Football

Football resisted officiating technology longer than any comparable sport, and the argument was never really about accuracy. The Laws give the referee authority over matters of fact, and the concern was that a review system would transfer that authority to a screen — which, in a game with continuous play and no natural stoppages, also means transferring control of the clock.

Goal-line technology came first and was uncontroversial, because a goal has the one completely unambiguous definition in the Laws: the whole ball across the whole line. There is nothing to interpret, so a machine can answer it.

VAR, written into the Laws in 2018, is a different kind of thing. It reviews four categories — goals, penalty decisions, direct red cards, mistaken identity — and only for a clear and obvious error or a serious missed incident. That threshold is doing enormous work, because most of what VAR is asked to review is not a fact but a judgement: whether contact was careless, whether an arm made the body unnaturally bigger, whether a foul was in the area.

The result is that football has automated its unambiguous decisions and left its ambiguous ones exactly where they were, while making them visible to everyone in slow motion. Offside is the awkward middle case: it is a question of fact, so it can be measured, and measuring it to the centimetre has produced decisions that are correct and widely felt to be wrong. That is not a technology failure. It is a rule written in 1925 for a human eye, now being enforced to a precision it was never drafted for.

Everywhere, which sounds like a non-answer and is actually the most important fact about the sport's rules. Football is the only sport on this site with no meaningful geographic barrier to entry, and that is why its Laws are so short.

A rulebook that has to work in every country, on every surface, at every level of resourcing cannot specify much. Law 1 gives the pitch as a range rather than a dimension. Law 2 specifies the ball by weight and pressure and says nothing about how it is made. There is no requirement for a marked pitch to have grass, no requirement for goal-line technology, no requirement for a fourth official. Everything that a wealthy competition adds is an option that competitions may take up, not a Law.

That looseness is what lets the same seventeen Laws govern a World Cup final and a game on packed earth, and it is why football produced no equipment-driven comparability break while athletics produced several.

The competitive geography is more concentrated than the participation geography and has moved. European and South American nations have won every men's World Cup; the women's game has a different and shifting map, with the United States, Germany, Japan, Spain and England having held the title, largely reflecting which countries funded the women's game and when — England's Football Association banned women's football from its members' grounds for fifty years, which is a rule with a measurable effect on where the sport is strong today.

Football's origin is a schism, not an invention. Through the middle of the nineteenth century English schools and clubs each played their own code, and the codes disagreed on two questions: whether the ball could be carried, and whether an opponent could be hacked. The meetings that produced the Football Association's laws in 1863 turned on exactly those points, and the clubs that wanted carrying and hacking left. What they left with became rugby.

So association football and rugby are not related sports so much as the two surviving answers to one argument, and the descent is legible in both rule books to this day.

The second structural fact is that the FA did not keep the laws. The International Football Association Board was formed in 1886 by the four British associations to hold them jointly, and it still does — FIFA runs the sport's competitions and holds half the Board's votes, but a change to the Laws of the Game is an IFAB act. Football is therefore the only sport in this collection where the body that owns the rules is not the body that owns the sport.

That separation is why football has no record book. There is no office with the authority to ratify a football number, so there is no number for a rule change to break.

Football has changed its equipment more than the timeline suggests, and almost none of it appears as a rule change, because Law 2 has always specified the ball loosely — circumference, weight, pressure — and left the construction alone.

The leather ball absorbed water and roughly doubled in weight over a wet match, which is a fact about the game before the 1980s that no rule records. Synthetic coatings, then thermally bonded panels, changed the flight of the ball substantially over three decades within a specification that never had to move. Every argument about a World Cup ball since 2006 has been an argument about an object that is entirely legal.

Goalkeeper gloves went from optional to universal in the 1970s without a rule. Shin guards became compulsory in 1990, which is one of the few equipment changes here with a safety cause and a date.

The point of this section for a site about rules is the negative one. Football's equipment was allowed to evolve inside a loose specification, so it produced no comparability break — while athletics wrote its specification tightly and therefore had to keep amending it, and each amendment cut the record book. How tightly a sport specifies its equipment determines how often it has to break its own numbers.

The Laws are held by the International Football Association Board: the four British associations hold one vote each, FIFA holds four, and a change requires six. Neither side can amend the Laws alone. This arrangement is a settlement of a 1900s dispute about who owned the game, and it has survived every subsequent realignment of power in the sport.

Its effect on this site is concrete. Because IFAB publishes an annual edition of the Laws plus a circular listing that season's amendments, football rule changes are among the best-documented in this collection — a dated act by a named body with a published text. Compare gymnastics, where the scoring system is republished wholesale each quadrennium and the amendments are not separately enumerated.

The professionalism schism came early here and was settled early. The FA accepted professionalism in 1885, decades before athletics, tennis or rugby union faced the same question. Football therefore has no equivalent of the amateurism rules that shaped who could compete in the other sports on this timeline, and no eligibility rule changes to show for it.

Italia '90. The tournament is the standard trigger cited for the back-pass rule: sustained time-wasting in which the ball was played back to a goalkeeper who picked it up, and the lowest scoring rate of any World Cup finals. Two years later a goalkeeper could no longer handle a deliberate back-pass, and the goalkeeping position was rewritten around the change. It is the clearest case in this collection of a rule change altering a position rather than a procedure.

Newcastle's offside trap. Sixty-five years earlier the Board had done the same thing for the same reason. A defensive method had become reliable enough to suppress scoring across a whole league, and the Board changed Law 11 from three defenders to two. Both changes are legislation against a way of playing that was working too well.

Golden goal, and its withdrawal. Introduced in 1993 to make extra time more attacking; abolished in 2004 on the reading that it had made extra time more cautious, because conceding once ended the match with no chance to reply. A governing body reversing itself and effectively saying so is rare enough to be worth recording as its own entry rather than as a footnote to the first.

Every televised refereeing error since about 1970. VAR has no single trigger, and that is the interesting thing about it. What forced it was cumulative: broadcast technology showed the audience, in slow motion and from eight angles, decisions the referee had one look at in real time. The rule changed because the gap between what the crowd knew and what the official knew had become impossible to defend.

Recorded as unsettled, and football has more open arguments than any other sport here because IFAB amends the Laws annually and publishes the debate.

Handball. The most rewritten clause in the book and still the least settled. The test has moved between intent, position, whether the arm made the body unnaturally bigger, and whether the deflection came off the player's own body, and each revision has traded one kind of unfairness for another. The underlying problem is that the Law is asking for a judgement about a player's state of mind and then being enforced from a slow-motion camera that cannot see one.

Offside and precision. The Law dates from 1925 and was drafted for a linesman's eye. Enforced to the centimetre by tracking systems, it produces decisions that are correct under the Law and widely felt to be wrong. Proposals to add a tolerance, or to require daylight between attacker and defender, are attempts to rewrite the Law to match the precision now available. None has been adopted.

Concussion substitutes. Temporary concussion substitutions have been trialled, and player unions have pressed for them against a Board that has preferred permanent additional substitutions. This is a safety argument with an integrity objection attached — a temporary substitution is exploitable — which is an unusually clean example of two of this site's causes pulling against each other.

Time-wasting and effective playing time. Proposals to stop the clock, as most other sports do, resurface regularly. Football's added time is the only mechanism of its kind here and the only one left entirely to one official's discretion.