Ifab’s plan to introduce blue cards is at risk at the law-making body’s AGM in Scotland this weekend
Plans to introduce a blue card in football are set to be shown the red card when the game’s lawmakers meet on Saturday to discuss bringing in sin-bins at professional level.
Telegraph Sport has been told directors of the International Football Association Board (Ifab) are not convinced of the need for such a card during trials of the rugby-style measure as they prepare for their annual general meeting, held this year at Loch Lomond.
This newspaper’s revelation last month that Ifab was planning to announce the sport’s first permanent new card for more than half a century sparked worldwide panic and fierce opposition from the Premier League’s leading bosses.
It can be disclosed members of Ifab’s own board, which include the chief executives of the four home associations and Fifa, had been unaware beforehand that a blue card would form part of protocols drawn up by the law-making body’s administration.
Unless they can be won over by a proposal designed to make it clear when a player has been sin-binned, the trials will instead involve a yellow card and a referee gesturing for a player to exit the pitch.
The blue card became a lightning rod for growing opposition to sin-bins in football, with the president of Uefa, Aleksander Ceferin, having told Telegraph Sport in January he was totally against the concept.
Ifab has already been forced to row back on plans for top-tier competitions to be included in initial trials and it could further water down proposals for cynical fouls to be part of sin-bin protocols and focus instead exclusively on dissent, which it has warned could be the “cancer that kills football”.
Telegraph Sport has also been told of concerns about what happens when a goalkeeper is sin-binned after it emerged that would force teams to choose between putting an outfield player in goal or making at least one permanent substitution.
The publication of new protocols laying all this out was abruptly blocked last month following the panic caused – including in football’s corridors of power – by the emergence of the blue card plan.
Among other items on the agenda at the Ifab AGM are plans to give referees the power to stop matches for “cooling-off periods” in the event of mass confrontations.
The length of such periods has yet to be decided for a move that could see players ordered to retreat to their own penalty area.
Other proposals include trialling another rugby-style measure that would ban any player except a team captain from approaching match officials.
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