Gerard Pique and Arsene Wenger have batsh*t ideas to shame Todd Boehly

We take it you’ve all seen Gerard Pique’s latest wheeze to Save Football. If not, apologies for we are about to shake you from that blessed ignorance.

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 can’t be that you go to a football stadium, spend €100, €200 or €300 and the match ends 0-0.

“Something needs to change. One proposal to consider would be that if the match ends 0-0, the teams would score zero points.”

It’s brilliant, in its way. He is so, so close to getting it at the start there. So close. But while there would appear to be another, dare we suggest simpler, way to stop people having to pay €300 to watch a game that might end 0-0, Pique has with laser-like misdirected precision identified the real culprit in this equation: the 0-0 draw.

Now the problem here isn’t that Pique’s 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. It’s not even the first time he’s done it.

If anything, his stance has in fact softened because he’s previously suggested scrapping draws altogether, look.

“Maybe there are no draws, why not? In baseball and basketball there are no draws. You go to a game and it ends with a draw and the feeling is, “Who won?”

“Football is afraid of change. It has a huge history, it is very traditional, but change will happen, it has to happen. A 90-minute game that can finish 0-0 is difficult to understand for the new generation.”

We can all sit here and pick the holes in his reasoning. We can all ask whether football really needs another monumental rug-pulling rule change that tilts the game in favour of the biggest clubs and the casual supporter.

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We can ask what, if anything, is in place to stop teams just 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 world’s most popular sport, needs to take cues from less popular sports in order to become more popular.

But that’s not the issue, not really. The issue is that we have to make these points at all. Because while Pique’s 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 don’t need to destroy the entire fabric of football as it’s 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, wouldn’t it? They wouldn’t 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 Doesn’t 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 he’s just not going to be able to Yank-brain out of the game, he’s 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.

It’s 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 isn’t quite yawning enough, and that you’d 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 don’t have to worry with Todd, do we? Nobody is treating his daft ideas as anything other than a daft idea. He’s not a Football Person and never will be.

Pique is more dangerous. He’s not quite as dangerous as Arsene Wenger. Luckily for us all, Pique’s 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 we’re not so lucky. He’s right in there trying to actually make his non-solution to the problem of VAR offsides reality.

It’s 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 don’t 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 now, it 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 wouldn’t get more goals under Wenger’s relaxed offside law, you would almost certainly get less. Teams would adapt to the new reality. They wouldn’t 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 you’ve 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 Pique’s plan is fewer 0-0 draws for sure, but also fewer competitive games full stop. How’s 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.