The ultimate objective of sport, Baron Coubertin aside, is entertainment, especially in today’s TV age when eyeballs are as important as footballs or the Duke’s variety. In this context the purpose behind tweaking, or competely changing, the rules of any particular sport is to increase its entertainment value.Nowhere is this more true than in football, the world’s most popular sport.Football’s major rule changes — offside, the backpass, professional fouls — have all been engineered with the intention of making goalscoring more possible. To this end, the sport has been fighting a running battle with rising stakes and the consequent natural safety-first tendencies among teams, players and coaches. It’s no wonder that the bigger the tournament, the more boring it gets: the last truly entertaining World Cup was way back in 1982 (and last month’s Champions League final only rose to the heights it did because one team thought it had nothing left to play for).The first major offside change came in 1925, when the number of defenders required to make an opposing player offside was reduced from three to two. In England, it had an immediate effect on the number of goals scored and, two seasons later, Everton’s Dixie Dean set the record for most goals in a season: His 60 goals in 1927-28 remain unsurpassed and even Thierry Henry will find it hard to beat!That law was further changed in 1990 to a one-defender scenario and, though it didn’t have as dramatic an effect as on the previous occasion, it did make it more difficult to deploy the offside trap.It’s not just the defenders who have been disadvantaged by attack-minded rules; goalkeepers too have seen many changes to laws governing their role. From the four-step rule to the six-second rule to the illegal backpass, they are as much under watch as any outfield player.And now, they are under attack from an unlikely source: lightweight balls. Over the past decade or so balls have been developed to move fast, and with a spin, in the air. ‘‘The old ball didn’t move unless you were playing in thin air like Mexico’’, Bob Wilson, formerly Arsenal’s goalkeeping coach, said in a recent interview. ‘‘Now it moves like a beach ball, it’s so thin.’’The reason is clear: lighter balls make for more spectacular goals. Much of what David Beckham and Roberto Carlos do with free-kicks is due to their technique and innate sense of aerodynamics but the ball plays a major role.The laws regarding substitutions were not specifically linked to entertainment or goalscoring when first introduced in the 1960s. But an amendment last year — fixing a limit of six substitutes for international friendlies — was in direct response to what was developing into a farcical situation.In a bid to protect their precious millionaire stars, national team managers would get past the unwanted business of friendlies by making wholesale substitutions — England coach Sven-Goran Eriksson replaced all 11 players in a match against Australia in 2003. This obviously left spectators dissatisfied, so FIFA, one eye constantly watching “bums on seats”, stepped in.And if cricket experts fear the substitution law will make for disastrous errors of judgement, know that it happened to even the greatest of footballing coaches.In Mexico 1970, England, the defending champions, were leading West Germany 2-0 when Sir Alf Ramsey, in the first World Cup allowing substitutes, inexplicably took off Bobby Charlton and Martin Peters. West Germany eventually won 3-2.Football has had its share of shake-ups, and survived. Cricket needn’t worry.
