The offside rule explained: position, involvement, sanction

The flag stays down.

A striker has gone off the shoulder, the ball is in the net, and a fair proportion of the ground is not watching the celebration at all. They are watching a man on the touchline, standing very still, deciding whether the last ten seconds happened.

That decision looks like one judgement. It is two, and nearly every argument about it comes from collapsing them into one. Most versions of the offside rule explained in a pub, a commentary box or a television graphic answer the first question and stop there. Law 11 asks a first question, and then asks a second, and the second one is where the football actually is.

Question one is geometry: was the player in an offside position? It has an exact answer, it can be measured to the centimetre, and it is not an offence. It has never been an offence. A player can stand in an offside position for the whole ninety minutes and never break a law.

Question two is judgement: did that player become involved? It has three separate definitions, each with its own wording, and it is the question that decides matches, disallows goals and produces the arguments that outlive the season.

Everything below is those two questions, taken apart properly.

The offside rule explained in two questions rather than one

The structure of the law is worth stating baldly, because once you have it, most of the confusion dissolves on contact.

Being in an offside position is a state. It is true or false about a player at a particular instant, and it depends on three things: which half of the pitch they are in, where the ball is, and where the second-last opponent is.

Committing an offside offence is an act. It requires the state to be true at one specific instant, and then requires the player to do one of a short list of things afterwards.

The sanction only arrives at the end of that chain. Miss out the middle and you get the two most common mistakes in the sport: the fan who shouts "offside" at a player standing in an offside position who never touches the ball, and the fan who insists a player cannot have been offside because he was level when he received it. Both are answering the wrong question.

1. 1Fix the instantOffside is judged at the moment the ball is played or touched by a team-mate. Not when the pass arrives, not when the run begins. Every measurement below is frozen at that instant and nothing afterwards changes it.
2. 2Question one, the position testAt that instant, is any part of the player's head, body or feet in the opposition half, and nearer to the opposition goal line than both the ball and the second-last opponent? Arms and hands are excluded. Level is onside.
3. 3If the answer is no, stopThere is no offence and there never can be one from this pass, whatever the player does next. He can score, obstruct the goalkeeper, or run through the entire defence. The law has nothing to say about it.
4. 4Question two, the involvement testIf the answer is yes, the player is in an offside position and has still committed no offence. He is penalised only if he then interferes with play, interferes with an opponent, or gains an advantage from a rebound or a deflection.
5. 5Check the exemptionsEven then, there is no offence if the ball came directly from a throw-in, a goal kick or a corner, or if an opponent deliberately played the ball to him and that deliberate play was not a save.
6. 6The sanctionAn indirect free kick to the defending team, taken from the position of the offence, which can be in the offside player's own half. No caution, no card. Offside is not misconduct and never has been.

The first three steps happen in a single instant. Everything after them happens later, and only matters if the first three are satisfied.

What actually puts a player in an offside position

Three conditions, all of which have to hold at the same instant.

The player is in the opposition half. The halfway line itself does not count as the opposition half, so a player standing with a foot on the line is in his own half and cannot be offside. This produces the one piece of offside knowledge every centre-half has: if you are level with the halfway line, you are safe, and if the line is behind you, you are not.

The player is nearer to the opposition goal line than the ball. More on this below, because it is the condition that quietly decides more goals than the other two combined.

The player is nearer to the opposition goal line than the second-last opponent. Not the last defender. Not the last outfield player. The second-last opponent, counted by position on the pitch, whoever they happen to be.

And then the part that turns all three into a measurement: which bits of the player are we talking about?

The head, the body and the feet count. The hands and the arms do not, for anybody, goalkeepers included. The boundary is drawn at the bottom of the armpit, which means the top of the shoulder is in and the whole of the arm below it is out. A striker leaning forward with an arm outstretched can have that hand a foot beyond the last defender and be comfortably onside, because the law simply does not look there.

The reasoning behind excluding arms is sound, if slightly grim. Offside is meant to be about whether you are ahead of the defence in a way that helps you score, and you cannot score with your arm. Including arms would mean a goal disallowed because of a body part that could not legally have been involved in scoring it. So the lawmakers drew a line at the armpit and accepted that the line would sometimes look absurd on a freeze frame.

There is no tolerance band anywhere in this. The law says nearer, so level is onside and a centimetre is nearer. The idea that there needs to be "clear daylight" between the attacker and the defender is folklore, invented by commentary and sustained by the fact that for a century nobody could measure anything smaller than daylight. Whether a tolerance should exist is a real and live argument, and it is an argument for the lawmakers rather than for the officials, who can only apply the words in front of them.

Why the law says second-last opponent and not last defender

The phrase "last defender" is one of those errors that is right almost all the time, which is what makes it dangerous.

In ordinary open play the goalkeeper is one of the two opponents nearest his own goal line, so the reference point is the outfield defender in front of him, and calling that man "the last defender" gets you the correct answer. The law does not name the goalkeeper at all. It counts bodies.

Which means the reference point moves in exactly the situations where matches are decided.

A goalkeeper who has come out to the edge of his box and been rounded is no longer one of the last two. The two nearest opponents are now defenders scrambling back towards the goal line, and the second-last of those is the reference. A goalkeeper who has gone up for a corner in the last minute is thirty yards from his own goal, and the entire offside line for the counter-attack is drawn off outfield players who have no idea they have become the reference point.

The most awkward version is a keeper who has come for a cross and missed. For a second or two he is ahead of his own defensive line, and an attacker who looks to be level with the last man may in fact be beyond the second-last opponent, because the man he is level with is the last one and the keeper is nowhere. This is one of the genuinely hard reads in officiating, and it is hard for a reason that has nothing to do with speed: the assistant has to recount who is where, in the middle of a set piece, in about a fifth of a second.

Two defenders side by side make the same point in reverse. If the two nearest opponents are level with each other, the second-last opponent stands on the same line as the last one, and an attacker level with both is onside. Defensive lines are drilled to step up together precisely because a line that breaks leaves one defender playing everybody onside on his own.

The ball is the other reference point, and it settles more than people think

Almost every explanation of offside stops at the defenders. The law lists two reference points and the ball is the other one, given exactly equal weight.

A player who is level with the ball or behind it cannot be offside, no matter where the defenders are, no matter how far up the pitch he is standing.

This is not a footnote. It is the mechanical reason the cutback is the most reliable attacking move in modern football. A winger takes the ball to the goal line, which puts the ball itself as deep as it is possible to be, and then squares it. Every team-mate in the six-yard box is now behind the ball, and every one of them is therefore onside. The defenders could be standing on the halfway line drinking tea. Offside cannot be given.

Coaches worked this out and rebuilt the final third around it. The near-post cutback, the low ball pulled back to the penalty spot, the runner arriving late from midfield who is never in an offside position because he starts from behind the ball: these are all offside-proof by construction, which is why they now account for such a large share of the chances teams deliberately manufacture. If you want to understand why the shape of chance creation changed, part of the answer sits in the shot-quality models that told coaches which chances were worth having, covered in the piece on what expected goals actually measures, and part of it sits in this one clause of Law 11.

The same clause explains the other thing that confuses people, which is a pass played sideways or backwards. Offside does not care about the direction of the pass. It cares whether you were ahead of the ball at the moment it was played. A team-mate can pass the ball backwards to a player who is still, at that instant, ahead of the ball and ahead of the second-last opponent, and that player is in an offside position despite having received a backward pass. The pass went one way and the geometry went the other.

The offside rule explained at the moment the ball is played

Everything is frozen at one instant: the moment the ball is played or touched by a team-mate.

Not when the ball arrives. Not when the striker begins his run. Not when the defence steps up. One instant, and the position test is applied to the picture as it stood in that instant and no other.

This is why a forward can be six yards clear of the last defender when he collects the ball and be entirely onside. He timed his run. At the instant of the pass he was level, and everything after that is just him being faster than the man marking him. It is also why a forward can be a shoulder offside at the instant of the pass, then check his run and receive the ball ten yards deep, and still be penalised. The picture that counts was taken before either of those things happened.

And it is the reason offside is the hardest routine decision in the sport, because the person judging it has to be looking at two places at once.

The assistant referee has to see the moment the ball leaves the passer's foot, which is happening in the middle of the pitch, and simultaneously see the relative positions of the attacker and the second-last opponent, which is happening on a line that may be twenty yards away. Human vision cannot do both. The eye jumps between the two, and each jump takes time in which the world keeps moving.

• Attacker moving forward
• Defensive line stepping the other way

Run begins 0.1s early70cm20cm

Run begins 0.2s early140cm40cm

Run begins 0.3s early210cm60cm

Constructed arithmetic with invented round numbers, chosen to make the geometry legible. Not a measurement of any player. A striker accelerating at seven metres per second and a defensive line stepping the other way at two metres per second are separating at nine metres per second, so the gap opens far faster than either figure alone suggests.

Show the numbers

Worked example: how far the picture moves if the run starts fractionally early

Item	Attacker moving forward	Defensive line stepping the other way
Run begins 0.1s early	70cm	20cm
Run begins 0.2s early	140cm	40cm
Run begins 0.3s early	210cm	60cm

Add the two columns together. A run that starts a tenth of a second before the pass leaves the striker ninety centimetres further forward, relative to the line, than a run timed perfectly. Three tenths of a second and the number is closing on three metres.

Those are constructed figures, but the shape of them is the whole problem. The margin the law cares about is a shoulder. The margin an early run produces is a body length. An attacker does not need to cheat by very much to turn a marginal call into an obvious one, and he does not need to be very much less early to turn an obvious one into a call that no human being on a touchline could reliably make.

That is the honest position on marginal offsides. They are not hard because officials are bad at them. They are hard because the quantity being measured is smaller than the resolution of the instrument, and it always was. The lines and the tracking did not create that problem, they made it visible, which is a different thing, and the mechanics of how the moment of the kick is now established are worth reading in the piece on how VAR actually works.

Involvement, and the three definitions underneath it

Here is where the law stops being geometry.

A player in an offside position is penalised only for becoming involved in active play, and involvement is defined in three ways. They are separate. A player only has to satisfy one of them.

Interfering with play is the simple one: playing or touching a ball that has been passed or touched by a team-mate. Touch the ball, and if you were in an offside position at the moment the pass was played, that is the offence. There is nothing else to argue about. Most offsides in most matches are this and nothing more.

Interfering with an opponent is the difficult one, and it gets its own section below, because the wording carries an enormous amount of weight.

Gaining an advantage is the one that catches people out after the event, because it can turn a goal scored two touches later into an offence committed before the first one.

The important structural point is that the three definitions are not a hierarchy or a spectrum. A player who never touches the ball can still commit the offence through the second or third route. A player who touches the ball has committed it through the first, no matter how little he affected anything. The law does not ask whether the involvement was significant. It asks whether it happened.

Interfering with an opponent is the clause with no camera

This is the clause that produces the goals people are still arguing about years later, and it is worth setting out the sense of it precisely, because the detail matters.

A player in an offside position interferes with an opponent by preventing that opponent from playing or being able to play the ball. The law then lists the ways: clearly obstructing the opponent's line of vision; challenging the opponent for the ball; clearly attempting to play a ball which is close, when that attempt impacts on an opponent; or making an obvious action which clearly impacts on an opponent's ability to play the ball.

Read the qualifiers. Clearly obstructing. Clearly attempting. Obvious action. Clearly impacts. The law is loaded with words that raise the bar deliberately, because the alternative would be that any offside player anywhere in the goalkeeper's field of view kills every goal.

So a striker standing in an offside position, motionless, six yards to the side of a shot that flies past him into the corner, has done nothing. The goal stands. He was visible, he was offside, and he was irrelevant, and the law is written so that irrelevance is not an offence.

A striker standing in an offside position directly in the goalkeeper's eyeline, who ducks as the shot passes his head, has almost certainly done something. He did not touch the ball. He did not challenge for it. He made an obvious action that affected the keeper's ability to play the ball, which is the fourth limb of the definition, and it is enough on its own.

There is a further distinction here that almost nobody knows about and that referees use constantly. If an offside player is simply in the way, and his presence impacts an opponent's ability to play or challenge for the ball, that is an offside offence. If the player moves into an opponent's path and impedes his progress, that is not offside at all. That is a foul, dealt with under the fouls and misconduct law, with a direct free kick. Same two players, same collision, and the difference between a static obstruction and a deliberate movement into the path changes both the offence and the restart.

No camera resolves any of this. Tracking technology can tell you that a shoulder was eleven centimetres beyond the reference point. It cannot tell you whether the goalkeeper could see through a man standing in front of him, and it never will, because that is not a measurement. It is a judgement about somebody else's perception, made by a third party, in real time.

Gaining an advantage, rebounds and the deliberate save trap

The third route into involvement covers a specific situation: the ball has come off something before it reached the offside player.

A player in an offside position gains an advantage by playing the ball, or by interfering with an opponent, when the ball has rebounded or been deflected off the goalpost, the crossbar, a match official, or an opponent. The same applies when the ball has been deliberately saved by an opponent.

The logic is straightforward. If you were offside when your team-mate hit the shot, you should not be able to launder your position through the woodwork. The post is not a team-mate and it does not reset anything.

The clause that ruins people's afternoons is the deliberate save.

Here is the sequence. A striker is in an offside position when his team-mate shoots. The goalkeeper saves it. The rebound falls to the striker, who taps it in. He has clearly received the ball from an opponent, and an opponent playing the ball normally wipes the slate clean. He is still offside, and the goal is disallowed.

The reason is that a save is carved out of the reset rule specifically. The law defines a save as stopping, or attempting to stop, a ball going into or very close to the goal, with any part of the body except the hands and arms, unless the player is a goalkeeper inside his own penalty area. So a defender flinging himself in front of a goal-bound shot has made a save, not a deliberate play, and the offside striker who follows up is penalised exactly as if he had scored from the first shot.

This is the right outcome and it is worth understanding why. A save is not a defender choosing to play the ball. It is a defender with no choice at all, doing the only thing available to him, on a ball that was already going in. Treating that as a voluntary act that rewards the attacking team would mean that the harder a defender works to keep the ball out, the more he helps the man who was offside.

Deliberate play or deflection, the most contested line in the law

Everything above turns on a distinction that the law now spends more words on than almost anything else: when an opponent touches the ball, was that a deliberate play or a deflection?

Get it right and the answer follows automatically. A deliberate play by an opponent resets offside, so the attacker who was in an offside position is no longer penalised for what happens next. A deflection off an opponent resets nothing, and the attacker is still offside.

The problem is that "deliberate" is a word about somebody's intention, and intentions are not visible. So the lawmakers stopped asking about intention and started listing observable conditions instead. The guidance sets out five things to weigh.

1. 1Distance and sightDid the ball travel from some distance, and did the defender have a clear view of it coming? A ball arriving from thirty yards in plain sight is a very different act from one that appears off a deflection two yards away.
2. 2Speed of the ballWas the ball moving quickly? A defender has far less claim to have chosen anything about a shot struck at full pace than about a floated cross dropping towards him.
3. 3DirectionWas the direction of the ball unexpected? A ball that has already been diverted once, or that has bounced awkwardly off the turf, gives the defender something he did not plan for.
4. 4Time to coordinate the bodyDid the defender have time to organise his own movement, or was this an instinctive stretch, a jump, or a lunge that achieved only limited contact? Instinct is the opposite of deliberate.
5. 5Ground or airWas the ball on the ground or in the air? A ball rolling along the turf is straightforwardly easier to control, and a touch on it is more readily a deliberate play than a header taken under pressure.

These are weighed together rather than counted up. The more of them that point towards control, the more likely the touch was a deliberate play, and the more likely the offside player is let off.

That list is the answer to a question the game had been arguing about for years, and the direction of travel in the guidance is worth naming plainly. It has moved steadily away from the attacking team.

The older reading was generous: a defender touched the ball, therefore he played it, therefore the offside player was absolved. That produced goals nobody could defend, in which an attacker who was yards offside was rescued by a defender getting the faintest touch on a ball he was never going to control. The current framing asks a harder question, and the effect is that a defender's touch now has to look like a genuine act of control before it saves the attacker.

The five criteria do not produce certainty and were never going to. What they produce is a shared vocabulary, so that two officials arguing about the same incident are at least arguing about the same five things rather than about the inside of a defender's head. That is a real improvement, and it is also why this remains the most contested area of Law 11: reasonable people weigh the same five factors and come out in different places, and no amount of camera resolution changes that.

Three restarts that cannot produce offside, and everything else that can

A player cannot be penalised for offside if he receives the ball directly from a goal kick, a throw-in or a corner kick.

Those three, and only those three. Everything else in the game is live for offside, including a free kick anywhere on the pitch, a dropped ball, and a pass from a team-mate that has come from any of the exempt restarts by way of a second touch. The exemption attaches to the direct receipt of the ball, and the moment a team-mate touches it in between, ordinary Law 11 applies again.

The throw-in exemption is the one with the largest tactical consequence, and it is why a long throw into a crowded box is not just a set piece but a rule-shaped weapon. There is no offside line to beat because there is no offside. Attackers can occupy positions in front of the defence that would be illegal from any other delivery, defenders cannot use a line to solve the problem, and the whole thing has to be defended by marking and by winning the ball in the air. That is a large part of why throw-in coaching stopped being a joke and became a job, a shift covered properly in the piece on how set pieces became a specialism.

The corner exemption reads as redundant and is not quite. From a corner the ball is on the goal line, so every attacker in the box is behind or level with the ball at the moment it is played, and none of them can be offside on that basis anyway. The exemption still does work in the odd case where the ball is played backwards from the corner arc towards the edge of the box, and in second-phase situations it disappears entirely: once the ball has been headed out and returned by a team-mate, offside is back in force and the attacking team's second wave is suddenly playable.

The goal kick exemption became more interesting once goal kicks could be played short to a team-mate inside the penalty area. A goalkeeper can roll the ball to a centre-half standing in his own six-yard box while the opposition press ten yards away, and nobody on the pitch can be offside from that ball. The exemption is doing nothing there, because everybody involved is in their own half. It matters at the other extreme, when a goalkeeper launches one and a striker takes it down on the halfway line ahead of everybody, which is legal and always has been.

• 2Reference points an attacker must not be beyond
• 3Separate ways of becoming involved in active play
• 3Restarts from which offside cannot be given directly
• 5Criteria weighed in the deliberate-play test

Every one of these is a count taken from the structure of the law itself, not from any competition's practice or any season's data.

The edge cases that decide about one match a season

A handful of situations in Law 11 look like trivia until the afternoon one of them happens to your team.

A defender who has left the pitch. A defender who goes off the field of play without the referee's permission, whether he has slid off after a challenge or wandered off to make a point, is treated as still being on his own goal line or touchline for offside purposes. He counts as one of the two opponents until the next stoppage, or until his team has played the ball towards the halfway line and out of its own penalty area. Defences cannot manufacture an offside by having a man step off the pitch, and the law closed that door explicitly.

An attacker who has left the pitch. The reverse is allowed. An attacking player may step off, or stay off, the field of play in order not to be involved in active play. A winger carried past the goal line by his own momentum is not obliged to sprint back on and play everybody onside.

A free kick in your own half. The restart for an offside offence is an indirect free kick from the position of the offence, and the law says out loud that this can be in the offside player's own half. That reads as impossible until you follow the sequence: a player is in an offside position at the moment of the pass, then runs back into his own half and touches the ball there. The position test was satisfied at the moment of the pass, the involvement happened later and further back, and the free kick is taken from the spot where he touched it.

No card, ever. Offside is not misconduct. There is no caution for it, no matter how blatant, how repeated or how cynical. A player who deliberately stands in an offside position all afternoon commits no disciplinary offence at all. He is only wasting his own time.

Why offside exists at all, and what each rewrite bought

The law exists to solve one problem, and the problem is older than the professional game.

Without offside, the optimal strategy is to leave a player permanently next to the opposition goalkeeper and hit long balls at him. The pitch collapses into two penalty areas and the space in between stops mattering. Every code of football that has ever been written has needed some rule against goal-hanging, and the different codes are largely defined by which rule they chose.

The version the Football Association codified in 1863 was borrowed straight from the handling game: a player ahead of the ball was out of play, full stop. That is close to the rugby answer, and it produces rugby's shape, a game of dribbling and backward passing with no forward pass available at all. Football abandoned it within a few years, because the forward pass turned out to be the thing that made the sport worth watching, and the three-opponent rule that replaced it allowed passing forward as long as three opponents stood between the receiver and the goal.

That rule survived into the 1920s and slowly strangled the game. Defenders learned that they could step up in unison and catch attacking teams offside almost at will, the offside trap became a specialism in itself, and matches turned into long sequences of free kicks in midfield. In 1925 the lawmakers cut the requirement from three opponents to two, which is the version that still stands.

The effect was immediate and enormous. Space appeared behind defences that had not existed for half a century, goalscoring rose sharply, and within a couple of seasons the tactical structure of the sport had been rebuilt around the change. The centre-half, who had been a creative midfielder, was pulled back between the full-backs to become a stopper, and the modern back line was born out of a rule change about goal-hanging.

The 1990 rewrite continued in the same direction. Where a player level with the second-last opponent had previously been offside, level now counts as onside, and the tie goes to the attacker. It is a small piece of wording with a large consequence: an entire body width of pitch was handed to forwards at the moment of the pass.

Since then the movement has been in the definitions rather than in the geometry. The three routes to involvement were spelled out so that passive players in offside positions stopped killing legitimate goals. The wording on interfering with an opponent was tightened so that a merely distracted defender was no longer enough on its own. The deliberate-play criteria were added so that a defender's accidental touch could not rescue an attacker who had no business being where he was.

Read the whole sequence and the pattern is unmistakable. Nearly every rewrite of Law 11 for a century has moved the balance towards the attacking team, and every one of them was a response to defences becoming too good at exploiting the previous version. The law is not a fixed principle. It is a running negotiation between the people who write it and the coaches who spend every week trying to break it.

What the assistant referee is actually doing with that flag

Watch an assistant referee properly for ten minutes and the technique becomes obvious, which is not at all the same as easy.

He is not running the line. He is running the second-last opponent, keeping himself square with that player as the line moves up and back, so that at the moment of the pass he is looking across the pitch at a right angle rather than at a diagonal. Everything about the discipline exists to eliminate the error that comes from viewing angle, because a body seen from twenty yards down the pitch at an angle appears to be somewhere it is not.

The flag is carried in whichever hand keeps his body open to the pitch, and swapped as play changes end, so that raising it never involves turning away from what he is watching.

Then there is the part of the job that is physically impossible. The pass happens in one place and the offside line is in another, and the eye cannot hold both. Assistants are trained to keep the line in peripheral vision while the ball is played, or to use the sound of the kick as the cue, which is why a noisy stadium makes the job measurably harder in a way that has nothing to do with pressure.

Which brings us to the flag that does not go up.

In competitions with video review, assistants are instructed to keep the flag down in a promising attacking situation unless the offside is immediate and obvious. They let the passage of play finish, and then flag if the offence stood. The reasoning is asymmetric, and it is sound. Raising the flag on a wrongly judged offside destroys a legitimate goal that cannot be given back, while holding the flag on a genuinely offside player costs a few seconds and a stoppage. One error is fatal and the other is recoverable, so the instruction is to risk the recoverable one.

The costs of that choice are real and they are paid on the pitch rather than in the video room. Defenders keep defending passages of play that have already ended. Goalkeepers make saves from shots that should never have been struck. Challenges are made in a period of football that is going to be erased from the record, and the injuries from those challenges are not erased with it. The game accepted that trade quietly, and it is the part of modern officiating that gets the least attention relative to how much it changed.

Watching for it live, without a replay

The single most useful habit is to stop watching the striker.

Offside is decided at the moment of the pass, so the information you need is at the passer's foot and along the defensive line, both of which you can see, and none of it is at the far end where the ball is going to arrive. If you find yourself judging offside by where a forward is when he takes his first touch, you are looking at a picture the law never asked about.

Four things to check, in order.

Was he in front of the ball? Ask this first, because it is the fastest way to eliminate most shouts. On any cutback, any square ball, any pass from the byline, the answer settles it before the defenders matter at all.

Who were the last two? Not the last man. Count two, and check whether the goalkeeper is actually one of them. If the keeper is off his line, out for a cross, or has been rounded, the reference point has moved and half the crowd will be judging it off the wrong player.

Did he do anything? If the answer is that he stood there and watched a shot go in from six yards away, the goal almost certainly stands, however offside he looked in the freeze frame. If he ducked, jumped, ran across the keeper or challenged for it, the position becomes relevant again.

Who touched it last before it reached him? If the answer is a defender, ask whether that defender chose the touch or was beaten by it. Ball on the ground, arriving from distance, defender set and balanced, and the offside is probably wiped. Ball fizzing through the air, defender stretching, one boot thrown at it, and it is not.

Get those four in order and you will be right far more often than the people around you, and you will find that most of what gets shouted at assistant referees is a complaint about the first question when the answer was always in the second.

None of it exists in isolation, either. The offside line is the thing pressing systems are built to protect and to attack, which is why the pressure metrics discussed in the piece on what PPDA measures in football and the movement described in the explanation of what a false nine actually does both come back, sooner or later, to one clause about who was where when the ball was kicked. The rest of the tactical and financial machinery around it runs through the wider football coverage.

Two questions. Position, then involvement. Almost every argument you will ever have about this law is somebody answering the wrong one.