On the green field, the offside rule has always been the center of debate among fans and experts. Younger, the head of FIFA's Football Development Department, boldly proposed a complete overhaul of the offside rule two years ago. He advocated that attacking players need to "full body" over the opponent's penultimate defender to be considered offside, this change will be the first pilot in Sweden, if the results are significant, will be further extended to Italy and the Netherlands.
Currently, the offside rule states that as long as an attacking player's "any effective part of the ball" exceeds that of the penultimate defender, even by a hair's breadth, it constitutes offside. Younger's new rule is relaxed to the point that as long as an attacking player is not "fully offside", he is not subject to the offside rule, which will undoubtedly free up the creativity of the attacking players, and may lead to a surge in the number of goals scored.
According to DirecTV Sports, FIFA is first testing the new rules in the Swedish U21 men's and U19 women's leagues, before rolling them out to tournaments in the Netherlands and Italy. Unger originally planned to implement the changes during the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, but the changes were too drastic to roll out in time. Now, the new rules will be implemented gradually as planned, with the expectation that they will eventually be fully implemented.
