The Offside Rule Explained: What IFAB's Law 11 Actually Says

The rule in one sentence, and the part everyone gets wrong

Offside is two separate tests, and almost every argument about it comes from collapsing them into one.

Offside is Law 11 of the seventeen that make up the Laws of the Game, and it is the one that produces more disagreement than the other sixteen combined.

Test one is position. You are in an offside position if any part of your head, body or feet is in the opponents’ half — the halfway line itself excluded — and nearer to the opponents’ goal line than both the ball and the second-last opponent.

Test two is involvement. IFAB states plainly that it is not an offence to be in an offside position. You are penalised only if you then become involved in active play.

A player can stand in an offside position for ninety minutes and never commit an offence. That is why the linesman’s flag sometimes stays down when a player is obviously beyond the defence — the position was offside, the involvement never happened.

Why “second-last opponent” and not “last defender”

The law says second-last opponent, not last defender, and the distinction matters more often than you would think.

In normal play the goalkeeper is the last opponent and the deepest outfield defender is the second-last, which is why the shorthand “last defender” usually works. But when a keeper rushes out, or is up for a corner, the two roles swap. The law is written to survive that, because it never mentions positions at all — only how many opponents are between you and the goal line.

Level is onside. You must be nearer than the second-last opponent. Being exactly level with them, or with the last two opponents, is not an offside position. Every one of those agonising frame-by-frame VAR lines exists to answer this single question: nearer, or level?

Why arms and hands don’t count

The law considers the head, body and feet, and adds that “the hands and arms of all players, including the goalkeepers, are not considered.”

This is not an arbitrary carve-out. The offside line is really asking could this part of you legally score? You cannot score with your hand or arm, so an arm hanging beyond the defensive line cannot put you offside. The armpit, famously, is where the body ends and the arm begins for these purposes.

The three ways you become involved

Position alone does nothing. Under Law 11 you commit an offence by:

1. Interfering with play — “playing or touching a ball passed or touched by a team-mate.”

2. Interfering with an opponent, which the law breaks into four specific actions:

• preventing an opponent from playing the ball by clearly obstructing their line of vision
• challenging an opponent for the ball
• clearly attempting to play a ball which is close, when this impacts an opponent
• making an obvious action which clearly impacts an opponent’s ability to play the ball

3. Gaining an advantage by playing the ball or interfering with an opponent when it has:

• rebounded or been deflected off the goalpost, crossbar, a match official or an opponent
• been deliberately saved by any opponent

That second list is the one that decides modern matches.

Deflection versus deliberate play

Here is the distinction that produces most of the shouting.

If the ball reaches an offside-positioned attacker because it rebounded off the post, the crossbar, a match official, or an opponent, or because a defender deliberately saved it, the attacker can still be penalised. The offside situation is not reset.

But if a defender deliberately plays the ball — a genuine, controlled action, not a desperate block or an unintentional ricochet — the situation is reset, and the attacker is free to play on.

So the referee is not judging whether the defender touched the ball. They are judging whether the defender chose to. A controlled pass or clearance resets it; a blocked shot off the shin does not. A save never does, which is explicitly written into the law.

The three restarts with no offside

There is no offside offence if a player receives the ball directly from:

• a goal kick
• a throw-in
• a corner kick

The word directly is load-bearing. Receive a throw-in in an offside position and you are fine; if that ball is then passed on to you by a team-mate while you are still beyond the line, ordinary offside applies again.

The punishment

An indirect free kick to the defending team, taken from where the offence occurred.

Indirect means no goal can be scored straight from the kick — another player must touch the ball first. Offside is treated as a technical infringement rather than foul play, which is why it carries no card and no direct shooting opportunity.

How rugby’s offside differs — and why

Offside is one of the rare ideas that several sports invented separately, and comparing them shows what each rule is really protecting.

In soccer, offside is about a line defined by opponents. It exists to stop attackers goal-hanging behind the defence, so it measures you against the second-last opponent.

In rugby union, offside is about a line defined by the ball. A player is offside if they are in front of a team-mate carrying the ball or who last played it — opponents are irrelevant to the calculation. That follows directly from rugby’s core constraint that the ball cannot be passed forward: if the ball only moves backwards, everyone ahead of it is by definition out of the game.

A third version exists again in ice hockey, where offside is measured against a painted line — the blue line — rather than against opponents or the puck. That is why hockey offside can be judged frame by frame against fixed geometry, while soccer’s line moves with the defence.

Three sports, the same word, three unrelated reference points: the defence, your own ball, and a line on the floor. None is a variant of the others — each was built to solve a different problem.

More breakdowns of how sports actually work sit in rules and techniques, and our research and sourcing policy explains why we quote governing-body law texts rather than summarise them. For what the same league looks like through its record book, see hat-tricks in La Liga history — and for the object all of this is ultimately played for, the FIFA World Cup trophy has a stranger history than the sport it represents.