It’s not so much a “book” these days. International Football Association Board (IFAB), the body in charge of the rules of the game and arbiters of what is and isn’t allowed in it, have created a handy Laws of the Game app. Which is actually pretty good – it has a 4.3 star rating from over 2,000 reviews.
“The fact that the Laws of the Game are the same for all football throughout the world, from the Fifa World Cup through to a game between young children in a remote village, is a considerable strength which must continue to be harnessed for the good of football everywhere.”
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Read MoreAnd then follows 116 pages of complex rules and regulations, full of bullet points and graphs and diagrams, and offside armpits.
And if the rules weren’t confusing enough already, IFAB keep changing them. They keep tweaking and tinkering, forever sawing off bits here, extending over there, tightening screws and hammering in nails.
Take last season. They added a separate bullet point for goal celebrations “in the list of causes of time lost for which the referee makes allowances” – that was the moment players were effectively penalised for enjoying goals a bit too much.
So much of football discourse has become about officiating errors (Photo: Getty)On the subject of penalties, last year the term “kicks from the penalty mark” was finally replaced by “penalties”. Although why anyone felt it necessary to refer to penalties as “kicks from the penalty mark” in the first place is beyond me. Why use one word when you can use five, eh?
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Read MoreIn 2020-21, they added that “the goalposts and the crossbar may be a combination of the four basic shapes”. A year later it was decided: “Goalposts and crossbar must be the same shape.”
2021-22 was the year they included “the law 12 definition of where the arm ends (bottom of armpit) for the purposes of determining an offside/onside position”. And that was the moment offside armpits were cemented in the game, a metric used in jumpers-for-goalposts games and amateur pitches the world over.
From 2016 to 2020 there were more than 170 changes. Did football really require somewhere in the region of 250 tweaks to its rules in a decade? It seemed to have fared pretty well during the century-and-a-half it was played before that.
It does make you wonder if maybe it isn’t the referees’ fault so much of football discourse has become about officiating errors. Everyone keeps shouting at them and nothing seems to be improving. Could it be the rulebook? One minute it is in a referee’s hand, the next it is slipping through their fingers like sand.
Some of the many rule tweaks in the last decade
What constitutes handball Offside armpits Deliberately playing the ball Goal celebrations Goalkeeper behaviour during penaltiesAnd hats off to Postecoglou for speaking out when an officiating mistake had won his team the game. Liverpool manager Arne Slot was furious Lucas Bergvall wasn’t sent off for a second yellow card for a challenge before scoring a late winning goal. Too many coaches lash out only when it costs them.
“Especially in this country – you guys think you’re custodians of the game, you’ve got a song that says ‘it’s coming home’. This is your game. And yet it takes an Aussie from the other side of the world to be the one that’s most conservative about changes.”
Bergvall scored the winning goal for Spurs in their Carabao Cup clash against Liverpool (Photo: Getty)Only a few days before, Postecoglou had complained, after being left bewildered by a decision not to award a handball in the build-up to Antony Gordon’s equaliser in a defeat to Newcastle United, that “it’s very hard at the moment, it’s very confusing, to understand certain elements of the game”.
“Football must have Laws which keep the game fair – this is a crucial foundation of the ‘beautiful game’ and a vital feature of the ‘spirit’ of the game,” reads another passage in IFAB’s rulebook.
In the game the rulebook has created, matches seem further away from that definition than ever.
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