoy a game that may stop 0-0, Pique has with laser-like misguided accuracy identified the real culprit in this equation: the 0-0 draw.
Now the problem here isnt that Piques solution is laughable, mental, entirely unworkable and involves ripping out a foundational building block of what football is and how it functions as a sport on the off-chance it makes tourists slightly happier. Its not even the second day hes done it.
If something, his position has in fact softened because hes earlier suggested revamping draws entirely, look.
Maybe there are no draws, why not? In football and baseball there are no draws. You go to a sport and it ends with a draw and the feeling is, Who won?
Football is afraid of change. It has a great history, it is very standard, but change does happen, it has to occur. A 90-minute activity that you complete 0-0 is difficult to understand for the innovative technology.
We can all stay around and get the openings in his logic. We can all question whether soccer really needs another huge rug-pulling law change that tilts the game in favour of the biggest leagues and the casual admirer.
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We may ask what, if anything, is in place to stop teams simply allowing each other to score a goal after 85 minutes, or what happens in cup competitions. Does the 0-0 keep its place in the game there, as some quaint relic of a lost era?
We can ask why football, the worlds most popular sport, needs to take cues from less popular sports in order to become more popular.
But thats not the issue, not really. The issue is that we have to make these points at all. Because while Piques Plan is obviously ludicrous and his claim that the occasional 0-0 puts people off the entire sport with its lack of entertainment at best projection and at worst an attempt to promote his own Kings League footytainment business, it comes from a Football Person.
And because this very stupid idea has come from a Football Person we all have to treat it with respect and argue our case about why maybe we dont need to destroy the entire fabric of football as its existed for generations in case that is a bit off-putting for a hypothetical young American we all desperately need to get on board for some reason.
If those exact same quotes and exact same reasoning had come from the mouth not of Pique but, say, Todd Boehly, the conversation would be very different, wouldnt it? They wouldnt be enthusiastically embraced as a radical idea that could transform the game for good. They would, rightly, be laughed out of town as the latest bumgravy mindfart of a man who just Doesnt Get It.
We know this to be true, because Boehly has also recently been talking bollocks, as is customary. Having grudgingly and unhappily accepted that relegation is one of those quirky European ideas like healthcare that hes just not going to be able to Yank-brain out of the game, hes come up with a new idea where teams get Premier League stock for every year they are in the Premier League and keep it even when they go down.
Its a fine solution to the problem of the yawning chasm that now exists between the Premier League and the Championship, as long as your view of that problem is that the chasm isnt quite yawning enough, and that youd like to make it much bigger if possible while also plunging yet greater number of clubs into the current Leeds/Sheffield United/Leicester/Burnley purgatory of too good for the Championship, not good enough for the Premier League.
But we dont have to worry with Todd, do we? Nobody is treating his daft ideas as anything other than a daft idea. Hes not a Football Person and never will be.
Pique is more dangerous. Hes not quite as dangerous as Arsene Wenger. Luckily for us all, Piques own toddler-like attention span that cannot stomach a 0-0 draw means he cannot stomach the boredom of an official role with any actual football lawmaking organisation.
With Wenger were not so lucky. Hes right in there trying to actually make his non-solution to the problem of VAR offsides reality.
Its perhaps interesting that Pique and Wenger have both come up with plans that fall down for differing reasons but ultimately in the same way. They both dont so much ignore unintended consequences as deny the very possibility of their existence. They both see their solutions as a silver bullet that is inserted into football and changes only the issue they wish to solve while the rest of the game carries on exactly as before.
With Wenger that means a still-maddening refusal for this intelligent man to understand that his solution that if any part of a striker is onside then he is onside absolutely clears up every single tight offside decision in the game as it is played nowit instead creates a whole new raft of tight offside decisions elsewhere. And does this while also tilting the game so far in the favour of attackers that even Ange Postecoglou would be forced to adopt a low block to counter it.
You almost certainly wouldnt get more goals under Wengers relaxed offside law, you would almost certainly get less. Teams would adapt to the new reality. They wouldnt just keep playing the game as if the old rules were still in place.
So too with Pique. There is no thought here for what wider implications there might be for effectively scrapping something so fundamental as the 0-0 draw. The obvious example is the sharing of late goals both the fact teams absolutely could collude to turn any 85-minute 0-0 into 1-1 and arguably even more importantly the fact that any time it happens even naturally football fans on the internet will cry foul.
Now youve got people not knowing whether the sport they just watched is even actually real. Ask athletics or pro cycling how that works out for you.
Or how by taking away even the slim prospect of a 0-0 you give small teams even less reason to try and compete against the bigger teams. One likely consequence of Piques plan is fewer 0-0 draws for sure, but also fewer competitive games full stop. Hows that holding the dwindling attention span of the next generation?
A lot of Football People have terrible ideas to Save Football. They have almost certainly at the very least not thought them all the way through, have failed to truly consider any knock-on effects beyond the singular focus on Perceived Problem and Half-Baked Solution.
When a Football Person has a Bad Idea, it is as stupid to think the Football Person is the important bit as it is to think the 0-0 draw is the problematic element of spending 300 to watch a 0-0 draw.
