In November 2019, the phrase armpit offside entered football vocabulary. In an English Premier League match that season, Liverpool's Roberto Firmino scored a goal against Aston Villa but it was disallowed by the Video Assistant Referee(VAR)after the forward was ruled offside. So close was the call that Premier League wrote on its official Twitter handle "... his armpit, which was marginally ahead of the last Villa defender." The decision led to a furor over offside laws and the role of the VAR.
However, such decisions could soon be a thing of the past. World football's governing body FIFA will be trying a new offside law, proposed by legendary football manager Arsene Wenger, in what is said to be the change to the rule for a century.
Wenger's Proposal
Wenger, who is called 'The Professor' for his ideas and managerial abilities, proposed a change to the existing offside rule in October last year. According to this theory, a player should be judged offside only if any part of the body with which he can score a goal is past the last defender.
'I would like it to be that there is no offside so long as a (single) body part which a player can score with is in line with the defender. This could be too much of an advantage for an attacker because that obliges the defenders to play higher up, "Wenger told L'Equipe.
After a meeting of the International Football Association Body (IFAB), which forms the laws of the game, FIFA said they would try this rule in a Chinese league. Based on the sports of the trials, they would decide it can be applied globally.
Source: Indian Express