99% Invisible - 374- Unsure Footing

Episode Date: October 16, 2019

Before 1992, the easiest way to run the time off the clock in a soccer game was just to pass the ball to the goalkeeper, who could pick the ball up, and hold it for a few seconds before throwing it back into play. This was considered by some to be unsportsmanlike and bad for spectators. So in 1992, the International Football Association Board, the committee in charge of determining the rules of soccer, made a minor change to the laws of the game. From that season forward, in every league throughout the world, when a player passed the ball back to the goalkeeper, the goalkeeper could no longer use their hands. The backpass law didn’t seem like a huge change at the time, but it fundamentally changed soccer. Unsure Footing

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. The most popular sport in the world has been relatively slow to catch on here in the United States. There's this episode of The Simpsons that I think captures the disdain with which some Americans regard the rest of humanity's favorite game. It starts with the family watching TV. Open wide for some soccer! The Caminetto Soccer Association is coming to spring for you. It's all here. Fast kickin' low-scored and he ties. You bet.

Hey Dad, I'll come you never taking us to see a soccer game. I don't know. So the Simpsons decide to go to the game, and the stands are packed. But the fans' enthusiasm quickly evaporates as the game gets going. Half-back passes to the center, back to the wing, back to the center. Center holds it, holds it, holds it. Blowing! Come on, you snores! Do something! I think it's fair to say that Homer and crusty the clown are echoing a common complaint about soccer that you hear in the United States a lot.

That it's not exciting enough. That's producer Emmett Fitzgerald. They don't score enough points to lament these narrow-minded touchdown lovers. I completely disagree with this perspective, but even I have to admit that soccer can be a low scoring affair. Professional teams routinely win games one to nothing, or worse yet battle for 90 minutes and settle for a 0-0 draw. But whatever your feelings about the relative excitement of the beautiful game, Soccer was undoubtedly more boring 30 years ago.

The world was in general agreement, the game was too slow, and it needs to be more dynamic. This is Soccer writer, or football writer, Adam Hurrey. And Adam says that the main culprit, slowing the game down was the goalkeeper. So the goalkeeper became very useful in controlling the pace of the game. Basically teams would score a goal or two, and then they would do anything they could

just to kill time and protect the lead. And the easiest way to do that was just to pass the ball to the goalkeeper. Who back then could just pick the ball up and run a few seconds off the clock before throwing it back into play. And you could do this as many times as you wanted. It kind of resulted in real sort of almost comic book scenarios where they would kick the ball bets the goalkeeper from the halfway line, from free kicks that they had in the opposition half, just because they knew that that would waste pressure seconds, the opposition team simply couldn't have the ball.

People finally got fed up with this uninspiring tactic during the 1990 World Cup in Italy. Now, nostalgia kind of paints the World Cup of 1990 as a wonderful tournament, but at the time it was regarded as kind of the power of a cynical football. Lots of low scoring games, lots of passing the ball back to the keeper, lots of time wasting. There was one story about a game at Italian 90 between Egypt and Republic of Ireland where someone totalled up the amount of time that Irish goalkeeper Pat Bonner had the ball in his hands and he added up to six minutes.

In other words, fans spent about 7% of the game watching the goalkeeper just hold the ball. Set Blatter, who was the general secretary of FIFA at the time, he said this is not why people go to watch football. It's one of the rare things he did get right in his time in FIFA. But he was spot on, he was absolutely right. This is not entertaining football. This is not inspired people. And there is no skill in simply standing there holding the ball in one hand.

Something had to be done. And so in 1992, the International Football Association Board, the committee in charge of determining the rules of soccer, made a minor change to the laws of the game. From that season forward, in every league throughout the world, if the player intentionally kicked the ball back to the goalkeeper, the goalkeeper could no longer use their hands. So any deliberate pass back to the goalkeeper from any place on the pitch could not be picked

up. FIFA put out a press release about the new rule, where they came down really hard on the goalkeepers. It was entitled goalkeepers are not above the law. And they were very strong about this. They said the goalkeeper has a very rare privilege in football, the use of his hands, but it is a privilege that should not be abused. Time wasting is one of the worst forms of unsporting behaviour, because it attempts to deny opponents a fair chance of using the fuller lot of time to use their skills to win the game.

The backpast law might seem like a pretty subtle tweak to the rules of soccer, but over time, it would completely transform the game in ways that FIFA could never have envisioned. This little rule change would become one of the most consequential in the history of the sport and force nearly every player on the field to adapt. But in the short term, the rule change would cause an existential crisis for one player in particular. The goalkeeper. The goalkeeper has always been a unique specialist position,

like a field goal kicker in American football, or a coxen in rowing. They even wear a different colored shirt from their teammates, as if to signify, I am not like the rest of you. The most obvious difference is that they're allowed to do something that no one else in the field can. Touch the ball with their hands. Goldkeepers have this strange superpower, which they use to ruin everyone else's fun.

Soccer is the most popular sport in the world and what most people love about it is the goals, and it's actually our ambition to prevent goals from happening, so we're sort of trying to disappoint the entire world. This is Justin Bryant, a former professional fund-ruiner who is currently the goalkeeping coach for the North Carolina State Women Soccer Team. Bryant is from the United States, but he played professionally in England in the 80s and 90s for a really small club called Borum Wood FC. They paid me, I think, 50 pounds a week plus room and board.

So, by the slimmest of margins I made living, but I did. Justin was this kid from Florida, living out of a bed and breakfast, trying to follow his dreams. But it wasn't always easy. The fields were in bad shape, the fans were sometimes hostile.

And the style of playing England at the time wasn't very sophisticated. Teams would just kick these long balls forward and hope that their big bruising striker would make something happen. You know, I had to very quickly get used to balls being played in the box and three or four great big ball-dehitted tattooed guys flying in,

trying to run me over essentially. If the goalkeepers job to go grab that ball, no matter what. Yeah, it's actually counter to several million years of human evolution, throwing ourselves, hurling ourselves in front of a ball that's moving at a high rate of speed. Some people say you have to be crazy to be a goalkeeper. Justin doesn't love that word, but he says that goalkeepers are just wired a little bit differently than everybody else. If he spots a soccer team at the airport, for example, he can recognize the goalkeeper right away.

It's a different personality type. It's a different mindset, a different mentality. They carry themselves differently. They express themselves differently. And what are the telltale signs of a goalkeeper? I don't know. There's goalkeepers tend to have kind of a knowing smirk. That's the best way I'd put it.

It's almost like they're saying, yeah, I know. I know what you think, but I still like to do this. I grew up playing soccer, and I never wanted to be the goalkeeper. In part, because it felt like such a thankless job. When goalies do everything right, they get taken for granted. But if they make one mistake, everyone notices.

We can make other fools of ourselves. We can make out of fools of ourselves. We can make just the most horrific mistakes that lose games, and it's very evident to everybody watching when that happens. What a fatal era! What on earth is he doing? But what happens to the goalkeeper? I think that's every goalkeeper's nightmare where you have nothing to do the whole game, and then the other team gets one chance, and it squirms right under your hands and into

the goal and you lose by that goal. Whoops, it's a daisy! Oh, pal, I'm one of the mistakes! How on earth did you do that? He completely misjudged it! That has to be the worst mistake that I have ever seen from an excellent goalkeeper. That's a recipe for sleepless night or two. For that reason, the goalkeeper developed a reputation

as kind of a lonely outsider. French existentialist philosopher Albert Camus was a goalkeeper. If that tells you anything. You know, obviously, I've been around goalkeepers now as my profession for a quarter century, and there are a lot of individualists, iconoclasts, loners, whatever you want to call them. We are kind of a loan task with keeping the ball out of the net with our hands. For Justin Bryant's whole life that had been his one job to keep the ball out of the net with his hands, that is until 1992.

with his hands. That is until 1992. I didn't hear about it until it actually did happen. Like, it just, I think anecdotally somebody mentioned, oh, starting next season, you can't pick up a back pass. And I just couldn't, I couldn't believe it because there were an awful lot of goalkeepers that weren't suited for it at all. Goalkeepers in England were trained in how to block shots,

catch crosses, and fight for loose balls. All things you mostly do with your hands. A training session in the old days, a goalkeeper session in the 1980s wouldn't involve playing the ball with your feet at all, at no point. But now, if someone on their own team passed them the ball, the goalkeeper would be stripped of their superpowers. They would need to use their feet,

just like everybody else. And that turned out to be a bit of a problem, because a lot of them just didn't know how. 1992 was a big year for English soccer. It was the start of a brand new, highly commercialized league that would go on to become the most lucrative in the world, the English Premier League. There were big money sponsorships and a new TV deal. The whole country was watching soccer. But that first weekend of games in this critical season

were pretty sloppy. We had a weekend full of goalkeepers making horrendous errors because they just didn't know what to do. That's Adam, hurry again. goalkeepers were in a blind panic. The ball would be kicked back to them as it used to be because that's defenders had a habit of doing that.

But then once the ball was at the fate that they just had sheer terror. Over the first few months, it was as if all the goalkeepers in England were working together to collaboratively produce one long blooper reel. There were slips and falls and bizarre own goals. There was a particularly comical episode involving the goalkeeper for Sheffield United, a man named Simon Tracy. Now, I'm going to take you through this kind of calamity point by point because it really does sum up the immediate effects of the Bat Pass law. He was pass the ball back, very

simple pass, he could have dealt with it quite easily. But now that the ball was at his feet, a striker from the other team started charging at Tracy fast, knowing full well that he probably didn't have great foot skills. And Tracy clearly panicked. Tracy, he's going to get caught here if he's not careful. Then he tried to do a little bit of skill to get away from this attacker running straight end and ended up running sideways towards the side of the pitch. Tracey ended up dribbling the ball straight out of bounds. And then it went from comedy to forest because the other team just needed to do a throw-in and they could shoot on an empty net since Tracey was so far out of position.

And so Tracey tried to stop the ball boy from giving the ball to the other team. He ended up kind of wrestling the ball from this small child. He was given a red card and kicked out of the game. So within about maybe 15 seconds, the whole drastic effects of the backpast law have been summed up. Goldkeeper receiving a pass, not knowing what to do, trying to be clever, then ending up in this calamity where he got sent off because he just didn't know what to do. More often though, when someone passed the ball back to the goalkeeper, the keeper would just kick it away as far as he could.

Sometimes straight up the field, but often the ball would end up out of bounds. Sometimes 15 rows up in the stadium, sometimes completely out of the stadium. So it wasn't a very aesthetically pleasing development at first. So the first reaction was how has this improved our game? If anything, it's less enjoyable to watch because now the ball's in the stand instead of the goalkeeper's hands. World Soccer Magazine launched a Saver Backpass campaign. I remember thinking that as a fan of the game, Yish, this is not, you know, the greatest thing to look at and I think they're going to regret it

and I even wondered in the early days if they would change it back. Another goalkeeper from that time, Craig Forest, remembers the rule change causing friction between goalkeepers and defenders. Forest played for a primarily team called Ipswich Town, and he says that that first season his defenders would forget about the rule change and pass him the ball in these really dangerous situations. They would pass the ball back to you forgetting when that rule came in that you couldn't pick it up.

Sometimes it was slip their mind and they would lose focus and pass you one back and not realize that oh no no no you can't pick it up and it ear under too much pressure. He remembers one moment in particular where a teammate whipped a hard pass right at his chest and he's yelling at me why didn't I just pick it up. The two goalkeepers that I spoke to for this story were the lucky ones. They had decent foot skills and so over time they were able to adjust to the role change. But that wasn't the case for every goalkeeper. And if anybody wasn't at all comfortable with playing with your feet, you got found out really quickly. And you could be good at everything else. But if you're not good at playing with your feet or striking a ball first time, and dealing with that, you'd be out of the game and

aren't beat. And a lot of guys did kill the game for them as well. Over the course of the 90s, lots of goalkeepers were just weeded out because they couldn't adapt to this new reality. So there's a tragic element to this because there are hundreds of footballers who simply of no use, almost straight away. Suddenly, they were forced to do things that they simply weren't trained for, that a whole generation of goalkeepers who have been brought up to rely on their hands only,

were suddenly rendered kind of redundant. Right, it's almost like jobs lost to automation or something. Yeah, exactly right. It's a little bit like that. But once this law came in and wreaked havoc with their entire existence, they looked even more lonely than before because they looked almost obsolete. And you've got to feel for these guys. Like the goalkeeper was already this isolated lonely player, and then just pull the rug out

from under them with this rule change and tell them, well now you need to have this whole new set of skills that you weren't trained for. But you know, over time, the role really became quite successful. I mean, for one, it completely did away with time-wasting, which was its initial purpose. And then after a few rough years, goalkeepers really started developing the necessary foot skills. Yeah, so then what happened is we changed the way we trained goalkeepers, so you know, we didn't take long for coaches to realize, gosh, we've got to prepare goalkeepers for this demand. Justin Bryant says he had

a goalkeeping coach at Borum Wood who really made a point at this. Once the new law came into play, he started adding an element of playing the ball with your feet to every session, almost every activity, every drill. So we just started adding this kind of thing, training. Everyone did it, took a while, but everyone started incorporating it, and the goalkeepers got better. Was it fun to suddenly have this new challenge? It was. It was fun because I liked the feeling of being

a more complete player. I think it made us feel better about being goalkeepers because now we weren't just these weirdos who stood back there and swatted at the ball with our hands. We were soccer players. But the goalkeepers weren't the only ones who had to adjust the rule. From the perspective of the defenders, the game changed a lot too. Before when they got into a sticky situation, they could just pass the ball back to the goalkeeper

who would pick it up. And now they didn't have this escape route, they didn't have this kind of fail safe. So they had to kind of evolve very quickly as well. And as defenders and goalkeepers adjusted to this rule and got more skilled with their feet, it completely changed the way the game was played. Instead of just booting long balls forward, teams started focusing on keeping control of the ball with skill for passing. Possession of the ball became imperative. If you had the ball, the other team couldn't score.

That was pretty much the ethos here. And that starts from the back. If you can have a goalkeeper who's fully capable of joining him in the play, then he becomes an extra player than what you may have had 20 years previously. So it became an opportunity rather than a restriction. Adam Hurrier says that the rule change even made players more physically fit. Because before whenever anyone passed it back to the goalkeeper, the outfield players had this moment to catch their breath. Now there's no let up. The action is non-stop. The average outfield player today runs about seven miles in a single match.

Now they're all like Olympic de-Cathletes. They're all built like middleweight boxes. I think what we have now is a completely different sport. It's quicker, it's more dynamic. Players have to be fitter. Football has become so quick and so spectacular, again, as a direct result of the backpossilor. It is, to me, an underrated moment in football history.

Everyone that I talk to for this story brought up the same player. an underrated moment in football history. Everyone that I talked to for this story brought up the same player. A goalkeeper who really represents just how far the game has come since this rule changed back in 1992. His name is Ederson and he's this incredibly athletic Brazilian, he's got a neck tattoo the size of his neck. And Ederson is a very good goalkeeper in the traditional sense. He's a big guy with really strong hands,

he's very agile, good at blocking shots. But Ederson has spellbinding foot skills. He's incredible with a bullet his feet. Ederson plays for the English club Manchester City, who have one of the best coaches in the world, a man named Pep Guardiola. And Guardiola started using Ederson in a way that basically no goalkeeper had been used before.

Ederson is a playmaker. He starts attacks from Manchester City. He'll hit the bull 50 yards. He can hit the bull 5 yards. But some everything he does with the bull is with the purpose. He's treated as part of the team because of that. In many ways, Ederson feels like a unique talent, but at every level of soccer coaches are treating goalkeepers more like full members of the team.

Today, Justin Bryant is the goalkeeping coach for the North Carolina State Women's team, and he says that when they're recruiting, they like to look for goalkeepers who can play the ball with their feet and possess the ball out of the back. Last year, NC State had a star goalkeeper named Sydney Wooten. She took us to two sweet 16s. She had shutouts against schools like North Carolina Chapel Hill, University of Virginia, and Wooten was very short for goalie. But she was an incredible athlete with great leaping ability and very fast feet, but mainly she was such a good striker of the ball, such a good passer. And so the team developed a good striker of the ball, such a good passer.

And so the team developed a whole tactic of playing the ball out from the back, based around Wooten's foot skills. Wooten wasn't just known for preventing the other team from scoring, although she did that too. She was a valuable part of the team's offensive strategy. And so in a way, this rule that initially seemed so unfair to goalkeepers has ultimately made them a bit more like everyone else. Yeah, absolutely. I think the grand narrative of the Backpast law is that it had disastrous early effects.

It caused goalkeepers to question their very existence, and then over the course of the next 10 or 20 years, it brought them back into the family. You still have individualistic, high-classic, loner personalities, but you know, we are in a very real sense more a part of the team now. This year, the International Football Association Board made a few more tweaks to the rules. There's one change in particular that's causing a few little problems. From now on, goal kicks don't have to leave the penalty box. And teams are struggling to figure it out. Players are making mistakes, just like they did back in 1992.

It's hard to say right now if this will be an important rule change. We probably won't know for a couple of decades. But if we've learned anything from the back pass law, it's that anytime you tinker with the rules of the sport, you never know what might happen. The back best rule didn't just spring forth fully formed from the forehead of FIFA. One man claims that he was the one who invented it, and he has the facts to back him up after this. So I'm back in the studio with Emmett and he's got one more little detail

to add to the story of the back pass law. Yes, so one thing that we didn't get into and the story proper was like, who specifically came up with this idea for the back pass law? That's right. I guess I kind of assumed it was like this, the collective wisdom of specifically came up with this idea? For the back best of all. Right. I guess I kind of assumed it was like this, the collective wisdom of FIFA came up with a lot.

Right, right. There's sort of, you know, that just sort of the wisdom of a bunch of guys in some boardroom somewhere, collectively came up with this idea. But, exactly. But that is also what I assumed. But as I was talking to Adam Hurrey, who was the football, the soccer journalist,

he told me that he recently got a message from a journalist in Georgia who had some slightly more specific info. And you mean Georgia, the country? Yeah, Georgia, the country. That's the one. There was a game in Georgia this week and a journalist out there sent me a DM on Twitter saying, you're going to enjoy this. There's a guy here in the press room who claims to have invented the backpast law.

So yeah, so this man's name was and I'm probably going to butcher this but so can Yashvili. Okay. Yashvili. Mm-hmm. Sounds good. Sounds good to me. And apparently he's walking around the press room of this stadium telling, you know, anyone who would listen all the foreign journalists who are there covering the game, but he invented the back pass long. And he is holding this fax as proof. And what did the fax say? Well, it was from FIFA, it was written in 1994, you know, a couple of years after the law went into effect. And it was essentially a thank you fax. We're most grateful to Mr. Yashelief contributing directly to the realization of this new rule, which is greatly contributed to the development of football worldwide. We appreciate the work

of all pioneers whose ideas help to improve our beloved sport. And you know, this was this was the first that I or I think basically anyone who's written about this has ever really heard of this guy. His name is very rarely been mentioned or if ever in the history of this backpast law. Despite it being one of the most seismic events in football history, especially in modern football. He's a real unsung hero. Yeah definitely. I've sent him an email at this Georgian guy. I carefully translated it into Georgian and everything, which is a beautiful language by the way. And he didn't get back to me, so I'm really sad about it because I've been good to

get his input in here. Yeah, and sadly we still still have not heard back from Mr. Yosh-Feli. And yeah, there's really nothing that's really been written about this guy. And I don't, I'm hoping that we're not spreading misinformation here, but Adam sent me a copy of the facts and it looks fairly legit to both of us. I mean, as far as I'm concerned, that his story is watertight.

I've got no reason to doubt him. The facts looks legit to me. And, you know, this idea has to come from somewhere and no one else has ever been credited with it, so why not? So, yeah, Roman, do you want to see the facts I can show it to you? Totally. I can show it to you here. So, this is, yeah, take a look at my laptop screen. Oh, well, it's a scan of a wrinkle facts.

Yeah, and I guess what I like about this is like when you think about the evolution of sports, or if you tell the long story of the evolution of a game, the heroes are, you know, players and maybe coaches to coaches who come up with cool ideas about different ways to play and adapt their tactics or their style of play. But rules are important too. The game is contained by a set of rules and those rules need to change at times to adapt

to the way that the game is being played. Maybe there's a heroic Georgian man who deserves more credit than he's gotten so far. So here's to you, Mr. Josh Philly. Yeah. And your important contribution to the evolution of soccer. Change soccer forever. That's awesome. Cool.

What a great detail. Thanks, Emma. Yeah. Thank you. 99% invisible was produced this Week By Emmett Fitzgerald Mix and Tech Production By Sherev Yusuf, Music By Sean Rial Katie Mingle is the senior producer Kurt Colstead is the digital director. The rest of the team includes senior editor Delaney Hall, Chris Barupet, Avery Truffan, Vivian

Lee, Sophia Klatsker, Joe Rosenberg, and me Roman Mars. Special thanks this week to Michael Cox, who we also spoke with for this story. His new book, The Mixer, is a great look at the evolution of soccer tactics since the Backpass Rule. Adam Hurrey also is a book called Football Cleshays, all about the language we use to describe the beautiful game. And if you want to read more about Justin Bryan's professional career in England, he's got a memoir called Small Time.

You can find links to all of them on our website. We are a project of 91.7KALW in St. Francisco, we have produced, on Radio Row, in beautiful, downtown, Oakland, California. 99% of visible is a member of Radio Topia from PRXF fiercely independent collective of the most innovative shows and all of podcasting. Find them all at radiotopia.fm. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars in the show at 99PI org. We're on Instagram and Reddit too. But you can get them all to us.

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