Whose handball law interpretation is it anyway?

People all over Europe attempt to answer an unanswerable question

Improv comedy is an art form in which a group of people, without creating a script beforehand, act out comedic scenes.¹Or at least modern long-form improv comedy as performed at various theaters across the United States! This is not a perfect definition, but this is not a blog about improv comedy!

When done well, improv comedy is great: spontaneous, surprising, and genuinely funny. But when done poorly, like by Michael Scott in that one episode of The Office, improv can be an awkward, confusing mess. A lot of times, this happens when the performers have conflicting interpretations of the characters they’re playing, the scenario they are in, or the rules that they are operating under.

That brings us to what’s going on with England and Europe with respect to handballs in soccer.

Historically speaking, England and mainland Europe have disagreed over a number of things. Sources of disagreement in the past included whether or not the lord of part of France should be the king of England, whether or not the king of England should be the king of part of France, how the king of England should resolve marital issues, and — more recently — whether England is even part of Europe after all.²The answers to these questions were, respectively: Yes; No; However he wants but he has to start his own church first; Broadly speaking no but also yes in some specific ways.  

The current thing that England and Europe are disagreeing about, which is arguably much more trivial than any of the aforementioned arguments, is what exactly a handball is. Things came to a head recently when Paris Saint-Germain were awarded a late penalty to tie a Champions League match against Newcastle.

Basically the ball hit Tino Livramento in his midsection, and then bounced onto his outstretched arm. This would likely not be given as a penalty in the Premier League, but according to UEFA’s interpretation of the most recent guidance from IFAB, the body that creates the laws of the game, it … also shouldn’t be? Or maybe it should? Things get pretty unclear pretty quick.

The relevant part of the current law is probably this bullet:

• “A handball offence is when a player (except the goalkeeper in their own penalty area): … touches the ball with their hand/arm when it is in a position that makes their body unnaturally bigger and when that position is not the result of their body moving fairly as part of play”³Note the British spelling of “offence” … nothing to be done about that, sadly. 

So you can see the logic of the penalty under that rule: Livramento made his body “unnaturally bigger” because his arm was outstretched. That extended the physical surface area of Tino Livramento that could deflect the ball. But there are complications! In the spring the UEFA Football Board — yet another⁴You might be sensing a trend here! More on that later!administrative body that occasionally weighs in on the rules of soccer — basically said “maybe chill out on giving penalties when the ball hits someone’s stomach and then their hand.” But! According to various other folks around European soccer administration, it is unclear whether or not that guidance is currently being utilized?⁵Worth noting that I am cribbing a lot of this paragraph from a good write-up that Opta Analyst did about the situation, with some frankly comical numerical breakdowns of handball penalties decisions across Europe. Read that here.  

So no one is really sure that this should have been a penalty. And certainly no one is happy about it, or at least not anyone with a British accent and professional connection to a Premier League team.

You give a mouse a cookie and it will ask for milk. You give an English soccer pundit a refereeing controversy and he’ll generate at least 20 minutes of indignant talk radio. 

Anyways, British sports yelling aside, the issue here is that the question of “What is a handball?” is fundamentally unanswerable. There are broadly two ways to think about how soccer should approach handballs:

1. We should be very strict: The fact that you can’t use your hands is literally the main thing about soccer. The existence of the sport as it is played by billions of people around the world is down to a bunch of English dudes in the 1870s saying “We don’t like doing the version of this game where people sometimes pick up the ball and run with it. No more hands.” You can’t start letting people use their hands sometimes if it seems accidental enough. That destroys the whole purpose of the sport.
2. We should be very permissive: Soccer balls bounce around in weird ways all the time, and if you ever attempted to run or jump you would know that sometimes your arms end up outstretched. It is ridiculous to award such a clear goalscoring opportunity for incidental contact with someone’s arm, particularly when people need to use their arms for running and jumping. We should pretty much only call handballs if they prevent goals or are obvious cheating.⁶Oftentimes the kinds of handballs that are obvious cheating do prevent goals. See Suarez, Luis (South Africa, 2010)

Both of these lines of thinking are pretty much correct? You can’t use your hands in soccer, so you can’t just let people block the ball with their arms and feign innocence. But aside from not using your hands, the defining thing about soccer is that it is hard to score a goal, so it is also kind of insane to give fully a penalty kick for something as incidental as what happened to Livramento.

The act of defining a handball is doomed to always exist in a fairly subjective gray area, balancing the basic structures of the game with the reality of playing it as a human being with arms. 

And, yes, the current UEFA interpretation of the law is more than a little goofy, but what has made the controversy over the Newcastle game so loud is the sheer number of people and organizations who are professionally obligated to have an opinion on such a fundamentally subjective question. 

Here is a brief list of bureaucratic soccer organizations already mentioned in this blog: IFAB, UEFA, the Premier League, the UEFA Football Board. There is also the PGMOL, the Professional Game Match Officials Limited, which is the group responsible for referees in English soccer. And there are more leagues, refereeing organizations, and continental confederations throughout the world, each with an obligation to come up with a workable guidance for referees to decide what is and is not a handball. And then there are the individual referees who may or may not make the optimal decision in applying that guidance to incidents on the field in the heat of the moment. That’s a lot of people who are trying to come up with a clear way to answer something that is, again, probably impossible to answer objectively in a majority of cases.

Amplifying all of this is the fact that on top of the leagues and referees and other bureaucracies, you have the international sports shouting industry, full of men in various states of middle age whose livelihoods depend on their ability to become indignant about this sort of thing. 

So yes, a significant problem is that the current UEFA interpretation of the handball rule is an issue. But internationally, handball refereeing is basically an improv night gone wrong: No one is reading the room in the same way, no one quite understands where the other person wants the next beat to go, and none of the jokes are landing. 

There are, simply, too many cooks in the kitchen.