Before the back-pass rule was introduced in 1992, this was exactly how weaker teams did play, esp. at the 1990 World Cup; they couldn't lose the ball to pressing by opponents, since they could always pass back to the goalkeeper, who could pick it up and could not be tackled, before wasting more time then rolling/passing/kicking the ball back out and doing the whole thing all over again. So it was a consequence-free environment, and teams generally had no obligation to attack or move the ball into the last third of the pitch (other than getting booed, or an innate sense of sporting shame). Wikipedia quotes SkySports on this:
The back-pass rule was introduced in 1992 to discourage time-wasting
and unduly defensive play after the 1990 World Cup was described as
exceedingly dull, rife with back-passing and goalkeepers holding up
the ball.
You can see exactly this in old World Cup videos from 1982, 1986, 1990 etc.
Teams that had particular reputations for playing end-to-end passing then back to the goalkeeper without making any effort to attack included Egypt, Norway (previous WCs), Rep of Ireland (my country) and countless others. (No disrespect.)
As In Memory of Legal Backpasses (1863-1993) mentions:
Gradually, though, [between 1966-1990] the game evidently became more
cynical. The anti-football nadir was reached at the start of the
1990s, as Jonathan Wilson writes:
'A general rethink about the laws of the game had been promoted by
the negativity of the 1990 World Cup and, in particular one passage of
play in the group match between the Republic of Ireland and Egypt in
which the Irish keeper Packie Bonner held the ball for almost six
minutes without releasing it.'
Jonathan Wilson - The Outsider: A History of the Goalkeeper
Hey, people in Ireland were quite embarrassed by that too, it's not how we generally played (unlike Norway or Egypt), it's good the practice got banned.
