Why is the offside rule necessary

If the player left the field of play deliberately, the player must be cautioned when the ball is next out of play. An attacking player may step or stay off the field of play not to be involved in active play. If the player re-enters from the goal line and becomes involved in play before the next stoppage in play, or the defending team has played the ball towards the halfway line and it is outside its penalty area, the player shall be considered to be positioned on the goal line for the purposes of offside.

If an attacking player remains stationary between the goalposts and inside the goal as the ball enters the goal, a goal must be awarded unless the player commits an offside offence or Law 12 offence in which case play is restarted with an indirect or direct free kick.

News Go back News. George's Park Go back St. Go back Shop. Tickets Official Shop Wembley St. The thought is usually that this change would lead to more scoring, and therefore more entertaining games. Perhaps the most important concept to consider is space. Think about the large size of a soccer field, and how the offside rule serves to keep the different lines defense, midfield, attack relatively close together.

And to counter, defenses would send someone back there to mark the attackers. This would result in a nearly empty midfield consisting of huge swaths of space, and a game filled with long balls and a lot of 1v1 battles, with very little of the cohesion, teamwork, and passing that make soccer a challenging and interesting game today. Players would tire more quickly as well. Masters like Messi make brilliant unpredictable runs to earn space. Players must learn to operate in tight spaces, forwards must time their runs in order to get behind the defense, and defenders need to press and drop together with impeccable timing.

These tactics would be all but eliminated with the abolition of offside. The game would start to look like the youth game of World Cup where a mob of players in front of a goalkeeper all try to score. For additional evidence, look at throw-ins, where there is no offside. If a team has a player with a long throw, the attacking team simply packs the box with numbers in order to have a chance to scrape together a goal. So hopefully we now see the reasons against taking away the offside rule.

But if we dig a little into soccer history, we will learn that although the complete abolition of offside would be catastrophic, smaller tweaks have already been made over the years. There have been two big offside law changes that took place in and , both of which changed the way soccer is played. In , the offside law was changed from requiring three defending players between the forward and the goal to just two Wilson It was played by a different set of rules depending on where you went to school or where about in the country you lived.

Before the formation of the Football Association and an attempt to formalise the rules of the game most universities and even school played by the Cambridge Rules.

These stated that a player was not allowed to touch the ball if he was standing in front of it, similar to the rules imposed in rugby nowadays. When the Football Association drafted the Laws Of The Game in it stated that no forward passes were allowed at all unless the ball was hit from behind the goal line. These rules were only adopted by the followers of what was known as the London Football Association, however, with the Sheffield Football Association having a rule that was more similar to the offside law we know today.

In the season goals were scored across Football League matches.