Children Copy What Wins

An open challenge to FIFA and IFAB: clean up the corners, and help the world’s game teach the values it is capable of teaching

On Sunday, hundreds of millions of people will watch the World Cup final. On Monday morning, children everywhere will begin copying what they saw.

They will copy the goals, the celebrations and the great pieces of skill. They will imitate the players they admire on school fields, city streets, dirt pitches and suburban lawns.

They will copy the behavior too.

That is why football is more than entertainment. It is one of the largest classrooms on earth. The world’s best players teach children what courage looks like, what teamwork looks like and, whether they intend to or not, what kinds of conduct succeed.

Children do not copy what adults praise.

They copy what they see rewarded.

Give credit where it is due

FIFA and IFAB deserve genuine credit for several changes introduced during this World Cup.

The new measures against deliberate delay have been simple, visible and effective. Players receiving treatment generally have to remain off the field briefly after play restarts. Referees use visible countdowns when goal kicks and throw-ins are being delayed. Substituted players must leave promptly or their replacements have to wait.

These are not moral lectures. They change the calculation.

A player who delays a restart may lose possession. A player who wastes time while being substituted may leave the team temporarily short-handed. A player who demands treatment cannot automatically use the stoppage as a free way to interrupt an opponent’s momentum.

The early results were striking. Across the group stage, only one substituted player exceeded the time limit. There were very few restart violations. Requests for on-field treatment fell dramatically. Only two players and two coaches were cautioned for dissent.

Whatever controversies occurred elsewhere in the tournament, those figures deserve attention.

They show that footballers adapt quickly when the standard is clear and the consequence is immediate. The rules do not need to persuade players to become better people. They need to make better conduct the intelligent way to play.

That is an important achievement, and FIFA and IFAB should be proud of it.

They should also apply the same lesson to the most obvious remaining failure in the game.

Watch the next corner

At the next corner kick, ignore the ball for a moment and watch the players.

You will probably see fists gripping shirts, arms wrapped around bodies, attackers blocked from making runs, defenders climbing over opponents and hands pushing into backs.

Several possible fouls may occur before the ball reaches the penalty area.

Everyone can see them: the referee, the commentators, the spectators and the children watching at home.

Yet almost none are called.

The referee is not necessarily blind or indifferent. The referee is trapped by the scale of the problem. Award one penalty for holding and the same standard must be applied at the next corner, and the next. No official wants to oversee a match that begins to resemble a penalty shootout before halftime.

So the first offense is ignored. Then the next one.

Players learn where the practical boundary lies, and the grappling grows worse until it becomes accepted as simply part of a corner kick.

The law has not changed. The culture has changed around it.

A rule that was never repealed has been quietly repealed by exhaustion.

This is not what children should learn

The ethical problem is not merely that shirt-pulling is unattractive or that it makes refereeing difficult.

The problem is what it teaches.

A child watching professional football learns that grabbing an opponent is acceptable if enough other players are doing it. She learns that an obvious rule may safely be ignored when officials are reluctant to enforce it. She learns that appearing innocent matters more than behaving honestly.

Then she takes that lesson onto her own field.

Football cannot eliminate every bad decision, every foul or every selfish act. No sport can. But it can decide what kind of behavior it will systematically reward.

At present, penalty-area grappling survives because it works.

That can be changed.

Clean up the corners

FIFA and IFAB do not need another major technological system to solve this. They do not need a new slogan or another campaign telling players to show respect.

The existing Laws already prohibit holding, pushing and blocking opponents illegally. Before the ball is in play, continued holding can be cautioned. Once the ball is in play, defensive holding inside the penalty area is a penalty.

The necessary reform is straightforward:

Publish a clear international standard for contact at set pieces. Produce a library of video examples showing what is permitted and what is not. Brief every coach, player and referee. Trial the standard in senior competitions. Then choose an implementation date and enforce it consistently.

The opening weeks would be difficult.

There would be penalties, anger, argument and claims that referees were ruining matches. But elite players and coaches are extraordinarily adaptable. If holding regularly costs goals, coaches will remove it from their defensive systems.

The offenses will decline because they will no longer be profitable.

That is what happened with goalkeeper time-wasting. Football did not ask goalkeepers to become more honorable. It made delay cost possession, and behavior changed.

The same principle can clean up the penalty area.

Not virtue alone.

Arithmetic.

The lesson football can choose to teach

This World Cup has already shown that football can improve behavior without weakening the game.

Matches did not become less exciting because substitutes hurried off the field. Football did not become less passionate because players stopped wasting quite so much time or because fewer people surrounded the referee.

It became more football: more play, less theater.

That is the opportunity now.

FIFA and IFAB have four years before the next World Cup. They can use that time to establish a set-piece standard, trial it, refine it and carry it throughout the professional and youth game.

Then the 2030 World Cup could show children something different.

Corners where players compete for the ball rather than wrestle one another.

Players who help opponents up rather than pretend not to have fouled them.

Captains who speak to referees while everyone else gets on with the match.

Teams trying to win through courage, intelligence, discipline and skill.

Football is played and watched on a scale few institutions can approach. An immense number of the people learning it and forming their understanding of fair play through it are children.

Almost none of them will become professionals.

All of them are learning from the people who did.

That attention can be sold, and FIFA has done that with extraordinary success.

It can also be used.

The governing bodies of the world’s game have already proved that they can change conduct by changing what conduct earns. Now they should finish the work in the most visible place they have left untouched.

The penalty area is eighteen yards deep and forty-four yards wide. Every camera in the world is already pointed into it.

More cameras are not the answer.

A clear standard, consistently enforced, is.

Four years. One governing principle:

Make honorable play the winning strategy.

Children copy what wins.