Was that offside?

Two separate things, and conflating them causes most of the arguments. First, an offside POSITION: being in the opponents’ half and nearer to their goal line than both the ball and the second-last opponent, at the moment a team-mate plays the ball. Level with either is onside. Second, an offside OFFENCE, which only happens if the player in that position becomes involved in active play — by interfering with play, interfering with an opponent, or gaining an advantage. Being in an offside position is not, by itself, an offence at all.

No, and this is the detail that decides a surprising number of tight calls. Only parts that could legally score are considered — head, body and feet — because a hand or arm in front cannot confer any advantage you are allowed to use. This applies to every player including goalkeepers. IFAB puts the upper boundary of the arm at the bottom of the armpit, so a shoulder ahead of the defender can put you offside while an outstretched arm cannot.

No. There is no offside offence direct from a throw-in, a goal kick, or a corner kick, regardless of where anyone was standing. This is absolute rather than a judgement call, and it is probably the most commonly forgotten line in the whole law.

No — and this is the distinction the argument usually turns on. A rebound or deflection off an opponent, the goalpost or the crossbar does not reset anything; a player who was in an offside position and then plays that ball has committed an offence. What DOES reset it is an opponent DELIBERATELY playing the ball, which counts as handing it over rather than as an accident the attacker profited from.

IFAB publishes five criteria: the ball travelled from distance and the player had a clear view of it; the ball was not moving quickly; its direction was not unexpected; the player had time to coordinate their body rather than stretching or jumping instinctively; and a ball on the ground is easier to play than one in the air. There is deliberately no pass mark — three out of five does not settle it. A save is never a deliberate play for this purpose.

The attacking team must not precede the puck into the attacking zone. Position is judged at the moment the puck crosses the leading edge of the blue line, and it is judged by the SKATES. The stick does not matter and neither does the body — a player can lean well over the line, or reach into the zone with their stick, and remain onside as long as their skates have not gone first.

Not since 2021, and this is the change most explanations still have wrong. The blue line is treated as a plane extending upward from its leading edge. If the skate has not broken that plane when the puck crosses, the player is onside — whether or not the blade is touching the ice. The change was made because offside reviews had turned into pixel-level arguments about whether a blade was a millimetre off the surface.

No, and this exception catches almost everybody. When attacking players clear the zone to negate a DELAYED offside, the skate must contact the blue line. Being above the plane is not enough. So the identical skate position — four centimetres back, in the air — is onside on a zone entry and has not tagged up on a delayed offside. Two rules that sound like one.

Because they are solving different problems with the same word. Soccer’s rule exists to stop goal-hanging, so it measures the part of you that could score and asks whether you actually did anything. Hockey’s exists to stop the puck being flipped ahead to a waiting attacker, so it measures where your feet were relative to a line at a single instant, and involvement is irrelevant. They differ on what is measured, when the picture freezes, and whether position alone is an offence.

No. This works through a published decision procedure from inputs you supply, and it cannot see the play. In a real call the procedure is the easy half — the argument is about where a shoulder was in the frame the ball was struck, or whether a touch was deliberate. Change those inputs and the answer changes with them. Match officials decide, and video review protocols and competition-specific variations are not modelled here. The rule texts belong to IFAB and the NHL and are not reproduced.