In four days the biggest World Cup in football history kicks off in the United States, Canada and Mexico. Forty eight teams. Three countries. A hundred and four matches stretched across six weeks that will consume the attention of billions of people around the world in the way that only a World Cup genuinely can.
I have been looking forward to it for months. The football, the drama, the moments that nobody sees coming and that everybody remembers forever. The World Cup at its best is the sport at its best and despite every reservation I have about the people running it, and I have written enough on that subject to fill a small library, the tournament itself has never let me down.
Before any of it begins, football’s lawmakers have introduced the most sweeping package of rule changes in years. Seven significant changes, approved by the International Football Association Board at their annual general meeting in Wales, that will debut at this World Cup and then roll out across domestic football from next season.
Some of them are brilliant. Genuinely, unambiguously brilliant, the kind of changes that make you wonder why it took so long and feel quietly furious about all the time wasting you have had to sit through while the people in charge took their time getting here.
Some of them are more complicated. Reactive, imperfect, the product of specific incidents rather than coherent policy thinking.
And at least one of them exists because Gianni Infantino decided the national anthem ceremony needed his personal creative input. Which tells you everything you need to know about Gianni Infantino.
The Time Wasting Crackdown and Why It Is Long Overdue
Let me start with the good news because there is genuine good news here and it deserves proper recognition before we get to the more complicated stuff.
Football has had a time wasting problem for as long as anyone can remember. The dark arts of the final twenty minutes, the slow substitutions, the goalkeepers clutching the ball for as long as physically possible, the throw ins taken at the pace of a man who has all the time in the world and every intention of using it, the injured player who recovers from what appeared to be a career ending collision the moment the referee’s watch has been consulted and play restarts, all of it has been making the closing stages of football matches increasingly unwatchable for years.
IFAB has just taken the most comprehensive swing at all of it simultaneously and I am here for every second of it.
The throw in countdown is the change I am most excited about and I want to be specific about why. Referees will now begin a visible five second countdown if a throw in is being deliberately delayed. If the ball is not in play when that countdown expires, possession goes to the opposing team. Read that again. A player wasting time at a throw in will hand the ball to the opposition. The incentive structure around throw ins has been completely inverted. Where previously there was every reason to take as long as possible and no consequence for doing so, there is now a direct and immediate punishment for delay.
The same five second countdown applies to goal kicks. If a goal kick is not taken at the end of the countdown, a corner kick is awarded to the opponents. Goalkeepers who have spent years using the goal kick as an opportunity for a brief tactical conference with their defenders, a drink of water, a meaningful look at the sky and a series of instructions to players who stopped listening after the second sentence will now have five seconds to get the ball back in play or gift the opposition a corner. The efficiency that will force into goalkeeper restarts alone is going to change the texture of football matches significantly.
Players being replaced will have just ten seconds to leave the pitch once the substitution board is shown. If they exceed that limit, the incoming player must wait an additional minute before entering, temporarily leaving the team with ten men. The substitution walk. The slow meander from the centre of the pitch to the touchline, pausing to receive instructions, adjusting the shin pads, accepting the handshakes of every teammate within reach, all of it deployed with the specific intention of burning thirty seconds off the clock in the eighty eighth minute. Ten seconds from board to touchline or your team plays with ten men. I cannot wait to see the first manager furiously gesticulating at a substitute who has miscounted.
Each half of play at the World Cup will also feature a three minute hydration break, the timing of which is at the referee’s discretion. Players receiving on field medical treatment must leave the pitch and wait at least a minute before returning. No more miraculous recoveries the moment the clock stops. No more players being stretchered off and jogging back on before the physio has reached the touchline.
These four changes together represent the most serious attempt to reclaim the final quarter of football matches from the people who have been systematically dismantling them for decades. Every football supporter in the country has spent years watching the last twenty minutes of a match being strangled by cynical time management. The people who write the laws of the game have finally done something meaningful about it.
It took long enough. But it is here. And I am genuinely delighted.
The Mouth Covering Red Card
This one is more complicated and I want to engage with it honestly rather than simply cheering or dismissing it.
Players who cover their mouths with their hands, arms or shirts in confrontational situations will receive a red card. The rule was inspired by the controversy during the Champions League when Real Madrid’s Vinicius Junior accused Benfica’s Gianluca Prestianni of directing a racist slur at him. Prestianni’s mouth was covered when he said something to the Brazil star, which Prestianni reportedly later alleged was not racist but an anti-gay slur. Prestianni was later given a six match ban with the suspension extended to cover the World Cup.
The intention behind the rule is entirely correct. Discrimination on a football pitch is serious and the deliberate covering of a mouth to conceal what is being said to another player is a behaviour that has no legitimate purpose in a confrontational situation. If you are saying something you need to hide from the cameras and the officials, you should not be saying it.
The question I keep coming back to is whether a red card is the right response to a gesture rather than to the content of what was said. A player who covers their mouth and whispers something entirely innocuous to an opponent, tactical information, a comment about the weather, a request to swap shirts after the match, will now receive the same punishment as one using discriminatory language.
The rule is essentially punishing the concealment rather than the discrimination. That is an understandable position given the difficulty of proving what was actually said. But it creates a scenario where the severity of the punishment, a red card that changes the outcome of a match, is attached to a precautionary measure rather than a proven offence.
I understand why they have done it. I am not entirely comfortable with how blunt the instrument is.
VAR Expansion and the Arsenal Angle
VAR can now review second yellow cards issued after a clearly incorrect decision and can intervene when cards are issued in the case of mistaken identity. Incorrectly awarded corner kicks can also be subject to VAR intervention if the decision can be corrected immediately without delaying the restart.
Both of those are sensible extensions of VAR’s existing role. Second yellow cards that change the outcome of matches and are subsequently revealed to be incorrect have been a recurring source of controversy. Giving VAR the power to correct clear errors in that specific situation is proportionate and logical.
The corner kick VAR power is where it gets interesting for Premier League fans specifically. Under the new guidelines VAR has the power to intervene if a foul is spotted before a corner or free kick is taken, such as if an attacker is seen blocking a defender, a tactic Mikel Arteta will admit played a significant role in Arsenal’s success this season.
Arsenal’s set piece blocking routines were one of the defining tactical talking points of the Premier League season. They were effective, they were legal under the existing rules, and they drove opposing managers absolutely up the wall. The new VAR power does not retrospectively condemn what Arsenal did this season. It does signal that the approach will face significantly greater scrutiny from next season onwards.
Arteta is too intelligent a coach to be caught out by a rule change. He will adapt. But the specific reference to this tactic in coverage of the new rules is not subtle and he will be aware of it.
My broader concern about expanding VAR remains what it has always been. The problems with VAR are not primarily problems of insufficient scope. They are problems of inconsistent application, unclear rules and a technology that promises precision while delivering controversy. Adding more situations for VAR to adjudicate does not address those fundamental issues. It extends them into new areas.
The National Anthem Ceremony
And here we arrive at Gianni Infantino’s contribution to the football rule book.
FIFA president Infantino officially confirmed that a completely redesigned protocol will be implemented during the traditional pre-match national anthems. Under the new guidelines all players, including the starting eleven and substitutes, alongside the match officials, will gather inside the centre circle for a 360 degree ceremony where the two teams and the referees will stand directly facing one another.
The stated intention is unity. Emotion. A shared moment that involves every player in the squad rather than leaving substitutes on the touchline while the starting eleven line up in the traditional formation facing the stands.
Infantino said having all players and referees face each other in the centre circle during the national anthems will create a moment of unity, pride and emotion that truly belongs to the tournament.
I will be honest with you. I watched the traditional national anthem ceremony at the last World Cup and felt the emotion of it. The players standing in a line, the music swelling, the flags, the faces of men representing their countries at the biggest moment of their sporting lives. It worked. It has always worked. It is one of the most genuinely moving rituals in sport.
Infantino has decided it needs improving. He has decided that the existing ceremony, which has been creating moments of unity, pride and emotion for decades without his intervention, was insufficiently unified, insufficiently proud and insufficiently emotional, and that what it required was a redesign by the FIFA president.
Including all 26 players rather than just the starting eleven is a genuinely good idea and I will give that to him without reservation. The substitute who has trained for four years for this tournament and stands on the touchline watching his teammates sing the anthem has always struck me as an unnecessary exclusion.
The 360 degree facing each other element is where I raise an eyebrow. The traditional line facing the stands exists because the fans in the stands are the reason the ceremony has meaning. Turning the players to face each other rather than the supporters feels like prioritising the visual for the television cameras over the experience for the people in the ground.
But it is a ceremony. It is not a rule change that affects the football. And in the grand scheme of things that Infantino has done to this sport, redesigning the anthem formation is so far down the list of concerns that I am going to let it go and move on.
The Hydration Break Contradiction
I have written separately about the water bottle ban and I am not going to repeat that entire argument here. What I will do is note the specific contradiction that the new rules create and leave you to draw your own conclusions.
Players at the 2026 World Cup cannot have water bottles on the sideline during matches. They can however benefit from a three minute hydration break in each half at the referee’s discretion.
FIFA’s position is therefore that players need hydration breaks built into every match because the conditions demand it, but cannot have the water bottles that would allow them to hydrate during natural stoppages without those breaks. The hydration need is acknowledged. The most practical and least disruptive mechanism for meeting it is prohibited.
The three minute breaks are welcome. The water bottle ban that necessitates them, applied at a tournament being played in North American summer heat, remains one of the most commercially motivated decisions I have seen from a governing body that has produced considerable competition for that title.
A Mixed But Mostly Positive Package
Stepping back from the individual changes, the overall picture is more positive than my tone in places might suggest.
The time wasting rules are genuinely transformative and will make football better to watch in ways that supporters have been asking for for years. The throw in countdown alone is going to produce moments of chaos and comedy and genuine competitive consequence that I am looking forward to enormously. The five second goal kick rule is going to force a pace on the game in its restart moments that has been missing for too long.
The VAR extensions are proportionate if imperfect. The mouth covering red card is well intentioned if blunt. The national anthem redesign is harmless if unnecessary.
And the hydration breaks are good, even if the reason they are necessary is infuriating.
Football arrives at its biggest tournament with a set of rules that are meaningfully better than the ones it had last week. That is worth acknowledging. The people who wrote them deserve credit for the changes that are clearly right.
They also deserve scrutiny for the decisions that are clearly driven by something other than the best interests of the game. That scrutiny is not going away. Not while the water bottles stay banned and Gianni Infantino keeps redesigning ceremonies that did not need redesigning.
Five days. I cannot wait.
