The 17 Laws of Soccer: The Complete Rules, and What Changed for 2026/27

All 17 Laws

Soccer’s rules are called Laws, and there have been 17 of them since the game was first codified. The content has changed beyond recognition; the number has not.

Law	Title	Law	Title
1	The Field of Play	10	Determining the Outcome of a Match
2	The Ball	11	Offside
3	The Players	12	Fouls and Misconduct
4	The Players’ Equipment	13	Free Kicks
5	The Referee	14	The Penalty Kick
6	The Other Match Officials	15	The Throw-in
7	The Duration of the Match	16	The Goal Kick
8	The Start and Restart of Play	17	The Corner Kick
9	Ball In and Out of Play

Read as a list, the structure is clear. Laws 1–7 describe the setting — the pitch, the ball, the people. Laws 8–12 describe play itself. Laws 13–17 are all restarts: free kick, penalty, throw-in, goal kick, corner. A third of the entire rulebook is about how to start playing again.

That proportion tells you something real about the sport. Soccer stops constantly, and the Laws spend more space on resuming than on almost anything else.

Who actually writes them

The habit of settling the game by committee is as old as the game itself: the original laws took six meetings across 44 days to agree, and were not approved until December 1863 — see when soccer was actually established.

Not FIFA — a point that surprises most people.

The Laws are written by IFAB, the International Football Association Board, made up of the four British football associations and FIFA. IFAB is the only body that can change the Laws of the Game. FIFA applies them worldwide and holds half the voting power, but it cannot rewrite them alone.

This is unusual. Most sports have their global federation write their own rules — World Rugby writes rugby’s, the IIHF writes international hockey’s. Soccer separates the two functions, a legacy of the game’s British origins that survived its globalisation.

The split matters more than it looks. FIFA cannot rewrite a Law, but it decides things the Laws never touch — such as how many World Cup places each continent gets, which is a governance decision rather than a rule of the game.

What changed for 2026/27

These are the changes most likely to affect a match you watch this season.

A five-second countdown on throw-ins and goal kicks

The most visible change. Referees now use a visible five-second countdown when a player or team is delaying a throw-in (Law 15) or a goal kick (Law 16).

The sanctions are asymmetric, and deliberately so:

• Throw-in taken too slowly → the throw-in is awarded to the opposition
• Goal kick taken too slowly → the opposition are awarded a corner kick

Giving away a corner for time-wasting on a goal kick is a much heavier punishment than losing a throw-in, which reflects where time-wasting actually happens: a defending team protecting a lead from its own goal area.

This follows the same logic as the goalkeeper holding-the-ball limit — soccer has spent several seasons attaching visible countdowns to the moments teams most reliably exploit.

Ten seconds to leave the pitch

A substituted player now has ten seconds to leave the field. If they exceed it, their replacement cannot enter until the first stoppage after a further minute has elapsed.

Again, the punishment falls on the team, not on the individual — being a player short for up to a minute is a real cost.

Injury treatment now costs a minute

With certain exceptions, a player who receives assessment or treatment on the field, or who causes play to be stopped because of injury, must leave and stay off the field for one minute after play restarts.

The intent is to remove the incentive to stay down.

Law 12 also governs something most fans never think of as legislated at all: goal celebrations. Leaving the pitch to celebrate is explicitly not a cautionable offence, while removing your shirt is — even if the goal is then disallowed. We cover that, and where Ronaldo’s Siuuu came from, separately.

Fewer automatic yellow cards

Two changes soften cautions where the original reasoning no longer applies:

• No caution for DOGSO if advantage is played and a goal is scored. If the goal stands, the goalscoring opportunity was not in fact denied, so the yellow card falls away. IFAB has also added a reference to attackers among the DOGSO considerations.
• No automatic caution for the penalty taker when the kicker and the goalkeeper offend at the same time (Laws 10 and 14). Previously the kicker was cautioned even though both had transgressed.

More things VAR can review

The video assistant referee protocol expands to cover:

• a red card from a clearly incorrect second yellow
• mistaken identity — a card shown to the wrong player, of either team
• incorrectly awarded corner kicks, as a competition option, where the decision can be corrected immediately without delaying the restart

Competitions may also now equip referees, assistant referees and fourth officials with body cameras, and use technology to assist with ball in/out of play and semi-automated offside.

Coming later: only the captain

IFAB has given advance notice that the “only the captain” guidelines — restricting who may approach the referee — become a compulsory protocol for all competitions from 1 July 2027.

That is a year away and is not yet in force.

The Law that causes the most arguments

Of the 17, one generates more disagreement than the rest combined: Law 11, Offside.

It is short, it is precisely worded, and it is almost universally misremembered — chiefly because being in an offside position is not itself an offence. We have covered it separately in the offside rule explained, including the deliberate-play versus deflection distinction that decides most VAR calls.

Substitutes in international friendlies

A change with an oddly specific scope: in senior ‘A’ international team friendly matches, the number of substitutes that may be used rises to eight — or to eleven if both teams agree and tell the referee in advance. The restriction to three substitution opportunities per team still applies.

Friendlies have effectively been reclassified as something closer to extended training exercises, while keeping a limit on how often play is interrupted to make the changes.

Where to read them yourself

IFAB publishes the full Laws and the annual changes document free of charge, and both are readable without a refereeing background. If you only read one, read the changes document — it gives the previous wording, the new wording, and IFAB’s stated reason for each change, which is the clearest insight available into why the sport makes the decisions it does.

More breakdowns of how sports actually work are in rules and techniques.