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Blue cards were shown the red card, for now.

Soccer’s lawmakers, the International Football Association Board (IFAB), reportedly cowered from trialing a new card color to signal 10-minute sin-bin periods on Friday following widespread backlash to the plan. The punishment for players who commit cynical fouls or show dissent was due for top-level tests as soon as this summer and potentially in competitions as revered as the women’s and men’s FA Cups in England.

This isn’t the first example of the IFAB needlessly meddling with the world’s most popular sport – and it won’t be the last. Even this scatterbrained idea isn’t dead: Blue cards and sin bins will be up for discussion at the IFAB’s annual meeting in March.

The general consensus is that this latest initiative was plucked from the laws of rugby, along with another IFAB suggestion for only captains to discuss decisions with a match referee. Taking inspiration from a sport with limited appeal when compared to the global might of soccer, and one so complicated that it regularly offers in-game explanations of officials’ decisions to television viewers, seems rather peculiar.

FIFA was keen to distance itself from the IFAB experiments being held in professional soccer when the reports surfaced on Thursday. “Any such trials, if implemented, should be limited to testing in a responsible manner at lower levels,” world football’s governing body posted on X.

“It’s not football anymore,” UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin told The Telegraph when asked about his stance on sin bins in January. Ultimately, his opinion doesn’t matter. UEFA competitions must adopt whatever the IFAB adds to the laws of the game.

The blue-card bombshell followed a report by The Times’ Martyn Ziegler on Tuesday that claimed the IFAB was proposing “cooling-off periods” when on-pitch bickering is reaching breaking point and tempers are about to boil over.

Giving footballers toddler-esque timeouts and introducing blue cards would add more stoppages to a sport that prides itself on its flow and relentlessness. There would inevitably be consistency issues, too. The use of video assistant referees (VARs) has added an extra layer to the decision-making process, and with that, further risk of human error or differing interpretations. These risks range from egregious mistakes – such as Liverpool attacker Luis Diaz’s disallowed goal from an onside position against Tottenham Hotspur last September – to minor yet incessant quibbling, such as trying to determine if a player’s arm was in a “natural position” when they potentially committed a handball or, in the case of the latest changes, which words or actions constitute dissent.

(The confusion over the handball law is another matter bungled by the IFAB. Frankly, fans shouldn’t have to read up on the ever-changing rules to enjoy the sport to the fullest. This is meant to be a hobby, a form of entertainment. Watching football on Saturday shouldn’t be the sixth day of the working week. The IFAB is directly responsible for the current scenario where refereeing – and not actual football – often dominates the post-match conversation.)

The glaring and under-discussed problem linked to sin bins, timeouts, the implementation of VAR, and other changes to the on-pitch product is that fans weren’t asked if they wanted these things. Introducing harsher punishments for tactical fouls – which usually incur a yellow card – may prove popular among some supporters, but are sin bins really the best route? Would the risk of incurring a blue card encourage teams to swap an aggressive, attacking approach for a more conservative and ultimately less entertaining game plan? Will a goalkeeper vacate the net for dissent? Is 10 minutes too much? Does the opportunity to render more game-changing decisions nudge referees closer to center stage when players should always be the stars?

Perhaps we, the people who obsess over the sport, should be invited into the discussion. The IFAB – the self-described “independent guardians” of football’s rules – shouldn’t be so autonomous.

“I don’t know why they don’t leave the game alone at times,” said Everton’s Sean Dyche, who was among a stream of Premier League managers to voice opposition to the IFAB’s blue-card campaign. “I don’t think it’s needed, I don’t think it’s wanted.”

Tottenham Hotspur boss Ange Postecoglou noted that while “other sports are trying to make their games faster, we’re bringing in more clutter.”

A growing issue in football seems to be that executives and lawmakers are trying to look busy by making tweaks to the game without consulting fans, the lifeblood of the sport.

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High-profile trials of referees using a blue card to signal 10 minutes in the sin bin could take place as soon as the summer, according to The Telegraph’s Ben Rumsby.

The initiative was approved by the sport’s law-making body, the International Football Association Board (IFAB), and will be officially announced Friday, according to Rumsby. The IFAB is then expected to sign off on extended tests of blue cards and sin bins in senior levels of football during its annual meeting in March, Sky Sports’ Kaveh Solhekol reports.

The punishment would occur when players commit cynical fouls or show dissent. Two blue cards would result in a red card and dismissal, as would one blue and one yellow card.

Sin-bin trials have already been held in amateur and youth football in England and Wales. Encouraged by their apparent success, the IFAB recommended sin bins be implemented at higher levels of the game.

FIFA, however, called Thursday’s reports “incorrect and premature.”

“Any such trials, if implemented, should be limited to testing in a responsible manner at lower levels, a position that FIFA intends to reiterate when this agenda item is discussed at the IFAB AGM on 1 March,” the governing body said in a brief statement.

Mark Bullingham, the chief executive of the English Football Association who’s also on the IFAB board, said last November that a key aim of sin bins is to try to address tactical fouls – when a promising attack is scuppered by a deliberate illegal challenge. These incidents usually result in a yellow card.

The tougher stance on dissent, along with another potential trial that would only allow captains to discuss decisions with referees, is aimed at clamping down on poor player behavior.

The English FA could volunteer to use the FA Cup as part of the trials, Rumsby adds.

Sin bins won’t be introduced at Euro 2024 in the summer or next season’s Champions League. However, UEFA will have to include blue cards and sin bins in its competitions if the IFAB eventually adds them to the laws of the game.

Even if the trial is deemed successful, the new rules can’t become part of the sport’s official laws until 2026-27 at the earliest, according to Dale Johnson of ESPN.

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PARIS (AP) — UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin said on Thursday he will not stand as a candidate in 2027, one hour after steering through a controversial change of legal rules that would have let him.

Ceferin has led UEFA since 2016 and said he was “tired of COVID, tired of two wars” and of plans for a rival Super League that he called a “nonsense project.”

The Slovenian lawyer claimed he made the decision for family reasons six months ago, yet the progress of the rule change since November through various UEFA committees — that would allow him to stay in office until 2031 — provoked opposition including from vice president David Gill, the former Manchester United chief executive.

UEFA introduced a presidential term limit of 12 years in 2017 in fallout from American and Swiss federal investigations of corruption in international soccer.

Soccer bodies came under pressure to reform and prevent networks of self-serving patronage and influence building, and Ceferin himself promised he would not stay beyond 2027 in a job that pays him about $3.5 million annually.

Ceferin aimed a barb at another perceived opponent when making a statement at a news conference after the annual UEFA congress of 55 member federations closed.

He spoke of an unnamed European soccer official who made a “pathetic cry about morality” in a “narcissistic letter” to member federations.

“It was actually amusing to watch all this hysteria,” said Ceferin, adding he had not revealed his true intentions earlier because he wanted to see “the real face of some people.”

His target is widely understood to be Romanian federation president Razvan Burleanu, one of Ceferin’s colleagues representing Europe on the ruling council of FIFA.

The move on term limits that Ceferin was criticized for has already been made at FIFA by its president Gianni Infantino, who attended the UEFA meeting in Paris.

Infantino also was elected in 2016 in fallout from the corruption investigations and steered through statutes changes early in his presidency that will let him stay until 2031.

Ceferin’s perceived power grab was more controversial after he caused unease by seeming to support UEFA vice president Luis Rubiales from Spain in fallout from misconduct at the Women’s World Cup final in August, and trying to ease a ban on Russian teams from international competitions by letting the country’s under-17 teams enter UEFA events.

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AP soccer: https://apnews.com/hub/soccer