Category: Sports law

The law and lore of the offside offence

16th January 2023

There was a controversial offside decision this weekend in a high-profile football match.

Usually, for anyone with an interest in the game, it is plain if a player is offside or not and, if so, whether there has been an offside offence.

But this understanding is rarely based on someone studying the laws of association football.

Instead it is often based on watching hundreds – thousands – of instances, playing in matches, discussing incidents with others, reading reporters and hearing commentators.

Over time, someone can build up a good working knowledge of the rules and how they should and should not apply.

In a word, for many football fans, the knowledge of the sport is lore, rather than law.

And this is no different for many games and sports, and indeed it is true for most people in every day life about the laws of the land.

But every so often something so distinct happens that the common folk knowledge of a rule, and how it is should and should not be applied, can seem deficient.

And so we had the sight on Match of the Day of the pundits putting Law 11 of the laws of association football on the screen for viewers to read the offside offence themselves.

The one thing which struck me was one single, awful word which has no place whatsoever in any formal rules or laws, either of association football or of anything else.

“…clearly…”

Those who are geeks about the rules of football may be able to explain the purpose of that dreadful “c” word in this code.

But the job of any formal law, rather than lore, is to provide a precise rule capable of being applied to relevant facts so as to create a binary situation: the rule either applies or does not apply,  and if it applies it has either been infringed or it has not been.

It is not clear (ahem) what the “c” word adds to the rule, and it seems to make the rule less precise.

As it happens, most people who watched the incident, using only the lore of offside, believed an offence had been committed.

But the referee who had to apply the formal rule said otherwise.

And, as is so often the case, lore gets things right, and the law does not.

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‘Can we have two golds?’ – how the right Olympic high jump outcome was also in accordance with the rules of the sport

2nd August 2021

At a spare moment yesterday, I happened to turn on the television and I was quickly engrossed by the high jump final.

It was transfixing.

Anybody who watched the events unfold – as opposed to forming an opinion on the news afterwards – will understand how, in that dramatic moment, the resolution of the final made perfect sense.

The resolution, of course, was the shared gold medal.

Watch this video from beginning to end:

The result was absolutely appropriate for that exceptional sporting moment.

But.

Was it the right thing done against the rules?

No: it was done in accordance with the express rules of the sport.

Indeed, it would seem that the rules of the very event envisaged what could happen in the circumstances, see rule 26.8 generally and rule 26.8.4 in particular of the technical rules of world athletics.

 

If both jumpers were equal in that neither could clear 2.39 metres (and they could not be differentiated by rules 28.1, 28.2 or 28.3) then there could be a ‘jump-off’ or ‘if the relevant athletes at any stage decide not to jump further, the tie for first place shall remain’.

And this makes sense: if the jumpers have jumped the same height but cannot jump any higher then it is reasonable for the jumpers to jointly win.

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So this was not an exercise in sportsmanship in breach of the rules – and still less a cynical exercise in gamesmanship.

This was an outcome that was envisaged by the rule-setters for that particular sport, and so it was a result in full compliance with the rules.

Some have complained on social media that sharing the gold medal ‘literally defeats the object of having a sporting event’.

But this is incorrect:  the technical rules of that sport ‘literally’ provide that the gold medal can be shared in these circumstances – and so the critics should have respect for the rules of the sport.

And finally: this is a blog that often criticises those who make rules (in many contexts) for not properly anticipating what can go wrong – and so it is nice and heartening to see a practical example of rule-making done well.

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The European Super League and law and policy

20th April 2021

The proposal of a supposed European Super League is daft and dreadful.

Only the most partisan supporters of the clubs involved and those who will be making money out of the proposal are able to make a positive case for the idea.

Many supporters of the clubs involved, as well as the other football supporters, just see it as a cynical attempt to to exploit and develop cash revenues at the expense of the wider interests of the sport.

But.

An idea being daft and dreadful does not make it also illegal.

The law is not magic and there is no wand for any politician to say ‘I prohibit you thus’.

In particular, what is called ‘competition law’ – which prevents abuse by monopolies and the forming of cartels – is not likely to be of any use in preventing the initiative.

Indeed, competition law may help more than hinder the establishment of a rival international international football league.

Only a handful of clubs are involved, and there is no inherent reason why UEFA should have a monopoly on European club competition.

The fact that it is an artificial pop-up international league, where many of the participating clubs have not even won a European club competition before, is neither here nor there.

Nor is the fact that many clubs (such as my own, Aston Villa) that have won such competitions are excluded relevant (and I hope my view would be the same even if Aston Villa had been part of this misconceived project).

It is a new league that will be in competition to the existing arrangements, and the starting point of the relevant law is that competition is a good thing – rather than monopolies.

The European Super League may well rob the clubs, the players and the supporters involved of something valuable – genuine European football – and replace it with an artificial contest with regular matches against Tottenham Hotspur.

But that does not create a legal remedy.

If anything, competition law may undermine the attempts of the status quo to quash the innovation and provide a defence to threatened retaliatory or punitive measures.

If the proposal is to be defeated – it should be by means of politics and commercial realities, not litigation.

Perhaps this exercise in misplaced exceptionalism and a false sense of the international importance of those supporting the measure will collapse under the strain of its contradictions and impartibility before it gets going.

But then again, that is also what said would happen with Brexit, and it did not.

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