In a Life of a Footballer: 11/29/12

Football; a passion for everyone!

Hi there. Today i'm going to talk again about football to persuade inactive people to get involved more in this sport and not watching it only. In this post, i'll be talking about the rules of a football match. In all, there are 17 law of the game implied by the governing body of football; Fifa. But these rules aren't always applied in each game. Certain rules are there only for tournaments which can last 120 minutes + penalty shoot-out and other rules are there for league matches which last only 90 minutes. But there are about 13 laws which are common in every game.

These are the rules of the game!

These are the normal rules for a football match:

Law 1-The Field
Law 2-The Ball
Law 3-Players on the Field
Law 4-Equipment
Law 5-The Referee
Law 6-The Assistant Referees
Law 7-Duration of the Match
Law 8-Start and Restart of Play
Law 9-The Ball in and Out of Play
Law 10-The Method of Scoring
Law 11 - Offside
Law 12-Fouls and Misconduct
Law 13-Free Kicks
Law 14-Penalty Kick
Law 15-Throw-In
Law 16-Goal Kick
Law 17-Corner Kick

The field, as I explained in the first post has to be between 45 m to 90 m wide by 90 m to 120 m long.

The ball used in the game has to be of 27-28 inches in circumference, weighs from 410 g to 450 g and has a pressure of 0.6 to 1.1 atmosphere at sea level.

The third law is about the amount of players used in a match. Each team has to start the game with 11 players one of them being the goalkeeper. There are another set of seven players on the bench. The limit of substitutions used in competitive match is of 3 players from this bench.

A substitution taking place in a game

The basic equipment used by the players in the game are gear or a jersey, the shorts, the socks, the shin guards for shin protection and obviously the cleats. The jerseys of each team has to be different from each other and even the goalkeepers shirt has to be different from all the players.

The 5th and the 6th law talks about the referee and the assistant referees. These are there to see that the rules are enforced in the game. The referee controls what happens inside the ground with the help of the assistant referees. The assistant referees are there to check if the ball goes out of play over the line and helps the referee on certain decisions. As I said yesterday, another 2 referees are being introduced. These are there for helping in decisions like if the ball crosses the line for goal-kicks and to see if the ball crosses the goal-line.

The gear of the referees have to be also different from both teams

The 7th law is about the duration of the match. The most common time of a football match is of 90 minutes splitted into two halves of 45 minutes each with some allocated time per halve. The time between the halves is about 15 minutes, where the players rests and their managers give a team talk.

The next law is about the start and continuing the match. The game is started with a coin toss by the referee between the team captains. The first captain chooses which side his team will take and the other captain takes the kick-off. A drop ball is used to restart play when the referee decides to stop the game.