Sepp Blatter, visionary and forward thinker that he is, has been toying with the idea of abolishing the offside rule in football. Just toying, you understand, no more than that, but since Blatter's counterpart in the hockey world, Leandro Negre, revealed details of a conversation between the pair in which the Fifa president asked about the pros and cons of offside being ditched in hockey 12 years ago, one of football's oldest talking points is back on the agenda, if only as a talking point.

Negre did not have anything negative to say about hockey's rule change. Abolishing offside seems to have made the sport more open and attacking and consequently more appealing to spectators, though hockey's offside rule was not quite the same as football's in any case. Nothing is.

Football has considerably more spectators than hockey already, and there appears little need to change what is demonstrably a successful formula, though half the contentious decisions in football are based on offside and an awful lot turn out to be faulty.

There would be interest, to put it mildly, in simplifying the situation so that almost every goal would stand and the game would not have to be constantly brought to a halt for technical offences near the halfway line. Fifa are usually in favour of more goals being scored, so by extension they will also be interested in fewer goals being disallowed.

Some will view this as heresy, others will simply assume it is more wacky thinking from the ideas factory that not too long ago suggested women footballers should wear tighter shorts, yet it ought to be acknowledged from the outset that football's offside rule is a bastardised, almost arbitrary version of the norm in other sports.

For a start it has not always been around, different leagues used different interpretations of the offside rule as football developed in England in the 19th century, and the present requirement that two players must be ahead of an attempting to receive or play the ball was only standardised as late as 1925. Before that the rule was three players, although in some areas there had been no rule at all.

Secondly, while football began with an understanding of offside similar to rugby's, that players must always be behind the ball, this was quickly found to be too limiting and altered so that the ball could be passed direct to colleagues further downfield. Rugby still does not allow this, and the reason forward passes are illegal is because they contravene the offside rule.

It is possible to crosskick in rugby, or hoist a high punt downfield for teammates to chase, but only if they start from an onside position, behind the kicker, when the ball is played. Football needed to sanction short and long kicks downfield to team-mates in more advanced positions, while preventing the situation whereby "goal-hanging" forwards would station themselves permanently on the opposition's goal-line and wait for kick-throughs, so eventually, after a fair amount of trial and error, the present compromise was reached.

It is only a compromise, though, and a rule that is less than 100 years old, so it is not inevitable that it will stay unaltered for the rest of time, even if it is extremely unlikely that Blatter or anyone else will scrap it. The trouble with making such a massive change is that it would change the game massively, and no one can work out in advance whether it would be for the better or not. The game we know today, for example, a generally open and entertaining one with a good balance between defence and attack, has not always looked that way.

Football as a fast, free-flowing spectacle has been greatly improved by two fairly recent and deceptively slight rule changes. There was a brief storm of protest when backpasses to goalkeepers were outlawed (or at least goalkeepers were prevented from picking them up), though anyone looking back at old footage from the Seventies and Eighties will wonder how we ever put up with them for so long. Similarly the 1990 amendment to deem an attacker onside if merely level with the second to last defender was a subtle rewriting of the law that produced an enormously beneficial effect.

Games in the Eighties and early Nineties, an era perhaps typified by the Arsenal back four and the synchronised offside trap immortalised so neatly in The Full Monty, would often take part in such a narrow band of the pitch that all 20 outfield players would move up and down in a co-ordinated stripe. The most common comment back then was that you could throw a blanket over the lot of them, yet the rule change made a difference, and though it took a few years to work through, rigid last lines fell out of fashion and the game spread out to make use of a much greater area of the pitch. The Full Monty came out in 1997, when Tony Adams was still going strong, though by that time his raised hand appeal had already had its heyday.

Were the offside rule to be totally scrapped, no one really knows what would happen. Goalhangers would certainly come back, though it would appear a fairly simple matter for defenders to be stationed to look after them and that would stretch the game and create more space in midfield. Good thing, bad thing, who knows?

The only thing that can be safely said is that it would make a huge difference to the way the game is played, and football as it is currently played seems to be fine by most people. On the other hand, to put up with the present system is to accept that mistakes will often be made, sometimes as glaring as Jermain Defoe at Wigan last month or Miroslav Klose against Fiorentina in the Champions League. Both those should have been spotted, though there is at least one decision per game that is so borderline the human eye cannot possibly be expected to always get it right.

The offside rule has built-in imperfections and is bound to create injustices from time to time, yet it works most of the time and presently shapes football to a degree not always fully appreciated. It will probably be around for a good few years yet.