Laws of the Game (association football)
codified rules helping define association football
The Laws of the Game are the codified rules of association football. The laws mention the number of players a team should have, the game length, the size of the field and ball, the type and nature of fouls that referees may penalise, the offside law, and many other laws that define the sport. During a match, it is the task of the referee to interpret and enforce the Laws of the Game.
There were various attempts to codify rules among the various types of football in the mid-19th century. The extant Laws date back to 1863 where a ruleset was formally adopted by the newly formed Football Association (FA) and written by its first secretary, Ebenezer Cobb Morley. Over time, the Laws have been amended, and since 1886 they have been maintained by the International Football Association Board (IFAB).
The Laws are the only rules of association football FIFA permits its members to use. The Laws currently allow some minor optional variations which can be implemented by national football associations, including some for play at the lowest levels, but otherwise almost all organised football worldwide is played under the same ruleset. Within the United States, Major League Soccer used a distinct ruleset during the 1990s and the National Federation of State High School Associations and National Collegiate Athletic Association still use rulesets that are comparable to, but different from, the IFAB Laws.
List of Laws
The Laws of the Game consist of seventeen individual laws, each law containing several rules and directions:
Law 1: The Field of Play
Law 2: The Ball
Law 3: The Players
Law 4: The Players' Equipment
Law 5: The Referee
Law 6: The Other Match Officials
Law 7: The Duration of the Match
Law 8: The Start and Restart of Play
Covers the kick-off and dropped-ball; other methods of restarting play are covered in other laws.
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The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as codified rules helping define association football. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q506630. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1863 and 1886.
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This entry incorporates text from “Laws of the Game (association football)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.