A player scores in the 94th minute of a derby, runs to the corner where his own supporters are, and gets booked for it. Everyone accepts this now. It's been the rule long enough that it feels normal.
It's worth occasionally remembering that this is quite a strange thing for a sport to have decided.
How we got here
The rules didn't arrive arbitrarily. Shirt removal became a caution partly for time-wasting reasons and partly for commercial ones — sponsors on shirts, undershirts with slogans, a general desire to keep messages off the pitch.
Approaching or entering the crowd is more defensible. There have been genuine crowd safety incidents, crushes at the front of stands, players injured by fans. Nobody sensible wants a repeat of any of that, and the rule is a reasonable response to a real risk.
The provocative-celebration rules, similarly, come from a real place. Celebrating in front of opposition fans has caused trouble more than once and the game has enough problems without inviting more.
So each individual rule has a justification. The cumulative effect is what I'd question.
What we've ended up with
The modern celebration is heavily constrained. Stay on the pitch, keep your shirt on, don't approach the away end, don't gesture at anybody, don't take too long, and remember there's a VAR check coming so you might be doing all this for nothing anyway.
That last one might be the biggest change and it gets the least attention. The half-second of pure release when a ball hits the net has been replaced, in a significant fraction of goals, by a look at the assistant referee and a wait. Players celebrate tentatively now. Crowds celebrate tentatively. It's a small thing and it has changed the emotional texture of the sport.
I'd add that celebration itself has become somewhat professionalised. Rehearsed routines, personal brand signatures, the hand gesture that becomes a merchandising opportunity. None of that is a rules issue but it's part of the same drift towards the managed and away from the spontaneous.
The ones that got away with it
There's a decent argument that the most memorable celebrations in football history would all be cautioned today.
Running into the crowd. Climbing fences. Shirts off and swung around the head. Sliding on the knees into a corner flag surrounded by supporters. Every single one of those is now, at minimum, a yellow card, and several would get you a red if you'd already been booked.
The counter-argument is obvious: so what? A yellow card is a small price and players still do these things when the moment is big enough. Which is true, and I think it's actually the most interesting part of the whole situation.
The economics of the yellow card
What the rules have effectively done is put a price on celebration rather than banning it. A player who scores a last-minute winner in a cup semi-final will take his shirt off and accept the booking, because the booking is worth it.
A player who scores the fourth in a routine home win against a mid-table side won't, because it isn't.
So the rule functions as a filter. It doesn't stop celebration, it stops routine celebration, and it reserves the big ones for the big moments. That's a defensible outcome and probably not what the rule-makers intended.
There is a real cost though, in the cases where it goes wrong — the player already on a yellow who gets sent off for celebrating, leaving his team with ten men. That happens a handful of times a season and it always feels absurd. Being dismissed from a football match for being too happy is a genuinely silly way to lose a game.
What I'd actually change
Not much, honestly, and I say that as somebody who's just spent several hundred words being nostalgic.
The crowd safety rules should stay. The provocation rules should stay. Those address real problems and the cost is low.
The shirt removal rule is the one I'd drop, or at least downgrade. The justifications for it are weak — time wasting is better addressed by adding the time back, and message-control is not really football's job. It produces the largest number of the daft outcomes and prevents the least harm.
I'd also like to see referees given explicit discretion not to caution for a first celebration offence when it's clearly joy rather than provocation. Some already do this quietly and the game is better for it. Formalising it would help.
The thing underneath all this
What's really being negotiated here isn't celebration rules. It's the question of how much of football's emotional excess the sport wants to keep as it becomes a more organised, more televised, more commercially significant product.
The direction of travel over thirty years has been consistently towards control. Cleaner, safer, more predictable, more marketable. And most of the individual steps have been reasonable, which is exactly how you end up somewhere you didn't intend to be.
A goal is the only thing in football that's genuinely worth losing your composure over. It'd be nice if the sport left a bit more room for that.