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'Change isn't a quality, improvement is'

What does Arsene Wenger make of the latest proposals to shake up the laws of football - and what does he think is workable?

Fifa technical director Marco van Basten has put forward plans including abolishing the offside law, introducing sin-bins and only allowing captains to speak to the referee.

While Wenger is keen on the latter, he feels others are not to the benefit of the game as a whole.

"Changing in itself is not a quality, improving is the real target," the Arsenal manager said. "Some of the proposals are discussable, some of them I don’t see any big interest.

"The one I don’t find interesting is suppressing offside, because I think offside is what makes the teams be together, it’s a big quality of a team sport. It’s an intelligent rule as well where you can use your intelligence and so that is very important to keep that in the game.

"Overall, let’s not forget that football improves as well. People say it’s too tight, too compact… but the evolution of the game has always been like that. Defence gives a problem to the attack, the attack finds the solution and the response and the defence creates a new problem again for the attack, so we have to keep that going.

"But for the improvement of the game, it’s very important that you always face new difficulties."

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