Canadian league to trial Arsene Wenger’s offside idea

The Canadian Premier League is set to trial Arsene Wenger’s “daylight” offside rule.

It was presented to the International Football Association Board (Ifab) at its annual business meeting on Tuesday.

It will now go forward to the annual general meeting in Cardiff on 28 February. If approved the trial will begin when the 2026 season of the Canadian Premier League kicks off in April.

Wenger, who has been Fifa’s head of global football development since 2019, proposes that there should be a complete gap between the attacker and the second-to-last opposition player – effectively the last defender, given the goalkeeper’s usual positioning.

Critics have suggested that daylight offside will give too much advantage to the attacking team.

“We have to try the radical solution first and see if we need to come back from that,” said Wenger when he left Tuesday’s meeting in London.

It was first suggested six years ago but so far there have only been limited trials in youth football.

If it goes ahead the results of the trial in Canada will be presented to Ifab at the end of year. If successful there is the potential for the law to change across the world for the 2027-28 European season.

Other leagues are set to be invited to take part in the trial. It is likely Ifab will want multiple tests to show the change is robust, especially as the Canadian league does not have video assistant referees (VAR).

Before the Ifab meeting it was expected that the trials of “daylight” offside would be ditched in favour of “torso” offside, which ignores arms and feet when making a judgement.

However, there was opposition to this idea and it is now unlikely to go to trials.