Imagine Ange Postecoglou asking the referee to remove Allan McGregor leaving the goal untended for a full two minutes during the next Celtic v Rangers derby, Aberdeen taking a 2-0 lead over Hearts in the race for third after just a single Bojan Miovski strike or James Tavernier being allowed to take a penalty in a league match whenever he wants.
Even in the haphazard world of Scottish football officiating, the aforementioned hypotheticals are outrageous – well, perhaps not the Tavernier one – but they are weekly occurrences in the newly-launched Kings League.
For those new to the Kings League, it's the brainchild of Gerard Pique, the former Champions League and World Cup winning defender of Barcelona and Spain fame. Pique, whose company Kosmos won and then recently lost the contract to organise the Davis Cup in tennis, has teamed up with the Spanish Twitch streamer Ibai Llanos to create a seven-a-side football tournament that fuses FIFA-style multi-ball rules with the game of football as we know it.
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Team presidents include Sergio Aguero and Iker Casillas, who also play for their respective sides KuniSports and 1k, each squad is comprised of 10 players with two ringers allowed to feature one current and one former professional footballer. One of these, the self-styled ENIGMA69 has caused quite the stir among followers of the Kings League as to his true identity since he plays his games for the XBuyer team wearing a red and white, WWE-style mask and long sleeves to hide his tattoos. It has prompted a host of guesses from former Real Madrid midfielder Isco, who is currently a free agent, to Denis Suarez, the one-time Arsenal loanee, who now plays for Celta Vigo – but Aguero gave the game away when he admitted: "[Enigma is] someone who played for Cadiz."
The amateur sleuths soon worked out that the player in question was probably the Spanish journeyman striker Nano Mesa, something that was later confirmed by the journalist Guillem Balague.
With its efforts to inject greater pace and drama into football the Kings League is not unlike the white-ball format introduced to make cricket more sexy but with a lot more wildcard elements and gimmicks to it. For example, teams pick one of five golden cards prior to kick-off: the cards include actions like 'instant penalty', 'rob a card', 'remove a player for two minutes', 'goal counts double' and 'a joker' card.
There are plenty of other quirky rules such as a water-polo style kick-off that involves both sets of players starting from behind their goal before charging to be first to the ball and sin-bins for yellow and red cards.
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There is also VAR – that most contentious of all of conventional football's innovations. If some of Pique's ideas are too rich for the blood of the average football fan, then perhaps the mainstream format of the game could learn something from the Kings League's take on the Video Assistant Referee. Each team has one decision per game that they are allowed to review, if they are correct with their challenge they get to keep it, if they are wrong they lose it.
It's not the worst idea in the world, even if much of the rest of the Kings League seems designed to appeal to the mores of kids and teenage streamers encamped in their bedrooms. Cricket, a stolid, slow-moving format has benefited from greater innovation and the introduction pacier play to its proceedings in T20, for example. Football, on the other hand, has never wanted for thrills as Aguero – scorer of one of the most dramatic goals in Premier League history – knows all too well.
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