A2 · Elementary
11 min
sportshistoryculturelanguage learning
Nobody Gets Offside Right, Including the Referee
El fuera de juego y otras reglas imposibles
Football has only seventeen rules. So why does nobody actually understand them? Fletcher and Octavio dig into the history of the rulebook, the VAR controversy, and why the game connects people across every culture on earth.
El fútbol tiene solo diecisiete reglas. Entonces, ¿por qué nadie las entiende? Fletcher y Octavio exploran la historia del reglamento, el debate sobre el VAR y por qué el fútbol une a todo el mundo.
7 essential A2-level terms from this episode, with translations and example sentences in Spanish.
| Spanish | English | Example |
|---|---|---|
| árbitro | referee | El árbitro saca una tarjeta amarilla. |
| portero | goalkeeper | El portero para el balón con las manos. |
| tarjeta | card (yellow or red) | El jugador recibe una tarjeta roja y sale del campo. |
| meter un gol | to score a goal | El delantero mete un gol en el último minuto. |
| fuera de juego | offside | El árbitro anula el gol por fuera de juego. |
| penalti | penalty kick | El equipo marca un penalti en el último momento. |
| meter la pata | to put your foot in it; to make a mistake | Hablo español y siempre meto la pata. |
Forty years of watching this game and I still cannot explain the offside rule to anyone who hasn't already played it.
I've tried.
I've drawn diagrams.
I've used salt shakers on restaurant tables.
Nothing works.
El fútbol tiene diecisiete reglas.
Football has seventeen rules.
Solo diecisiete.
Only seventeen.
No son muchas.
That's not many.
Seventeen.
Octavio is telling me the entire sport runs on seventeen rules.
That number sounds small until you actually try to explain rule eleven, which is the offside rule, to someone who grew up watching American football.
Las reglas son simples.
The rules are simple.
El problema es el VAR.
The problem is VAR.
We will absolutely get to VAR.
But first, a bit of history, because the story of how football got its rules is genuinely fascinating and most people have no idea it happened in a hotel room in London.
En 1863, unos señores ingleses escriben las reglas.
In 1863, some English gentlemen write the rules.
Ellos inventan el fútbol moderno.
They invent modern football.
1863.
The Football Association in England sits down and codifies what had been a chaotic, school-by-school, village-by-village mess of different games into one set of rules.
And almost everything we watch today traces back to that meeting.
Antes de 1863, cada ciudad tiene reglas diferentes.
Before 1863, every city has different rules.
Es un desastre total.
It's a complete disaster.
A complete disaster, which honestly sounds like a pretty entertaining afternoon.
But the big question at that 1863 meeting was: can you use your hands?
And the answer was no.
The people who said yes walked out and eventually invented rugby.
That one argument split two sports.
Hoy, el IFAB controla las reglas.
Today, the IFAB controls the rules.
IFAB son cuatro personas de Gran Bretaña y cuatro de la FIFA.
IFAB is four people from Great Britain and four from FIFA.
The International Football Association Board.
Eight people, essentially, with the authority to change the rules of a sport played by 250 million people.
There's something almost absurd about that ratio.
Las reglas cambian poco.
The rules change very little.
El fútbol es muy tradicional.
Football is very traditional.
Very traditional, and that's putting it diplomatically.
Let's actually walk through the basics, because some of this is more interesting than it sounds.
Octavio, start simple for me.
What is a goal?
El balón entra en la portería.
The ball goes into the goal.
Todo el balón, no solo la mitad.
The whole ball, not just half of it.
The whole ball has to cross the line.
That sounds obvious but it has caused some genuinely epic controversies.
England versus West Germany, 1966 World Cup final.
A shot hits the crossbar, bounces down, and to this day Germans will tell you it never fully crossed the line.
Ahora hay una cámara especial para el gol.
Now there is a special camera for the goal.
La tecnología de línea de gol.
Goal-line technology.
Goal-line technology.
They put sensors in the ball and in the goalposts and a signal goes to the referee's watch within one second.
One second.
Sixty years after that disputed goal, the problem is technically solved.
Though I suspect German football fans still bring it up.
Siempre.
Always.
Los alemanes siempre hablan de eso.
Germans always talk about that.
Now, the offside rule.
Octavio, I am genuinely asking you to explain this as simply as possible, because I have a journalism degree and twenty-five years of foreign correspondence and this rule still occasionally defeats me.
Mira, es simple.
Look, it's simple.
El atacante necesita dos jugadores del otro equipo delante.
The attacker needs two players from the other team in front.
Two players from the other team in front of you when the ball is played.
One of those two is usually the goalkeeper.
So really, you need at least one defender between you and the goal.
If there isn't, you're offside.
That's the core of it.
Pero el momento es importante.
But the moment is important.
El momento del pase, no del disparo.
The moment of the pass, not the shot.
Right.
You're judged at the moment the ball leaves your teammate's foot, not when you receive it.
Which is why you see players sprinting from an onside position into an offside position and it's completely legal, because what matters is where you were when the pass was made.
Y ahora el VAR usa el ordenador.
And now VAR uses the computer.
El ordenador dibuja líneas.
The computer draws lines.
The VAR system draws these incredibly precise lines on the video to determine offside by centimeters.
And this is where I genuinely want Octavio's opinion, because the debates in Spain about VAR are something else.
I've seen grown men weep.
El VAR es un problema.
VAR is a problem.
Un centímetro no es fútbol, es matemáticas.
One centimeter is not football, it's mathematics.
That is a real argument and it's one I find compelling.
The rule was designed to stop blatant cheating, players standing behind the last defender waiting for easy goals.
It was never meant to disallow a goal because someone's armpit was two centimeters ahead of a defender's shoulder.
El fútbol necesita emociones.
Football needs emotion.
Necesita gritar el gol.
It needs to shout the goal.
This is something I've come to understand after spending enough time in Spain.
The goal celebration is not just a reaction.
It's a collective moment, a release.
When the VAR overturns it two minutes later, something genuinely gets taken away from people.
That's not trivial.
Bien dicho.
Well said.
Pero el árbitro también puede cometer errores.
But the referee can also make mistakes.
El VAR ayuda con eso.
VAR helps with that.
Okay, fair point.
Human error was a real problem.
I covered the 2002 World Cup and there were some referee decisions that were, let me say carefully, very difficult to explain.
The technology solves some things.
The question is whether it creates other problems.
La mano también es complicada.
The handball rule is also complicated.
La regla de la mano cambia mucho.
The handball rule changes a lot.
The handball rule.
This has become genuinely confusing even for people who understand football well.
Used to be simple: did you intentionally touch the ball with your hand?
Now there are questions about the position of the arm, whether it's in a natural position, whether it made the body bigger.
It's become a philosophy seminar.
El árbitro decide.
The referee decides.
Y el árbitro siempre decide mal, claro.
And the referee always decides badly, of course.
Obviously.
Let's talk about the cards.
Yellow card, red card.
Octavio, when did those start?
Las tarjetas empiezan en 1970.
The cards start in 1970.
En el Mundial de México.
At the Mexico World Cup.
El árbitro Ken Aston las inventa.
The referee Ken Aston invents them.
Ken Aston, driving home from a difficult match, stopped at a red light and had the idea.
Traffic lights.
Yellow means caution, red means stop.
He wrote it up and FIFA adopted it immediately.
The entire card system comes from one man sitting at an intersection thinking about a football problem.
That story delights me every time.
Una tarjeta amarilla es un aviso.
A yellow card is a warning.
Dos tarjetas amarillas son una tarjeta roja.
Two yellow cards mean a red card.
And a red card means you leave the field immediately.
Your team plays with ten players for the rest of the match.
No substitution allowed.
Which changes everything, because football is a game built around space, and suddenly one team has a numerical advantage.
Con diez jugadores, el equipo trabaja más.
With ten players, the team works harder.
Es muy difícil.
It's very difficult.
And yet teams have won matches with ten men.
There's something almost romantic about it in football culture, the idea of fighting against the odds, all eleven pulling in the same direction.
I've seen that turn a stadium into something almost religious.
El fútbol es pasión.
Football is passion.
No es solo un deporte.
It's not just a sport.
Es una forma de vida.
It's a way of life.
I believe you completely.
I've been to the Bernabeu.
I've been to the Camp Nou.
The atmosphere in those stadiums is unlike anything I've experienced covering any other story, and I've covered some things.
There's a shared language in football that crosses every other barrier.
Sí.
Yes.
En Madrid, en Buenos Aires, en Tokio: el fútbol es el mismo.
In Madrid, in Buenos Aires, in Tokyo: football is the same.
The same seventeen rules, everywhere on earth.
That genuinely is remarkable when you think about it.
There are countries that can't agree on a time zone but they all play by the same rulebook.
Y el reglamento cambia poco.
And the rules change little.
Es estable.
They are stable.
Eso es bueno para el fútbol.
That is good for football.
Although the debate over whether to change things is constant.
There are serious people who want to change the offside rule entirely, or introduce sin bins like in rugby, where a player serves a ten-minute suspension on the sideline instead of a yellow card.
Some leagues are actually experimenting with that right now.
No, por favor.
No, please.
El fútbol no necesita más cambios.
Football does not need more changes.
Ya tenemos bastantes problemas.
We already have enough problems.
Fair enough.
Though I'd point out that the penalty shootout, which feels ancient and eternal, was only introduced in the 1970s.
The game has changed before and survived.
Anyway, can I ask you something that's been on my mind?
You said earlier that the rules are simple.
Do you genuinely believe that, or is that the Madrid pride talking?
Las reglas básicas son simples.
The basic rules are simple.
El balón entra en la portería.
The ball goes into the goal.
No tocas el balón con la mano.
You don't touch the ball with your hand.
Corres.
You run.
Eso es todo.
That's it.
You run.
That's it.
I think that's actually the secret of why football spread the way it did.
You don't need expensive equipment.
You don't need a special surface.
You need a ball and some space and seventeen rules you can explain to a child in five minutes.
The rest is just culture built on top of that.
Exacto.
Exactly.
Oye, Fletcher, una pregunta.
Hey, Fletcher, a question.
¿Cómo se dice 'meter un gol' en inglés?
How do you say 'meter un gol' in English?
Score a goal.
But wait, 'meter' is interesting.
That verb doesn't mean 'to score,' it means 'to put in,' to insert something.
You're saying you put the goal in.
Why is that the word Spanish uses?
Sí, 'meter' es poner algo dentro.
Yes, 'meter' is to put something inside.
Meto el balón en la portería.
I put the ball into the goal.
Lo meto dentro.
I put it in.
So the Spanish way of saying you scored a goal is literally 'I put it in.' Which is more physical, more direct than 'score.' In English, 'score' comes from an old Norse word for cutting a notch into a stick to keep count.
Completely different image.
Interesante.
Interesting.
En España usamos 'meter' para muchas cosas.
In Spain we use 'meter' for many things.
'Meter la pata' es cometer un error.
'Meter la pata' is to make a mistake.
To put your foot in it.
Which, given my history with Spanish, is a phrase I apparently live by.
'Meter la pata.' I've been doing that since 2016 when I told Octavio's mother I was very pregnant instead of very embarrassed.
Same verb, wildly different result.
Mi madre todavía habla de eso.
My mother still talks about that.
Cada Navidad.
Every Christmas.
Sin excepción.
Without exception.
Seventeen rules, one ball, one word that means a hundred different things.
That's football and that's Spanish for you.
Thanks for being here, and we'll see you next time.