IFAB, the body that determines the rules of football and makes changes to them, is set to make the decision to allow five substitutions in football matches next month.
That's according to The Athletic, who are reporting that the temporary rule change, initially introduced during 'Project Restart' last season, could be about to be made a permanent fixture at the International Football Association Board's (IFAB) meeting at the start of next month.
The report claims that IFAB has recommended in the past that all competitions should be allowing up to five substitutions per match. However, a majority vote from the 20 Premier League clubs during the 2020/21 season went against the proposal.
What's been said on the matter?
Speaking towards the end of 2020, when the call to make the five substitutions rule permanent, Mikel Arteta was bemused by the rejection of the proposal.
The Arsenal boss said: "I think the most important thing at the moment is the welfare of the players and the best way to protect them and have options to protect them is to have the option to extend the substitutes.
"So it’s like yes, we’ll give you a little bit of this so that you can have an extra two on the bench but not the option to change.
"We are the only ones doing that and for me that doesn’t make a lot of sense but obviously it’s not up to us."
Meanwhile, more recently, Chelsea manager Thomas Tuchel called for the rule to be brought back into play.
Tuchel said: "For us it's the same situation as for anyone else. We have concerns, because we are not only football players and coaches, we are also fathers and have family members so we are also concerned and have doubts and fears.
"Still we are privileged to do our jobs and do what we love the most so it's kind of in between. I'm very impressed with how the team takes it.
"You know very well that the situation was very different when we arrived in Wolverhampton and had seven positive tests in three days.
"We had the feeling that we had an outbreak and wanted some time to deal with it mentally and to settle the team down. That was not the case and we lived with it. We tried to be as supportive as possible.
"I just can say on this occasion I would love to push for five substitutions because five substitutions were made to protect the players when coronavirus popped up and made life difficult.
"I think the situation is very serious and very challenging so if we decided to keep on playing at least we should have five changes to control the load."
