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More Than You Ever Wanted to Know About The Offside Rule

UPDATE: Yes, Cristiano Ronaldo was offside on his last two goals today.

I'm getting a lot of questions about the offside trap lately, so I thought I'd write a primer. It has to be useful to someone, right?

The Offside Rule

The offside rule attempts to prevent soccer from descending into a game of long punts towards crowds of players milling bout the goal, as is essentially equivalent to American Football's strict rules on the forward pass. In the current interpretation of the laws of the game, a player is offside at the instant a ball is played towards him as long as the following conditions are met:

  • The kicking player is on the same team.