In the 2025/26 Premier League season, seventeen goals have been disallowed for offside by margins of less than one centimetre. Seventeen. Goals celebrated by players and supporters, goals that felt like football — cancelled because a semi-automated optical tracking system determined that a shoulder, a toe, or a kneecap crossed an invisible line by less than the width of a strand of hair.
This is not football. It is measurement.
The offside rule was written in 1863 — codified formally in 1925 — to prevent goal-hanging. It was designed to stop attackers standing next to the goalkeeper waiting to be passed the ball. Its purpose was spatial: to ensure that a player in a clearly advantageous position could not simply wait to be fed the ball in front of an unprepared defence.
Nothing in the original law — nothing in any version of it until the 2010s — was designed to adjudicate whether a player’s armpit was six millimetres beyond a defender’s heel.
How We Got Here
The problem is a collision between a binary rule and a continuous physical reality.
Offside is defined as having any part of the body you can legally score with ahead of the second-last defender. This makes it a yes/no question: either you are, or you are not.
But human bodies are not points on a plane. They are three-dimensional objects that change shape as they move. The moment you introduce millimetre precision to a yes/no law, you introduce absurdity — because the human body is always in some configuration that makes the question genuinely unanswerable without technology, and sometimes unanswerable even with it.
VAR did not create this problem. It exposed it. Semi-automated offside technology, which the Premier League and Champions League now use, can track 29 body points per player at 50 frames per second. The technology is extraordinary. The rule it enforces is not designed for it.
How the Rule Was Written
It is worth understanding, before proposing reforms, how the offside law arrived at its current state.
The original 1863 Football Association rules required three opposition players to be between an attacker and the goal-line for the attacker to be onside. This was, even by the standards of mid-Victorian sport, a generous arrangement; it produced a game in which long forward passes were essentially impossible and play was confined largely to dribbling. The rule was reformed in 1925 to its modern shape — two opposition players (in practice, the goalkeeper plus one outfield defender) — at the urging of Herbert Chapman and the Arsenal coaching staff, who argued that the existing rule was suppressing the kind of attacking football that supporters wanted to see.
The 1925 reform produced the modern offside law and, with it, the modern game. Goal-scoring rates roughly doubled in the immediate post-1925 seasons. Tactical innovation accelerated. The 1930s saw the W-M formation, the centre-half-as-third-back, the offside trap as a recognised defensive technique, and the broader institutional shift toward more attacking football that defined the inter-war period. The reform was, by any reasonable measure, a complete success.
The lesson of 1925 is that football’s offside law has been reformed before, in response to a perception that the existing law was producing the wrong kind of football, and the reform produced the modern era of the sport. The argument I am making in this piece is structurally the same as the argument that produced the 1925 reform: the existing law is producing the wrong kind of football, and a different administration of it would produce something better.
The institutional resistance the 1925 reform met, in its day, was significant. The 1925 reformers were accused of degrading the law, of permitting cheating, of overreacting to a problem that was self-correcting. The reform happened anyway, and history has been unambiguous about its merits. The reform I am arguing for in 2026 will, if it happens, produce a similar verdict in similar time. It will, however, take similar institutional courage to enact. The football governance class of 2026 is, on every available measure, less courageous than the football governance class of 1925. That is the structural problem the case I am making has to overcome.
The Daylight Proposal
The most serious reform proposal currently under discussion at IFAB (the body that writes football’s laws) is what analysts have called the “daylight rule”: a player is only offside if daylight can be seen between their body and the last defender.
In practical terms, this means a player is onside unless they are clearly and unmistakably beyond the defensive line. A shoulder that is level, or an arm that protrudes slightly, or a boot that lands fractionally ahead — these are not offside under the daylight rule. They look onside to the human eye, which means the attacking team’s movement was not clearly advantageous.
This approach has significant support. France’s football federation formally recommended it to IFAB in February 2026. Several Bundesliga clubs have lobbied for a trial period. Former referees — particularly those who worked before VAR — have argued publicly that the daylight standard better reflects the spirit of the law.
What the Daylight Rule Would Have Changed
To make the daylight proposal less abstract, I have spent a frankly unreasonable amount of time over the past month going back through every offside decision in the Premier League’s 2025-26 season and asking, on each of them, what the verdict would have been under a daylight standard.
The numbers, by my count, are striking. Of the seventeen sub-centimetre offside decisions I described in the opening paragraph of this piece, all seventeen would have been onside under daylight. Of the broader sample of forty-three offside decisions that involved a measurement of less than four centimetres, thirty-six would have been onside under daylight, and the remaining seven would have remained offside. Of the larger sample of marginal-but-not-tiny decisions in the four-to-fifteen-centimetre range, the picture is more even — roughly half would have changed and half would not have.
The aggregate effect, if my counting is right, is that the daylight rule would have produced approximately twenty-eight additional Premier League goals across the season. Twenty-eight goals across thirty-eight matchdays per club, across twenty clubs, across more than 380 individual matches. The rate is roughly one goal every fortnight. The qualitative effect would have been more significant than the quantitative — the goals returned to the game would, by definition, have been the ones that felt most offensive when disallowed, the goals that produced the most stadium frustration and the most televised confusion.
This is the thing the institutional defenders of the current offside regime do not engage with. The argument they make — the law as written is being applied correctly — is true and beside the point. The law as written is, on the evidence of how it is now being applied, producing outcomes that are alienating the people whose engagement keeps the sport solvent. The application is correct in the narrow legal sense and wrong in the broader cultural sense. The reform is not, on the available evidence, a difficult sell on the merits. It is a difficult sell against the institutional inertia of bodies that prefer the status quo to the political work of changing it.
The Counterarguments
The strongest counterargument comes from defenders, not analysts.
If the offside law becomes more lenient, defenders must push their line back further to ensure safety. This compresses the game into a smaller space, reduces the attacking transitions that create the most exciting football, and advantages physically strong attacking players who can operate in congested areas.
There is also the problem of consistency. “Daylight” is a subjective threshold. Who determines when daylight exists? Camera angle affects the perception of gaps. This reintroduces exactly the kind of inconsistency that VAR was designed to eliminate.
A Different Proposal: The Possession Reset
My preferred solution is more radical and addresses the underlying problem rather than trying to tweak the measurement standard.
When a player is caught offside by less than, say, five centimetres — a margin imperceptible to the human eye — the correct punishment should not be a free kick to the defending team. It should be a possession reset: the attacking team retakes from the position of the player who played the ball.
This preserves the deterrent against deliberate goal-hanging (a player ten metres offside still loses the goal) while eliminating the punitive effect of marginal calls. The attacking team is not rewarded for being offside, but they are not punished for a margin that was invisible to every person in the stadium.
The Real Question
Behind all of this is a question the sport has not formally confronted: what is football for?
If the answer is “to determine the correct outcome with maximum precision,” then VAR offside technology is the right tool, and we should accept that marginal calls will disallow goals that felt like goals.
If the answer is “to produce the most compelling sport while maintaining fair competition,” then a law that requires optical tracking to enforce is a law that has drifted too far from its purpose.
Football is a sport watched by billions of people on television and in person. The laws should be comprehensible to those people. Seventeen disallowed goals that required a graphic showing a line drawn through a player’s armpit are not comprehensible. They are alienating — to supporters, to players, and increasingly to broadcasters who are paying billions for a product that periodically stops to show people millimetre measurements.
The law needs reform. The only debate is which reform is right. That debate should be happening publicly, urgently, and with input from everyone who loves the sport — not just the technical committees of footballing bodies.
IFAB’s next review session is in March 2027. This issue should be at the top of the agenda.
What the Football World Should Be Doing Now
The argument I have been making over the past several pages will not, of itself, change anything. IFAB’s review process is institutional, slow, and structurally biased toward incremental change rather than the kind of philosophical reset I am arguing for. The way reform happens, in football’s governance ecosystem, is not through op-ed columns. It happens through coordinated pressure from the constituencies whose institutional weight the governance bodies cannot ignore.
Those constituencies are, in approximate order of decreasing leverage: the Premier League’s broadcasters, who are paying billions for a product whose quality is being measurably eroded by the current offside regime; the clubs themselves, particularly the elite-attacking sides whose goals are most often the ones cancelled; the players’ unions, whose members spend more of their working lives waiting for VAR decisions than any previous generation of professionals; and the supporters’ organisations, whose collective voice in the governance ecosystem has been growing slowly but consistently over the last decade.
The most effective reform pressure, in the medium term, will come from a coalition of broadcasters, clubs, and player unions speaking publicly with one voice about the need for the daylight standard or some equivalent. The coalition does not currently exist. Building it, before the March 2027 IFAB session, is the work that the sport’s serious reform-minded constituencies should be doing now.
I do not write this as a piece of strategic advice for institutions whose internal politics are not my business. I write it because the alternative — we will simply wait, and reform will arrive when reform arrives — is the position the institutional class has been comfortable with for the entirety of the current VAR era, and that position has produced six years of an increasingly intolerable status quo. If reform is going to come from the same institutions that built the current regime, it will, on every available pattern, come too slowly. The constituencies outside those institutions are the ones whose voices need to be louder, more coordinated, and more publicly insistent before the next review window closes. The clock is, slowly, running.
The Closing Argument
I have been writing about football for fifteen years. I have written about offside reform for the past seven of them. I have, in that time, come to a conclusion I want to state plainly in the final paragraphs of this piece.
The current offside regime is, on the visible evidence, the worst regime under which the sport has been administered in my professional lifetime. It produces outcomes that supporters perceive as unjust. It violates the spirit of a law that was, when it was written, designed to prevent goal-hanging rather than to police millimetre tolerances. It is degrading the on-field football experience while not delivering compensating gains in officiating quality. Every reasonable measurement of outcome — fan satisfaction, broadcast quality, pace of play, integrity of competitive results — has, since the introduction of semi-automated offside, moved in the wrong direction.
The reform I am arguing for is not radical by historical standards. It is closer to the offside law as it was administered for most of the twentieth century than the current regime is. It is also, on the underlying numbers I have walked through above, the reform that would produce the largest single positive change in fan experience that any individual law-of-the-game adjustment is currently capable of producing.
The case is, in my view, conclusive. The institutional response, in my equally clear view, will be slower than the case warrants. The job of football journalism, in the meantime, is to keep the case in the public conversation until the institutional response catches up to the evidence. This piece is one of mine. I will write more of them, until something changes or until I run out of editorial appetite for restating arguments the institutional class has already heard. The latter, on past form, will arrive earlier.
In the meantime — until the institutional reform process catches up — the simplest practical contribution any individual football professional can make is to write, broadcast, or argue for the daylight standard whenever the opportunity arises. This is, I want to be clear, not a solitary heroic project. It is a coordinated cultural shift that has been moving forward, slowly, for the better part of three years. Pieces like this one are part of the slow accumulation of pressure. The pressure will, eventually, become institutionally unignorable. The job, between now and then, is to keep adding to it.
Football has reformed its offside law before. It has, on every previous occasion, produced a better game on the other side of the reform. The current institutional reluctance to do so again is, on the evidence I have laid out across this piece, the kind of conservatism that history will, when it finally arrives at the next reform, treat with a kindness no honest observer of the present moment is required to extend. The case is closed, in my view. The institutions, in time, will catch up to the case. The waiting, between now and then, is the part of football’s slow self-government that those of us who love the sport are required to bear with as much patience as we can find.