Should football abandon red and yellow cards?
Football’s disciplinary sanctions are overdue for an overhaul. Maybe.
Every summer, I get myself ready to know the rules of football for the season sprawled out before me.
The Laws of the Game is an evolving document that sets out the way football is played and the disciplinary framework that shapes the sport and spells out what happens when that shape is distorted by broken rules.
Before each new season I download the new Laws of the Game as a PDF that will live on my desktop for the next twelve months. I update the International Football Association Board (IFAB) app. Lastly, I review the changes, additions and removals that make up the new version. IFAB makes those three steps as, well, one-two-three.
IFAB implements a handful of changes season by season – a tweak here, a rectification there. They seep slowly through the season, each one revealing itself in a clutch of minor incidents that gradually unlock mass understanding.
The vast majority of updates to the text are imperceptible. But, every now and again, there are fundamental technical alterations that change the game in the truest sense.
The offside law has been refreshed in the meantime but has resembled its current form for a hundred years. Substitutions were introduced in 1958, the back-pass rule in 1992. Golden goal came and went. Goal-line technology was brought in, dragging video assistant referees in its wake.
Ideas of such raw game-shifting potential are floated all the time, some properly considered but most reactionary and nakedly stupid, football’s lawmakers bending to the will of perceived public opinion without actually knowing what irks supporters.
Thus, the game clock conversation gathers pace on the spurious basis that football has ever been a ninety-minute game. It hasn’t. Meanwhile, goalkeepers have a little sit down in every game played on this planet and football pleads impotence as if it’s impossible to simply outlaw in-game team talks and drinks breaks regardless of who’s pretending to be injured.
Football’s disciplinary framework, administered by issuing yellow and red cards, is a relatively recent development. It was first implemented in 1970; for 55 years, a yellow card has meant a caution, red a dismissal.
In practice, there’s a large grey area between yellow card offences and red card offences that people have sought to paint a secondary colour for half a century. The ‘orange card’ is a concept that’s existed in theory for almost as long as red and yellow have in reality.
Football’s ‘blue card’ was a newer development. Suggested as a measure to tackle dissent, it was typical of ideas of its kind: it correctly diagnosed but misunderstood a problem and proposed a solution that merely traced the outline of existing sanctions.
At no point in discussions around dissent, time-wasting or general disciplinary law changes has there been any suggestion that yellow and red cards be abandoned. New suggestions always fit within or around the use of yellow for a caution and red for a dismissal.
There’s no reason that should be the case. When it comes to football, I lean towards tradition. I don’t object to change but it takes a pretty compelling argument for me to get behind it. Nevertheless, there’s purpose in curiosity and evolution in exploration.
Why shouldn’t there be an intermediate card? Why shouldn’t there be a whole suite of cards? Why should discipline be administered by way of cards at all?
Why, in a game seemingly full of tinkering would-be innovators, are yellow and red cards always the assumed and accepted starting point?
He’s talking about ice hockey again, isn’t he?
In its simplest terms, football’s disciplinary framework consists of indirect free kicks, direct free kicks, penalty kicks, yellow cards and red cards. That’s it.
My default position is to avoid taking a steer from other sports, lest we find ourselves with a game of which Nigel Owens would approve, but there’s no harm in considering where they might inspire greater flexibility than the five existing arrows in the refereeing quiver.
The National Football League (NFL) and National Hockey League (NHL) have red card equivalents in the form of ejections and game misconducts respectively. Nothing to learn there.
Broadly, the NFL and NHL equivalents of football’s fouls and yellow cards are wrapped up in a system of penalties. If you don’t like time-wasting, dissent or deliberate fouls in football, a penalty-led system might tickle your fancy.
In the last 55 years, the yellow card has proved a questionable deterrent at best. It’s part of the game. Taking one for the team is normal because there’s no meaningful disincentive. In the NFL and NHL, penalties have a direct and immediate sporting impact. They are deterrents; they alter player behaviour because penalties disadvantage the team.
In American football, penalties affect field position. Dissent, delay of game and even taunting of opponents have become behaviours that are self-moderated in order to avoid penalties because penalties actually matter.
In ice hockey, the penalty box is the heart of the disciplinary rules framework. Taking one or more players off the ice for two, four or five minutes is detrimental to their teams. A two-minute penalty kill is much more substantial a punishment than a yellow card, not to mention part of a wholly different system of punishment.
The idea of the penalty box or ‘sin bin’ has been offered up as an idea for football for as long as I can remember. Indeed, it is in use as a sanction for dissent in some levels of the English game.
It doesn’t work. Analyses of data suggesting that it does are flawed. Its impact on dissent offences cannot be usefully measured when both the ten-minute sin bin and the straightforward caution are used with all the consistency of a wet paper bag, and the sporting impact of taking one player out is far less obvious in football than hockey.
Still, the fact that ice hockey referees and NFL officials don’t often have to tolerate being screamed at is as good an argument as any in favour of a disciplinary framework revolution built on tangible sporting impact.
What might disciplinary alternatives actually look like?
Let’s take our thought experiment on a step or two. How might a football match played along new disciplinary lines work?
The principles in American football and ice hockey as applied to football are twofold: yardage penalties and power plays.
The NHL also has a process for retrospective suspensions that feels relevant in a discussion of football reform. Disciplinary panels are familiar across sport as a whole but football’s retrospective charges and sanctions tend to be applied in more extreme or collective situations, or in the form of appeals against in-game decisions.
Football has a short and mostly forgotten history with yardage penalties too. Again, dissent was the offence for which it was applied before the whole thing faded from the game’s consciousness because we all got distracted by free kick spray or whatever.
Football free kicks are always enforced at the spot of the foul, to put it in NFL terms. If a player mouths off excessively now, they’ll receive a yellow card. Previously, briefly, the ball might also have been moved closer to their goal.
A reimagining for 2025 might use that disciplinary weapon differently – a 20-yard penalty for professional fouls, say, or 50 yards docked every time a full back has to ask the assistant referee where the ball went out of play for a throw-in.
If I’m sceptical about yardage penalties – and I am, to be absolutely clear – then I’m even more unconvinced about the idea of football power plays. I’ve seen them in action and they’re full of unintended tactical consequences.
A temporary player shortage in football isn’t nearly as punchy a disadvantage as it is in ice hockey, where the penalty kill is an arse-clenchingly nervy two-minute period that can have an outsized effect on the outcome of the game.
Yellow and red cards are symbolic now, and that’s fine
Football isn’t getting rid of yellow and red cards. There’s no known interest within IFAB in fundamentally changing the way football handles transgressions after 55 years of brandished cards and an imaginary severity scale that barely seems adequate in a sport now scrutinised to the millimetre.
But the beauty of yellow and red cards is the very same beauty that breathes life into football itself: simplicity and universality.
Imperfect though it is, the three-level disciplinary framework can be applied to any level of football, anywhere in the world. That might have lost its lustre in the cut-throat era of elite modern football but it’s important and should be protected wherever possible.
That the idea of yellow and red cards are woven into culture beyond football isn’t a reason to anchor the game to them, but the simplicity of the concept enables it to ooze into the wider public vocabulary and that is a tick in the ‘for’ column.
It doesn’t work completely but at least it works a bit. Updates are needed. When I open up the 2025/26 Laws of the Game PDF, I do want to read that yellow cards and red cards will be used more for some things and less for others. I want to see certain offences dealt with more effectively. Hell, I’m even open to innovative suggestions to tackle some of football’s worst irritants.
But it will be the yellow and red card framework that underpins it all, no matter how outlandish or unexpected any tweaks might be. That’s probably for the best.
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