​Why Arsene Wenger’s new offside rule proposal wouldn’t actually work originally appeared on The Sporting News. Add The Sporting News as a Preferred Source by clicking here. Arsene Wenger has been spotted in the suites at the 2026 FIFA World Cup, known as a legendary Arsenal coach in the English Premier League, and he’s at the center of a heated debate over the offside rule. Wenger has proposed a reform to how offside is enforced that would represent a major shift. He suggests that offside should only exist if an attacker is entirely beyond a defender—not merely a knee or a toenail, but the entire body beyond the defender. The idea would look like this: what offside would be and would not be if Arsène Wenger, FIFA’s chief of global football development, has his way. The change would effectively require daylight between attacker and defender for an offside offense; otherwise, all those goals would stand.
There are two reasons this wouldn’t achieve what advocates of a different offside interpretation want. First, it simply moves the goalposts. Instead of VAR determining whether a player was an inch offside, officials would have to decide whether a player was an inch offside. The margin becomes a different point of arbitration, but the razor-thin line remains. Second, consider how this would affect the game: defending with a full body-length beyond the defense would become far riskier than defending with a single inch of advancement. A common result could be a flood of low-block defending, with the entire back line positioned behind the ball, leaving less space to play in behind and potentially stifling attacking breakthroughs. Most likely, many spectacular runs and passes that produce great goals would disappear. So yes, it’s a creative idea, but unlikely to hit the mark.
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