Until recently, the offside rule stated that you are in an offside position if any part of the body you can score with is behind the last defender. You can’t score with your arm or hands, so they can’t make you offside. If any other part of you is behind the last defender, you’re in an offside position.
Harry Kane is offside here because he is behind the last defender when the ball is played forward to him.
Before 2019, we relied on hapless bald linesmen to make offside decisions. These linesmen would have to monitor when the ball was played forward and simultaneously whether the attacking player is in an offside position. This is a tough task because often the ball will be played forward from more than 20 yards away and some footballers (Ronaldo, Agbonlahor etc) are quick. Linesmen’s decisions were analysed to death in slow motion by clueless football pundits who, with the camaraderie of the changing room a distant memory, are typically clinically bored.
In 2019 the Premier League brought in the Video Assistant Referee (VAR). Humans were replaced by infallible robot referees housed in a chrome and granite bunker in west London guarded by armed Premier League drone swarms. The VAR process is utterly interminable: decisions are not referred to the European Court of Human Rights, but it feels like it. The new robot referees really don’t want to get it wrong lest they upset Gary Neville.
All of this means that the precise meaning of the offside rule really starts to matter. A lot of offside decisions are tight. To arrive at an answer in this case for example, the robot draws geometric lines at tangents off the contorted limbs of Tyrone Mings in a gross perversion of Da Vinci.
Is toothy Brazilian Bobby Firmino offside here? He can score with his shoulder, is his shoulder off? Where does his arm start again? I can score with my nose; can my nose be offside?
To Graham Souness, all of this is health and safety gone mad and can’t possibly be right. Plain old bloody common sense means that you can’t be a bloody millimetre offside.
The obvious solution: a thicker line. This will be introduced next season in the Premier League. The line may be up to 10cm thick, so we won’t get any of these nonsense decisions any more.
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Picture Boris Johnson. Due to the pandemic and continual mortar shots from Dominic Cummings, he starts to develop progressive stress-induced male pattern baldness, shedding a hair every day. How many hairs would Bohnson have to lose to become bald? Is there a precise answer to this question? Intuitively, removing one hair from his head cannot be the difference between him being bald and not bald. But if we apply this principle to each hair on his head, then Bohnson would still not be bald even if he had no hair.
This is the sorites paradox, which exploits the vagueness of the term ‘bald’. Most important words are vague, so vagueness might be important. Notably, it might be vague at which point a foetus becomes a person, so vagueness might matter for abortion law.
The sorites can be stated more formally as follows:
Base step: A person with 100,000 hairs is not bald
Induction step: If a person with n hairs is not bald, then that person is also not bald with n-1 hairs.
Conclusion: Therefore, a person with 0 hairs is not bald.
The Base step is clearly true and the Conclusion is clearly false, so something must have gone wrong. The natural thing to do is to follow the logic where it leads and to say that the induction step is false. This is the approach that epistemicists take: there is a precise number of hairs we could take off Bohnson’s head at which he becomes bald where before he was not. The point is just that we cannot know where that point is. Our concepts are learned from clear cases – this man is fat, this man is bald – not quantitiative definitions – a man of 100kg is fat, a man with less than 10,000 hairs is bald. We are bamboozled by the fact that without us even realising it, these concepts draw sharp boundaries
The epistemicist approach accepts a crucial lesson I learned when studying philosophy: a boundary has no width.
Some theories of vagueness try to get round this by saying that there are clear cases and a zone of borderline cases in the middle for which it is neither true nor false that Bohnson is bald.
The most popular theory that takes this approach is known as supervaluationism (discussed here). There are several problems with this approach. Firstly, what does this say about the sorites paradox? Supervaluationism says that the induction step is false but that for any n you might pick, we will know that the claim isn’t true. So, if I were to say that Bohnson minus 50,000 hairs is not bald but Bohnson minus 50,001 hairs is bald, my claim would be neither true nor false. This would apply to any individual number I might pick. Weirdly, for the same reason, supervaluationism says that it is true that “Bohnson minus 50,001 hairs is either bald or not bald” but that it is not true that “Bohnson minus 50,001 hairs is bad” and not true that “Bohnson minus 50,001 hairs is not bald”. This looks like (and is) a contradiction.
Second, note that on the diagram above, the boundaries to the rectangular zone of borderline cases are sharp. So, on this approach, while there is no sharp transition from baldness to non-baldness, there is a sharp transition from borderline baldness to baldness. If so, where is it? Supervaluationism does posit sharp boundaries, but treats them differently to the sharp boundary between baldness and non-baldness which motivated the theory in the first place. This is known as ‘higher-order vagueness’. Boundary moving is not a good solution to vagueness.
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Returning to the offside rule, the new thicker line is not really thick, it has just been moved 10cm back from the last defender. In the rules of football, players are offside or they aren’t; there is no purgatory of ‘borderline offside’ where we have a drop ball rather than a free kick. Since a boundary has no width, there just has to be a sharp line – moving it does not solve this problem. Next season, there will still be tight offsides – they will just be measured against a line that has been moved.
If a millimetre can’t be the difference between being offside and not, then, as in the sorites paradox, this implies that someone who is 6 yards offside is not offside. Each season, we will have to move the line. By 2029, the offside rule will have been abolished and goal hanging will be the norm.
According to top referee mandarins, the rationale for the ‘thicker’ line is that it restores “the benefit of the doubt in favour of the attacker”. But that was never the rule. The rule is and always has been crisp and clear – if you’re offside, you’re offside. There’s no mention of doubt. (Indeed, this is why offside decisions are not cases of vagueness).
Moreover, with VAR, doubt has been eradicated by machines. The decisions are not in doubt, but they are close. Pundits and managers object because the offside rule is now being enforced with previously unattainable accuracy. But the rule has always been that there is a sharp line, and it will ever be thus. If there is a sharp line, then players can be offside by a nose.
Creating a thicker line fails to come to terms with the fact that the world is full of sharp boundaries. The sorites paradox and VAR make us pay attention to these sharp boundaries. They offend common sense but they exist.