Handball, offside, VAR – is football too complicated?

There seems to be no greater confusion than the law of handball.

It has changed so many times in recent years that it has become impossible to keep up.

Alan Shearer told BBC Sport: “I hate the handball rules.” “They messed it up.

“They will say things are better in the Premier League than abroad, but I don’t like that.

“It’s very messy with everything, there’s ‘deliberate’, ‘proximity’, ‘natural’, ‘unnatural’ – there are so many different ways they have to interpret things, and it’s not fit for purpose.”

Shearer did not even mention the contradictory offensive handball rule that prevents an automatic goal from being scored.

It created an offense for the attacker that the defender could get away with.

Law enforcement may not look better in the Premier League, but – in terms of penalties awarded – it is clear that the penalties awarded are lower on average than in any of the other major European leagues.

But that doesn’t mean it’s good.

There is a misconception that the handball law was changed for VAR, but the opposite happened.

The International Football Association Board (Ifab) began working to redefine handball in 2014, two years before VAR trials began.

These changes created a list of justifications for handball.

When the video assistant came into the game, it was very easy to award penalty kicks. It only took finding one item to mark – and there has been a huge rise in penalty kicks across the leagues.

VAR has proven to be incompatible with the new law. It has been changed several times in recent seasons to try to find a solution.

Fans will love going back to the days when handball was the norm.

But the genie is out of the bottle.

Any change must be specified. And with this new definition to contend with, we probably wouldn’t be better off.