Purpose

By the end of this lesson, you will be able to determine whether a player is in an offside position at the moment the ball is played.

Lesson Explanation

Law 11 is genuinely one of the most misunderstood Laws by spectators, precisely because being in an offside position is not itself an offence — it only becomes one if the player then becomes involved in play in a way covered in the next lesson. This lesson isolates the position question alone.

A player is in an offside position if any part of their head, body, or feet (but genuinely not their hands or arms) is nearer to the opponents’ goal line than both the ball AND the second-last opponent, at the moment the ball is played (touched or played) by a teammate — not at the moment the receiving player touches it, a genuinely critical timing distinction.

A player is NEVER in an offside position if they are level with the second-last opponent or level with the last two opponents, or if they are in their own half of the field of play at the moment the ball is played by a teammate.

A genuinely important clarification connecting to the 2025/26 Law changes previewed in this course’s curriculum note: adjustments were made regarding how a goalkeeper’s distribution (specifically, throws) interacts with the offside line calculation, refining exactly which of the defending team’s players count toward the “second-last opponent” determination in certain goalkeeper-throw scenarios — a genuinely technical refinement that matters most at the elite level with semi-automated offside technology, covered fully in Part 4, Lesson 3, but worth flagging now as an example of how even a seemingly stable, decades-old Law continues to be refined for edge cases.

Practice Questions