The more I look at the clips, the more this looks like a huge change in offside interpretations. The Lukaku goal (Clip 4) and the Peru-Australia goal (Clip 7) being clarified as not a deliberate play is a big change towards the "spirit" of the offside law.
What's the difference between clip 3 and clip 4? They are both poor traps on a ball played from distance with moderate speed where you'd expect a professional to control it. Yet one is "deliberate play" and the other isn't. I'm quite literally not seeing a substantive difference from the two yet they are classified differently.
The only thing I could think of is the Russian one is perhaps an unexpected ball because his teammate just missed it prior to it coming down on him?
Huge change. Great. Just in time for a new season and a winter World Cup. I'm sure everything will be implemented uniformly and without any controversy. Can't wait to see how the clear and obvious standard is applied to the deliberate play question either. Is this black and white? If not, where's the wiggle room? Somewhere between clip 3 and 4, I suppose.
Right. I agree that's the only thing I can think of. And if that's the type of nuance we are hanging our hat on without explicit instruction to that effect... well, I'd argue that nothing really is clarified. At the very least, they shouldn't have used those two examples back-to-back, with different outcomes, without explaining.
Clip 11 is also a massive, massive, massive change. That's been a corner kick for like 15 years. So we just snapped our fingers and made it offside again? That's amazing.
That's the explanation they have for the clip: "Not deliberate play as the defender instinctively reacted to a ball whose direction was unexpected because of the presence and movement of the teammate in front of him." (For those who haven't used FIFA RED before, you can click the "i" button on a clip, then click "Explanation" in the overlay to see what their explanation is. Sadly it's still not always as detailed as we'd like. But it's something.)
"Not deliberate play as the defender had no control of the ball and, as a result, no possibility of clearing by heading. The defender was moving backwards and had no time to coordinate his body movement and had limited contact with the ball."
I cannot for the life of me see why 11 isn’t deliberate. The defender jumped and literally headed the ball out of play to the best of his ability. To say that’s not deliberate is nuts.
So I'm trying to figure this out as we go along in real-time, but I think I've got something regarding clips 9-12, which are the headers. You'll note 9/10 are still onside due to deliberate play while 11/12 aren't. And I think that's a change for both (though maybe 12 was marginal in the past?). This passage is obviously key: I was focused on the three bullets at first. And, in all four cases, the defender certainly had the possibility of clearing it. They just do it badly in 11/12. And this explicitly says an unsuccessful attempt shouldn't negate the deliberate nature of the action. So, what does? I think the key is the first sentence. "... when a player has control of the ball and..." If you start from the presumption that control does not equal possession, I think you can start to see what IFAB is saying/doing. In 9/10, the headers are controlled. The defender has all the time in the world to attempt to do what they want. Neither play works out perfectly for the defenders in question, obviously. But they both get headers away. 11/12 are just practically different. They are reaches to play the ball. The intent is the same in all four. But in 11/12, there's no way you can say the defender had control of the ball. That's the distinction. At least, that's what I think it is. Let me look at the others and see if that checks out for the non-headers.
When this first dropped into my Mailbox this morning, I genuinely thought "Great. About time we got some clarification". Then, I read the Text, and started to think......"not sure this has clarified anything". Then, I looked at the clips, and I thought "what the ****"? Really? The rest of the day was spent fielding phone calls from Referees (some at the very top levels of the game) who have no clue what they have to do with this information. Clarification? I don't think so!
That's how I'm viewing it at the moment, too. Previously we would have required shorter distance and more instinctual of a reaction than we're seeing in clip 11, for example, to call it not deliberate. But because this is a ball in the air, moving backwards, lack of control — it is considered not deliberate when it previously would have been deliberate.
I can imagine refs at the top level looking at this and not knowing what to think. Oh and some of them have real matches this weekend.
So, Mbappe's goal in the Nations League Final... offside now, right? Defender not in control with the possibility of playing it away. Right? Though I guess if he timed it just a little better, he could have possessed it. But because he didn't time it better, he wasn't in control. So, yeah, offside. Er, right?
Thanks for sharing and thanks to the other posters already helping decipher this document. But yeah, some of these clips and explanations are going to take time to digest because they are inconsistent with (pretty consistent) training on the interpretation of what constitutes deliberate play vs. deflection.
So with the yearly changes to the LOTG most leagues don't adopt them until the start of their next season (immediately for those leagues that start in the fall, the next year for those leagues that start in the spring). What about these interpretation changes though? Will MLS start using them (in theory) this weekend or will they ignore them until next season starts?
Almost certainly not. Talking to MLS guys right now who are aghast/dumbfounded.. particularly at 7, 8 and 11. Because the conclusions are the exact opposite of how they've been instructed for years now. So you're talking about re-training an entire professional corps of referees. You can't change horses mid-stream, as they say. This stuff will come into effect next year. At least, that's the logical way that it's normally done on things like this.
On the other hand how often does a widely accepted interpretation change in law from FIFA/IFAB happen overnight that isn't a new edition of the laws?
This is a big enough change where USSF needs to get a detailed presentation and send it out to all SDIs, assessors and ideally all of us.
Right. Feels like this is about rushing things out for the new fall seasons so that the World Cup won't be seen as some midseason anomaly. Normally this would be something you see at the World Cup. And then a new season would start. But if you tried to roll this out in early November and then have the major leagues and competitions revert back in January only to revert again after May? Yikes. That said, this should have come out like 6 weeks ago.