What Is IFAB? Who Makes and Changes Football's Laws

On 28 February 2026, at Hensol in the Vale of Glamorgan, the International Football Association Board, the one body able to change football's Laws, decided that a throw-in taken too slowly should be handed to the other team. The president of the Football Association of Wales was in the chair, and five organisations were represented in the room. One of them was the Football Association, which governs the game in England and which helped to found the body holding the meeting 140 years earlier.

IFAB, as the Board is known, is the only organisation with the power to make or change the Laws of the Game, the seventeen laws under which football is played everywhere from Wembley to a county league pitch. Its members are the four British associations (England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland), with one vote each, and FIFA with four. A change needs six of the eight votes. FIFA cannot alter a word without British support, and the British cannot alter a word without FIFA.

What IFAB is, and why FIFA cannot change the Laws alone

The Board describes itself as the guardian of the Laws. Legally it is an association under the Swiss Civil Code, based in Zurich, with five members and a small permanent staff. It runs no competitions, registers no players and disciplines nobody. Its single product is a book.

FIFA's own statutes tie FIFA's hands. They require every member association to play football in accordance with the Laws of the Game issued by the Board, and they state that only the Board may lay down and alter those Laws. So the organisation that runs the World Cup, with more than two hundred member associations, is bound by a text it does not own. It has a large say in that text, and the say is exercised inside the Board, by vote.

This surprises people because FIFA is the body they see. FIFA announces things. Its president speaks about offside and time-wasting. FIFA's referees committee issues instructions before each World Cup, and those instructions can change how the game looks without any Law being touched. But an instruction is an interpretation of the text. Altering the text is a matter for the Board, and the two should be kept apart.

The name misleads slightly. "International" in 1886 meant matches between England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, the only internationals there were, and "Football Association" is the old term for the sport, as in association football. A board for international association football, then, which a century of growth turned into a board for the world.

Until 2014 the Board had no legal form of its own. It was a standing arrangement between five football bodies, serviced by its members. The statutes adopted that year gave it a secretariat, a board of directors drawn from the chief executives and general secretaries of the five members, and two advisory panels. The reform made the process more open to outside opinion. It did not touch the votes.

What the Board owns, then, is narrow and absolute: the dimensions of the pitch, the offside law, what counts as handball, when a penalty is retaken, how a video review may be used. A complete list of the seventeen is in our guide to the Laws of the Game in order.

The eight votes, and the six needed to pass anything

Eight votes exist. Four belong to FIFA and are cast as a block. The other four are held singly by the associations that founded the Board.

Member	Founded	On the Board since	Votes
The Football Association (England)	1863	1886	1
Scottish Football Association	1873	1886	1
Football Association of Wales	1876	1886	1
Irish Football Association (Northern Ireland)	1880	1886	1
FIFA	1904	1913	4

• FIFA50.0%
• The FA12.5%
• Scottish FA12.5%
• FA of Wales12.5%
• Irish FA12.5%

Voting rights at the Annual General Meeting under the system in force since 1958. A proposal needs six of the eight to pass.

Show the numbers

How the eight votes on IFAB are divided

Item	Value
FIFA	4votes
The FA	1votes
Scottish FA	1votes
FA of Wales	1votes
Irish FA	1votes

A change to the Laws requires a three-quarters majority, which with eight votes means six. Work through the combinations and two facts drop out. FIFA's four are indispensable, because the four British votes together make only four. And FIFA's four are insufficient, because it needs two more. Either side can block. Neither can impose.

The British side is not a block, though it is often written about as one. Any two of the four associations voting with FIFA will carry a proposal over the other two. Equally, a proposal fails if three of the four oppose it, whatever FIFA wants.

The answer to the question English supporters ask most often is one. The FA has one vote of eight, the same as the Football Association of Wales and the Irish FA. The Irish FA is the Belfast-based association for Northern Ireland; the Football Association of Ireland, which governs the game in the Republic, has no seat and is represented through FIFA like every other country.

In practice formal divisions are rare. Proposals are worked on for months before they reach a vote, and one that lacks support tends to be withdrawn or converted into a trial. The voting rule matters less for the votes it decides than for the compromises it forces beforehand.

The yearly calendar: Annual Business Meeting, Annual General Meeting and 1 July

The Board works to a cycle that barely varies, and anyone who follows it knows roughly when next season's changes will be announced.

1. 1AutumnThe Football and Technical Advisory Panels meet to discuss ideas, trial results and problems seen during the previous season.
2. 2Annual Business MeetingLate in the year or in January, the Board reviews the panels' advice and settles the agenda for the general meeting. It does not change the Laws.
3. 3Annual General MeetingIn late February or early March, the eight votes are cast on each proposed amendment. Six are needed.
4. 4PublicationThe Board issues the amended text with explanations, and national associations pass it to their referees and competitions.
5. 51 JulyThe new edition of the Laws comes into force. Competitions already under way may finish under the old text.

The usual sequence under the Board's statutes. Dates shift a little each year; the order does not.

The Annual Business Meeting is the preparatory session. It hears reports on trials, considers what the advisory panels have said and decides which proposals go forward. Decisions there are a strong guide to what will pass, since a proposal that reaches the general meeting has usually been agreed in substance already.

The Annual General Meeting is where the Laws are actually amended. The members take turns to host it. Scotland staged the 2024 meeting at Loch Lomond, and Wales the 2026 meeting at Hensol. The agenda is published in advance, the meeting is held in private, and the decisions are announced the same day.

Changes then take effect on 1 July. The date is chosen to fall between European seasons, and an English season that kicks off in August begins with the new text in force from its first match. Two flexibilities exist. A competition that started before 1 July may delay until its next edition, which matters for leagues that run through the northern summer. A competition may also apply the changes early once they have been approved, and summer tournaments that begin in June commonly do, as the 2026 World Cup did with that year's amendments.

Not everything waits for the cycle. A clarification, as opposed to a change, can be issued by circular at any time and can take effect at once.

How an idea reaches a vote: associations, advisory panels and the technical subcommittee

A manager says on a Saturday evening that the handball law is a disgrace and somebody should change it. The route from there to an amended text is long, and it starts with who is entitled to ask.

Formal proposals come from the Board's own members. The FA can table one. So can the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish associations, and so can FIFA, which is the channel for every other country and for the confederations. A national association outside Britain that wants something changed has to persuade FIFA to carry it. Leagues, clubs, players' unions and coaches have no right of proposal. They lobby the bodies that do.

The two advisory panels

The 2014 reform created a Football Advisory Panel and a Technical Advisory Panel. The first is made up of people from the playing and coaching side of the game, former internationals and managers among them. The second draws on refereeing expertise. Neither has a vote. Their job is to say what the game thinks a problem is, and whether a suggested remedy would work on a pitch.

Their influence is real. The measures against time-wasting adopted in 2025 and 2026 (the goalkeeper countdown, then the countdown on throw-ins and goal kicks) followed years of complaints, voiced in these panels among other places, that the existing sanctions were never applied. Competitions, confederations and bodies representing players and coaches are consulted as well, and a proposal that the professional game is known to dislike rarely gets as far as a draft.

The technical subcommittee

Between an agreed idea and a votable clause sits the hardest job, which is drafting. The Technical Subcommittee, a small group of refereeing specialists from the five members, writes the wording, tests it against awkward cases and prepares the explanation that accompanies each change. A badly drafted law causes more trouble than no law, as several rewrites of the handball clause demonstrated. The subcommittee also handles requests for clarification during the season.

From there a proposal goes to the Board of Directors, then to the business meeting, then to the vote. Three outcomes are possible short of rejection: a change to the Laws, a clarification of existing wording, or permission for a trial.

Trials before law: goal-line technology, video review, concussion substitutes and sin bins

Nobody may experiment with the Laws without the Board's permission. A league cannot decide by itself to try a bigger goal or a stop-clock. That monopoly on experiments is as important as the monopoly on the text, and it has become the Board's normal way of handling anything contentious.

Innovation	Step before the Laws	Status now
Goal-line technology	Tested, then approved on 5 July 2012	Permitted by Law 1 where a competition installs it
Video assistant referees	Live experiments approved in March 2016	Written into the Laws in March 2018
Five substitutes	Temporary amendment in May 2020	Permanent competition option since 2022
Additional concussion substitutes	Trial from January 2021	Permanent competition option from 1 July 2024
Goalkeeper eight-second limit	Trials in selected competitions in 2024-25	In Law 12 from 2025-26
Sin bins	Approved in 2017 as a modification	Youth, veterans, disability and grassroots football only

Goal-line technology shows how slowly the process can turn and how quickly it can reverse. In March 2010 the Board voted to stop pursuing the idea. That June, at the World Cup in Bloemfontein, a shot by Frank Lampard for England against Germany bounced down off the crossbar well over the line and no goal was given. Testing resumed. Two years later the technology was approved, and the Premier League installed it for the 2013-14 season. The English part of that story is told in our guide to goal-line technology.

Video review followed the same path with more caution. The Board authorised live experiments in 2016, collected data from competitions in several countries for two years, and only then wrote a protocol into the Laws. A competition still needs approval before it starts using VAR.

Concussion substitutes began as a trial in 2021, with English competitions among the first to take part, and became a standing option in 2024. The detail is in our guide to the concussion substitute rule. Sin bins took a different route: the Board allowed them in 2017 for the lower levels only and left national associations to decide. The FA piloted them and then made them compulsory for dissent across grassroots football from 2019-20, as our guide to sin bins in football explains.

A trial is also a polite way of saying no. An idea sent for testing has not been rejected, and it has not been adopted.

The FA's double role, from the Board's table to the county leagues

Only four national associations are in this position, and the FA is much the largest of them. It votes on the Laws in the winter and has to enforce the result on thousands of pitches the following August.

At the Board the FA is represented by its senior officers, and its chief executive sits on the Board of Directors. The FA's vote is one of eight, but its influence on drafting has usually been larger than that, partly through history and partly through people. The 2016 rewrite of the entire text was led by David Elleray, a former Premier League referee who went on to become the Board's technical director.

Then comes the other half. The FA's own rules require all football under its jurisdiction to be played according to the Laws of the Game as settled by the Board. Each summer the amended text has to travel down a long chain: to the professional referees managed by PGMOL, to the National League System, to the County Football Associations, and through them to the volunteer referees who take charge of most matches played in England. Pre-season briefings for clubs and managers have become routine in the professional game. Lower down, a change reaches referees through county training evenings, FA communications and the updated book.

There is a third role as well. Where the Laws give national associations a choice, the FA makes it for England. It chose to mandate sin bins for dissent. It set the small-sided formats and pitch sizes for each age group. And when the FA wanted to go beyond what the Laws permitted, by removing deliberate heading from matches at under-12 level and below, it had to do what any other association would: apply to the Board for permission to run a trial. Permission was given for the 2022-23 season, and the measure has since been phased into the youngest age groups, as set out in our guide to the heading ban in youth football.

So an English referee's working text has three layers. The Laws as the Board wrote them. The options the FA has selected. And the competition rules of whichever league the match belongs to. How officials are chosen for the top of that structure is covered in our guide to how Premier League referees are appointed.

What IFAB does not control

Much of what supporters call "the rules" is not in the Laws and never passes through the Board. The confusion is understandable, and it leads to the Board being blamed for decisions made in other rooms.

Question	Who decides in England
The wording of the offside law	IFAB
Whether the Premier League uses VAR	The Premier League's clubs, within the Board's protocol
How many matches a sending-off costs	The FA, through its disciplinary regulations
How many substitutes, up to the Laws' maximum	Each competition
Whether a ground has goal-line technology	Each competition
Squad sizes and registration windows	Each competition and FIFA's transfer regulations
Kick-off times and fixture dates	Each competition and its broadcasters

Video review is the clearest example. The Board wrote the protocol and no competition may depart from it. Whether to use VAR at all is a decision for the competition, and in June 2024 the Premier League's clubs voted on a proposal to scrap it and chose by a large majority to keep it. The Board had no part in that. Our guide to how VAR works in the Premier League sets out the English arrangements.

Discipline is another. Law 12 says which offences bring a red card. It says nothing about what follows. The standard suspensions, the extra match for a repeat dismissal, the process for claiming a wrongful dismissal and the power to charge a player over something the referee missed are all the FA's, described in our guides to suspension rules and to FA misconduct charges.

The same goes for how a drawn cup tie is settled, for points deductions, for financial rules, and for the high bar English officials set before a video review overturns a call. That last one is an instruction to referees about applying the protocol. It belongs to PGMOL.

A fair test: if it happens between the whistle to start and the whistle to finish, and concerns what a player or official may do, it is probably the Board's. Anything about who may play, when, and what happens afterwards belongs to someone else.

Reading the Laws yourself: the current text, the annual changes and the circulars

The Laws of the Game are free. The Board publishes the full text on its website and in an app, and the FA reproduces it for English football each season. No subscription is involved and no referee's badge is needed.

Three documents are worth knowing about.

The current edition. It is dated by season, so the book in force from 1 July 2026 is the 2026/27 edition. It is published in several languages, and where translations differ the English text is authoritative. For a body founded in Holborn that seems fair.

The annual list of changes. Each spring the Board issues a summary of everything amended at the general meeting, setting the old wording beside the new with a short explanation of the reason. This is the single most useful thing a supporter can read, because it shows exactly what is different and what the lawmakers were trying to fix. Most summer arguments about "the new handball rule" would be shorter if both parties had read it.

The circulars. When a point needs clarifying between editions, the Board writes to national associations. Circulars are numbered and published. A recent example followed a penalty in a European tie in 2025, when a kicker slipped and touched the ball with both feet. The Laws at the time treated every double touch alike. The Board issued a circular saying an accidental double touch that results in a goal should lead to a retake, and the wording was folded into the Laws for 2026-27.

How to read an entry in the list of changes

Each amended clause is set out the same way: the Law and its heading, the old text with deletions struck through, the new text with additions marked, and a paragraph headed "Explanation". Read the explanation first. It usually says in two sentences what problem the lawmakers saw, and that tells a reader how a referee is meant to apply the new words. The DOGSO amendment for 2026-27 is a good specimen, since its explanation is a single sentence: where the referee plays advantage after such an offence and a goal follows, the offender is neither cautioned nor sent off. Our guide to the DOGSO rule covers what that change did.

A warning about what else is in circulation. Competitions and referee bodies publish their own guidance, and it is easy to mistake a domestic instruction for a law. Check the source. If the document does not come from the Board, it is an interpretation.

Why four British associations hold permanent seats: the meetings of 1886 and 1913

In the early 1880s an England v Scotland match needed a negotiation before it could be played. Each of the four British associations had its own version of the laws, and the differences, over the throw-in among other things, had to be settled fixture by fixture.

The associations met at Manchester on 6 December 1882 and agreed a single code for matches between them, which made the British Home Championship possible from 1884. A code needs a keeper. On 2 June 1886 representatives of the four met at the FA's offices in Holborn Viaduct and constituted themselves as the International Football Association Board, with equal votes and a rule that the laws would change only by agreement.

At that moment the four were, near enough, the whole of organised international football. That is the entire explanation for their seats. They were not granted a privilege by a world body. There was no world body.

The Irish seat needs a footnote. In 1886 the Irish Football Association, founded in Belfast, covered the whole island. After partition in 1921 a separate association was formed in Dublin, and the Belfast body carried on as the association for Northern Ireland, keeping its place on the Board.

• 1886Board founded
• 1913FIFA admitted
• 1958Present voting system
• 2014Independent association

Years of the founding meeting, FIFA's admission, the adoption of the present voting weights and the Board's incorporation as an independent association.

FIFA was founded in Paris in 1904 by continental associations, without the British, and accepted from the outset that the game would be played to the Board's laws. It asked for representation and got it in 1913, at first with no more weight than a single British association and a four-fifths majority required, so the four founders could still carry a change over its objection. The current balance, four votes for FIFA and six of eight to pass, was agreed in 1958.

One detail shows how separate the two bodies were. The British associations walked out of FIFA twice after the First World War. The first break, in 1920, shut FIFA's delegates out of the Board's meetings until 1924. The second, in 1928, was over payments to amateur players and lasted until 1946, and through those years FIFA kept its place on the Board. The story of how the FA's first code came to exist is in our guide to who invented football.

Four changes that reshaped the sport: 1925, 1992, 2016 and 2019

Most of the Board's work is maintenance. Now and then a decision alters how the game is played.

Year	Change	What it did
1925	Offside: two opponents, not three, needed to keep an attacker onside	Ended the easy offside trap and raised scoring sharply
1992	Goalkeepers barred from handling a deliberate kick from a team-mate	Removed the safest form of time-wasting
2016	Complete rewrite of the text	Shorter, plainer Laws and an end to automatic "triple punishment"
2019	A package of a dozen or so amendments	New handball wording, goal kicks playable inside the area, cards for coaches

1925. Under the old law an attacker needed three opponents between himself and the goal line. Full-backs had learned to step up in turn and catch forwards offside almost at will, Newcastle United's Bill McCracken being the name always attached to the trick. The Board reduced three to two. Goals in the Football League rose by more than a third the following season, and coaches responded by withdrawing the centre-half into defence, the origin of the formation Herbert Chapman built at Arsenal. One amended number changed the shape of teams for a generation.

1992. After a 1990 World Cup remembered for its caution, the Board stopped goalkeepers picking up a ball deliberately kicked to them by a team-mate. The change arrived in England in the same summer as the Premier League. It forced goalkeepers to use their feet and defenders to think, and it is hard to name a law change with a better ratio of words to effect. Our guide to the back-pass rule has the detail.

2016. The rewrite cut the length of the text heavily and replaced a century of patched wording with plain sentences. It also made substantive changes: the kick-off could go in any direction, and a defender who conceded a penalty while trying to play the ball was no longer automatically sent off as well. The same meeting approved the first video experiments.

2019. The largest single package of recent times dealt with handball, dropped balls, defensive walls, substitutes leaving by the nearest line and yellow and red cards for team officials. The handball wording has been revised again since.

Ideas tested, parked or turned down

The list of things the Board has declined to do is as revealing as the list of what it has done.

Kick-ins. In 1994-95 the Isthmian League, then sponsored as the Diadora League, played a season in which a team could take a kick from the touchline in place of a throw. The theory was more attacking play. The result was that every restart within range became a set piece aimed at the tallest players in the penalty area, and the experiment ended after a year. The idea has been raised again since without getting further. What survived is covered in our guide to throw-in rules.

"Daylight" offside. Arsène Wenger, in his role at FIFA, has argued for an offside law under which an attacker is onside if any part of the body that can score is level with the second-last defender, so that only a player wholly beyond the defender is penalised. It would reverse the benefit of the doubt. The Board has allowed trials and, at the 2026 meeting, said they continue. It has not adopted the idea. The technology used to measure the existing law is explained in our guide to semi-automated offside.

Blue cards. Early in 2024 it was widely reported that a blue card would be introduced for sin bins in the senior game, for dissent and cynical fouls. FIFA said publicly that talk of blue cards at elite level was premature. When the Board met that March it approved no such trial for the top levels, tightened the existing guidance for grassroots sin bins and said any wider use would be considered later.

Temporary concussion substitutes. The Premier League, players' unions and others asked for a trial in which a player with a suspected head injury could be replaced for a short period while being assessed, then return if cleared. The Board declined in 2023 and again in 2024, preferring the permanent additional substitute it had already approved.

The stopped clock. In 2017 the Board published a discussion paper under the title "Play Fair" that floated, among other ideas, two halves of 30 minutes with the clock stopped whenever the ball was out of play. It was offered for debate and has never been put forward as a law. The time-wasting measures of recent years, countdowns and fuller added time, are the modest alternative.

Each refusal had a reason, and the reasons are arguable. On concussion in particular, the Board held a line that many medical voices in the English game opposed.

The criticism of the structure: British privilege, FIFA's block and a small room

Three complaints are made about the Board, and each has substance.

The first is the obvious one. Four associations representing one sovereign state hold half the votes over a game played in every country on earth. Wales and Northern Ireland have the same weight as England, and together the four have the same weight as Brazil, Germany, Japan, Nigeria and some two hundred others combined. No one designing the body today would arrive at this. The defence offered is that the British associations have no domestic interest in most proposals and behave as trustees, a conservative brake on a commercial organisation. That defence is not empty. It is also precisely what the holder of an inherited seat would say.

The second complaint runs the other way. FIFA votes as one, so its four votes are in effect a single decision taken inside FIFA before the meeting. Nothing passes without it. An idea supported by every British association and opposed by FIFA's leadership is dead, and an idea FIFA's leadership favours needs only two of four small delegations to agree. The associations of Africa, Asia and the Americas have no direct vote at all, only whatever influence they have within FIFA.

The third is about numbers. A handful of people, meeting in private for a day, settle the laws of a sport with hundreds of millions of players. The advisory panels widened the circle after 2014, and consultation is far better than it was. The panels still advise and do not vote, and their membership is by invitation.

Against all this stands the record. The Laws are stable, short and the same everywhere. Other sports with more representative law-making have changed their rules more often and not obviously for the better, and football's simplicity owes something to how hard it is to get six votes out of eight. The structure is indefensible in theory and has worked tolerably in practice. Whether that is good enough is a fair argument, and it is one the Board itself is unlikely ever to put to a vote.

More explainers on how the game is run in this country are on our England hub, with wider coverage on the football section.