The Handball Law Gets Rewritten

VAR's first full season across Europe's top leagues surfaced a problem nobody had fully reckoned with: reviewing handball frame by frame made the law's old standard — a "deliberate act" of handling the ball — nearly impossible to apply consistently. Slow motion made almost any arm-to-ball contact look intentional, and referees using the same law were reaching visibly different conclusions on near-identical incidents, week after week.

For the 2019/20 season, IFAB rewrote the law: it became an offence if a player's hand or arm made their body "unnaturally bigger," or if a player scored or created a goal-scoring opportunity immediately after any contact with the hand or arm — deliberate or not. The change was meant to make the decision more binary and referees more consistent. Fans and players, by most accounts, hated it. Accidental handball in the build-up to a goal was now being punished as harshly as a deliberate one, which felt, to almost everyone watching, like exactly the wrong lesson to take from VAR's forensic scrutiny.

IFAB partially reversed course two years later. From 1 July 2021, accidental handball that led to a teammate scoring or creating a chance was no longer judged an offence. The whole episode — one hurried rewrite, followed by a partial retreat — is one of the clearest examples in recent football history of what happens when a law is patched under pressure without first asking what kind of question it's actually supposed to answer: a factual one, or a judgment one.