FIFA's Marco van Basten has crazypants ideas (Running shootouts! Stop clock! Sin bin! No offside!) and we love them

Former Dutch superstar Marco van Basten, whose career was cut short by ankle injuries just after his 28th birthday, has been vocal about his wild ideas to innovate soccer for years. It’s just that he made most of his pleas in Dutch, and that he didn’t have much of a platform, let alone the power to enact them.

After he finally retired in 1995, following years of surgeries and failed comebacks, he stepped away from the game for almost a decade before embarking on a middling coaching career. But in September, he became Chief Officer of Technical Development at FIFA, where he was put in charge of throwing ideas at the wall for the future of soccer and seeing what sticks.

On Wednesday, we got a glimpse of what he’s got cooking. The plan to expand the World Cup to 48 teams in 2026 was apparently van Basten’s brainchild, although it’s also been said that new FIFA president Gianni Infantino is merely using the former striker as a mouthpiece for his own ideas.

In that tournament, there will be 16 groups of three, meaning the final group stage games could pit two teams who’d both advance with a tie. This can lead to scandalously insipid games that betray the very spirit of sport. And so van Basten has suggested in an interview with German magazine Sport Bild that ties could be decided by penalty shootouts, just like in the early days of Major League Soccer, to disincentivize playing for a draw.

More interesting still: van Basten is suggesting that hockey-style shootouts could replace traditional spot-kick penalties, wherein a player would get to run at the goalie from 25 meters with eight seconds to shoot. The old North American Soccer League famously did these. (It’s probably worth pointing out here that NASL star and Dutch legend Johan Cruyff was a huge fan of these shootouts. And that van Basten was a protege of the recently deceased Cruyff.)

We quite like this idea. Because it actually simulates a soccer scenario much more closely than an uncontested kick from the spot. It’s more of a soccer play than a traditional penalty. And it will surely make for more dramatic viewing.

Van Basten also discussed stopping the clock in the final 10 minutes of games to avoid time-wasting. Again: We’re into this.

And he suggested sin bins, like in hockey, instead of yellow cards to punish teams more severely for serious fouls. Big fan of this, too. It should make for a cleaner sport when the downside to a hard tackle is to be reduced to 10 men for five to 10 minutes.

His idea of allowing more than three substitutions? Less so. Although we believe that unlimited substitutions in case of suspected concussions would be a good thing. This wasn’t mentioned by van Basten, though.

As for van Basten’s notion of abolishing the offside, well, that one is hard to even wrap your head around. It would change the game so dramatically, opening up vast spaces, that it’s tough to tell what it would even look like.

But you keep on thinking up radical innovations, Marco. We’re all for it.

Leander Schaerlaeckens is a soccer columnist for Yahoo Sports. Follow him on Twitter @LeanderAlphabet.