8 June 5, 2022The Sunday Times
Football
The seeds of the modern game
were laid 30 years ago by a law
change, writes Ian Hawkey
Tommy Forse, the chairman of the
Welsh FA, cleared his throat to open
the meeting. Congratulations were
extended to his English counterpart,
Bert Millichip, on being knighted by a
Queen then celebrating her Ruby
Jubilee in low-key fashion. Formalities
completed, the International Football
Association Board (Ifab), the body
that makes the sport’s rules, moved
on to business and to one radical item
on its agenda.
It was 30 years ago this week that
Ifab brought into being what came to
be known as the back-pass rule, pro-
hibiting goalkeepers from handling a
pass from a team-mate — headed
passes excluded — and it did so with
zeal. It was unanimously approved.
And more. The proposals put to those
considering the amendment to Law
XII at Celtic Manor, Newport, initially
had the new rule limited to passes to
the goalkeeper from outside his or her
penalty area. Ifab, encouraged by Fifa
executives sensing a real opportunity
to reduce endemic time-wasting,
abandoned that caveat.
It braced itself for a sceptical
response, not least from goalkeepers,
whose complaints about the stripping
of their powers would be answered by
Sepp Blatter, then the secretary-gen-
eral of Fifa, in a headmasterly tone.
Goalkeepers enjoyed “a rare privi-
lege”, they were told. “It is a privilege
that should not be abused.”
Blatter then sat back to watch the
cynical final outing of the ancien
régime as the 1992 European Champi-
onship kicked off, a tournament too
imminent to have the new back-pass
rule suddenly imposed on it. In the
closing period of the final, the win-
ning team, Denmark, routinely fun-
nelled the ball to the safe hands of
Peter Schmeichel. The Danes were a
wonderful fairytale story that sum-
mer — and they had a goalkeeper unu-
sually well equipped, with his exten-
sive background in indoor football, to
master the new requirements that
goalkeepers be more adept with their
feet — but they were no naïfs. They
knew the best way of killing time.
Fast-forward to the here and now,
and it is hard to dispute Schmeichel’s
observation that no rule change in
modern sport has been as transform-
ative as the one voted in at Celtic
Manor. Ask Karim Benzema. Assum-
ing the France and Real Madrid
striker wins the Ballon d’Or this year,
he may thank Ifab for making relevant
a specific skill Benzema has per-
fected: the determined, sharp-eyed
pressuring of a goalkeeper in two
minds about how to quickly control
and recycle a pass from a team-mate.
Witness the profitable hounding of
Gianluigi Donnarumma that
launched Real’s comeback in the
round-of-16 tie against Paris Saint-
Germain on their way to winning theChampions League last weekend, one
of many in a catalogue of high-stakes
moments in which Benzema has
made talented goalkeepers look like
novices.
In its origin, the back-pass rule did
not envisage the age of the high press,
of Ederson, Alisson Becker and Man-
uel Neuer. Adventurous coaches, as
well those who governed and mar-
keted football, were simply exasper-
ated by time-wasting’s most efficient
tool. The 1990 World Cup, dull for
long periods, had created an appetite
for change within Fifa, and in the
autumn of that year, Walter Gagg, who
sat on the body’s technical commit-
tee, received a letter from an old
friend, Daniel Jeandupeux, a former
coach of the Switzerland national
team then working with Caen in the
French top flight.
The letter had been typed out on a
Mac computer, still deemed a thing of
wonder 30 years ago, but what made
Jeandupeux truly seem ahead of his
time, quite the Billy Beane of his
sport, was that he applied detailed
data analytics to several of Caen’s
matches. The statistics in games in
which his side or the opposition took
an early lead depressed him.
He noted that, against Auxerre,
their goalkeeper, robotically receiving
passes from defenders, passing it
from hand to foot and back again to a
team-mate, had held possession for
almost half the time Auxerre had the
ball. The letter and the research were
appreciated. But Jeandupeux’s rec-
ommendation was tamer than the
rule approved 18 months later.
Its guinea pigs were the teenagers
of the 1991 Under-17 World Cup in
Italy. The big launch would be at theOlympic football tournament at Bar-
celona 1992, where the goalkeepers,
mostly in their early twenties,
regarded this radical change with
apprehension. “We weren’t used to it
and were unsure about it forming
such a part of our lives,” recalled Santi
Cañizares, who was in the winning
Spain squad and went on to a distin-
guished international career, admired
for his agility with hands and feet.
It is tempting to imagine that the
lead creative midfielder in that SpainOlympic team, one Pep Guardiola,
took detailed notes on his first experi-
ence of football under the back-pass
rule and gleefully imagined a future in
which such players as Neuer, Ederson
and even Claudio Bravo would be the
ideal new prototype of a goalkeeper.
There were jarring moments at
first. Francesco Antonioli appeared to
have forgotten his Law XII briefing in
the opening Italy match at those
Games, handling a back-pass and con-
ceding a free kick from which Joe-Max
Moore scored for the United States.
The next month, the inaugural Pre-
mier League began to acknowledge
that the new rule would become one
of the best gifts it inherited. Within
eight minutes of Leeds United’s open-
ing fixture against Wimbledon,
Leeds’s Lee Chapman pounced on the
defender Roger Joseph’s apparent
indecision about whether to risk a
pass to his goalkeeper to put his side
1-0 up. At the other end, John Lukic
was penalised for picking up a pass
from Chris Whyte.
The team who would be the Pre-
mier League’s first champions, mean-
while, offered instant proof that they
had a goalkeeper unafraid to trust his
feet. Schmeichel provided the assist
for Manchester United’s first goal of
that season. As Schmeichel would
reflect in his autobiography, One,
“because of rule changes, goalkeep-
ing has undergone more evolution
than any other role. The toolbox you
need to do the job has become enor-
mous. You have to be an outfield
player too, which means reading the
play, deciding which passes to make
and executing those, and to have feet
good enough to manipulate the ball
under the pressure of high-pressing.”2003-04
2004-05
2005-06
2006-07
2007-08
2008-09
2009-10
2010-11
2011-12
2012-13
2013-14
2014-15
2015-16
2016-17
2017-18
2018-19
2019-20
2020-21
2021-2242%
44%
43%
44%
43%
45%
43%
46%
51%
52%
51%
51%
51%
54%
54%
58%
61%
65%
66%HOW GOALKEEPERS GOT
BETTER AT PASSINGPassing success of PL goalkeepers (%)THE BACK-PASS REVOLUTION