  We give a new way of looking at the Cho--Faddeev--Niemi (CFN) decomposition
of the Yang-Mills theory to answer how the enlarged local gauge symmetry
respected by the CFN variables is restricted to obtain another Yang-Mills
theory with the same local and global gauge symmetries as the original
Yang-Mills theory. This may shed new light on the fundamental issue of the
discrepancy between two theories for independent degrees of freedom and the
role of the Maximal Abelian gauge in Yang-Mills theory. As a byproduct, this
consideration gives new insight into the meaning of the gauge invariance and
the observables, e.g., a gauge-invariant mass term and vacuum condensates of
mass dimension two. We point out the implications for the Skyrme--Faddeev
model.
