In our last piece, we looked at how the offside rule had been twisted out of shape by the pursuit of technological precision, producing decisions that were technically defensible and sporting nonsense in equal measure. The handball law has a different problem. It has not been made too precise. It has been made too complicated.

The result is the same: a rule that nobody fully understands or likes, applied inconsistently by officials who are working from guidance that even its own authors have had to rewrite three times in six years. Just like the offside rule, the inconsistency we see from officials is not driven by their inability to understand the game, as many suggest. Still, rather, just like the handball law, it’s the ambiguity of the whole thing, with so many elements of the law open to interpretation, the officials have no chance even to attempt to apply it consistently.

The absurdity of the current law can be witnessed in any game you care to watch these days. Whenever the ball goes anywhere near the arm of a player, there are claims from players for a free kick, penalty or for a goal to be chalked off. They know that there’s always a good chance that they could have a successful claim. This, of course, puts pressure on the officials and leads to inevitable delays while VAR checks everything from every conceivable angle. Meanwhile, the supporters in the stadium sit and wait, wondering what all the fuss is about.

If the offside saga is a story about technology outrunning wisdom, the handball story is a story about bureaucratic overreach, well-intentioned tinkering that has produced a law so riddled with conditions, subclauses, and competing considerations that it is essentially impossible to apply coherently. Ask a referee, a pundit, a manager, and a fan what constitutes a handball in 2025, and you will get four different answers. That is not ambiguity. That law has collapsed.

How We Got Here: A Brief History of a Rule Being Fixed to Death

The handball law used to be simple, if imperfect. A deliberate use of the hand or arm to control the ball was an offence. Intent was the key. Referees exercised judgment, fans understood the standard, and while individual decisions were disputed, the law itself was not.

Then came VAR, and with it a forensic attention to handball that the law was never designed to survive. When cameras can freeze-frame every incident and zoom into a player’s sleeve from sixteen different angles, the old standard of “deliberate or not?” suddenly felt insufficient. IFAB responded — as governing bodies often do — by adding words rather than stripping them away.

In 2019, the law was substantially rewritten. IFAB confirmed that a handball would be awarded if a player made their body bigger with their arm, and that it would be automatically an offence if the arm was above shoulder height. It also became an offence if an attacking player handled the ball in the build-up to a goal, even if it was accidental. The intention was to eliminate inconsistency. The reality was the opposite.

In the 2019-20 Premier League season alone, 15 goals were disallowed for handball through VAR. Celebrations that had lasted thirty seconds were being extinguished two minutes later because a replayed freeze-frame showed the ball brushing a forearm somewhere in a preceding passage of play. The game was in uproar.

UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin wrote to FIFA president Gianni Infantino, warning of growing frustration and discomfort across football, and called for a return to the old law,  highlighting the fundamental difficulty of defining what a “natural” body position actually is when play moves at speed.

IFAB duly amended the law for 2020-21, narrowing its scope so that only accidental handball directly by the goalscorer or the player immediately creating the chance would be penalised, not every handball in the build-up. The number of goals disallowed for handball through VAR dropped from 15 to six. Then they tweaked it again for 2021-22, further refining the “unnaturally bigger” standard. Three rewrites in three years. Each one was an implicit admission that the previous version had not worked.

The law, as it currently stands, attempts to distinguish between an arm that is in a position that is “not a consequence of, or justifiable by, the player’s body movement for that specific situation” and one that is not. This is the kind of language that sounds reasonable in a legal document and is useless at the pitchside.

The Problems That Remain

Three rewrites have not resolved the fundamental tensions. They have merely shifted where the arguments happen.

The accidental goalscorer rule is the most clear-cut remaining issue. Under current law, if a player scores a goal and the ball has touched their hand or arm at any point before going in — even completely accidentally, even with the arm tucked against their body — the goal must be disallowed. There are no exceptions. Intent is irrelevant.

A selection of the most contentious handball rulings of recent seasons:

• Mac Allister vs Nottingham Forest — 2025/26 Alexis Mac Allister threw himself in front of a clearance; the ball rebounded off his elbow and went in. His arm was tucked in. The handball was entirely accidental. The goal was cancelled. Correct under the law — but only because the law itself is wrong.
• Havertz vs Aston Villa — January 2025 A goal ruled out for Arsenal despite contact that was widely described as incidental. The decision was straightforward under the letter of the law; the sporting logic was far less clear.
• Evanilson vs Arsenal — 2024/25 Bournemouth’s goal stood after VAR found insufficient evidence of handball — a ruling Arsenal supporters pointed to as directly contradictory to the Havertz decision. Same law. Opposing outcomes. No coherent explanation for the difference.
• The “unnaturally bigger” standard — recurring Season after season, defenders contest penalty decisions on the basis that their arm was in a justifiable position. Season after season, different referees reach different conclusions on functionally identical incidents.

The Precision Problem

The inconsistency between leagues and referees remains a significant problem. The Premier League has historically operated with a more relaxed interpretation of handball, leaving more to the referee’s judgment rather than applying the law to the letter. In 2017-18, just six penalties were awarded for handball in the Premier League, compared to 20 in Italy and 31 in Spain.

VAR was supposed to standardise this. In practice, different VAR operators apply the same law differently; different referees have different thresholds for recommending an on-field review; and the line between handball and no handball continues to shift in ways that players, managers, and supporters cannot predict.

It’s not about the Laws of the Game. It’s about knowing the game of football. We need to drastically go back to interpreting handling the ball as we always have done.

Mark Halsey, former Premier League referee, 2020

That verdict was delivered five years ago. The law has been amended twice since. The arguments have not stopped.

What the Law Actually Needs

The handball law does not need a fourth rewrite that shuffles the subclauses. It needs a foundational reset — a return to a principle simple enough that a Sunday League referee and a Premier League VAR operator can apply it the same way.

A striker palming a cross into the net,  handball. A defender raising their arm to block a shot, handball. A ball pinging off a player’s arm from two yards as they turn, not handball. A goalscorer’s elbow makes accidental contact as they throw themselves at a clearance, not handball.

The current law’s insistence on penalising accidental handball by the goalscorer, regardless of intent, regardless of arm position, is the single most damaging provision in the rulebook. It produces outcomes, goals cancelled for contact, so incidental that it required six camera angles to detect, which are completely disproportionate to any actual advantage gained. A player does not score a better goal because the ball happened to graze their elbow. The goal is not tainted. The law should not pretend otherwise.

The objection to reintroducing intent as the primary standard is always the same: intent is subjective, and subjectivity produces inconsistency. This is true. But the attempt to remove subjectivity through the current framework has not produced consistency. It has produced a different kind of inconsistency — one dressed up in clinical, legalistic language, and therefore harder to challenge. At least when a referee makes a judgment call on intent, the basis for the decision is understandable. When a goal is disallowed because a freeze-frame shows the ball touching an arm in a position the law deems unjustifiable, the decision is opaque, difficult to explain, and often impossible to predict.

Football is a contact sport played at a pace. Bodies collide. Arms go places they were not deliberately placed. The law should reflect that reality rather than pretend it does not exist.