The offside law, Bill McCracken and, a century on, the decision that changed football forever
https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6415406/2025/06/13/offside-rule-mccracken-ifab-newcastle/
One hundred years ago today, at a meeting at 22 Rue de Londres, Paris, association football — soccer — changed forever.
The International Football Association Board voted that Law 11 of the game, the offside law, would be altered from season 1925-26 so that two players would need to be between an attacker and the goal line to remain onside, not three as it had been previously.
This was arguably the most significant rule change since football was professionalised in the mid-1880s. It is possibly the most significant until the introduction of the back-pass rule in 1992. It may even have a claim to be the biggest moment in the history of the professional sport. Every organised match played since 1925 has had its geometry defined by the June 1925 offside law.
The reason for the change was that matches had become clogged by offside procedures and decisions, with referees sometimes blowing their whistle 40 times in a game for offside alone. Newspapers referred to “the eternal whistle”. The constant interruptions were affecting the game’s flow and supporters’ enjoyment was diminished. It may sound remarkably familiar given today’s gripes over VAR.
The aim of the altered law was to decrease interruptions and increase goalscoring. In this, it was a success.
Chelsea players react furiously after referee GC Denton rules out a goal for offside (PA Images via Getty Images)
The June 1925 minutes of the IFAB meeting in Paris state, under the heading ‘Present Law’:
“6. When a player plays the ball, any player of the same side who at such moment of playing is nearer to his opponents’ goal line is out of play and may not touch the ball himself nor in any way whatever interfere with an opponent, or with the play, until the ball has been again played, unless there are at such moment of playing at least three of his opponents nearer their own goal-line.”
Under the heading ‘Proposed Alteration’, it states: “From the first sentence of Law 6, delete the word ‘three’ and substitute the word ‘two’.”
It appears a simple modification, yet its impact was dramatic and enduring.
Perhaps the simplest way of explaining the pre-1925 situation is to say that defences were effectively allowed a spare defender, who was — by modern interpretations — not counted in offside calculations. In other words, assuming the goalkeeper was in his usual position, the offside line was determined by the penultimate defender, rather than the last defender.
Therefore, before 1925, the two defenders (the “full-backs” in the 2-3-5 formation that was almost mandatory at the time) would not play in a line when defending. Generally, the defender closest to the ball would push up and close down, and would often find himself 15 or 20 yards in advance of his colleague, who basically acted as a sweeper.
A 1937 book entitled Association Football by FNS Creek illustrates this point via the diagram below:
Association Football by FNS Creek (JM Dent & Co, 1937)
The ‘2’ and ‘3’ in the 2-3-5 system are denoted by lines. Creek’s point is that the attackers in positions ‘A’ and ‘B’ would, according to pre-1925 laws, be offside because of the position of the right-back. But in the post-1925 world, they were onside because of the position of the left-back.
The point of the law change was to reduce the number of stoppages in the game, but it had a dramatic effect on goalscoring.
On the first day of the new laws, Aston Villa defeated Burnley 10-0. “With the law change, play initially lost its balance,” wrote John Cottrell in his 1970 book, A Century of Great Soccer Drama. “The new law apparently favoured forwards even more than the old rule had assisted defenders. The immediate conclusion was that full-backs would have to play squarer and nearer their own goal.”
There had been 4,700 goals scored in the four Football League divisions over the season just before the law change — afterwards, it rose to 6,373. There’s a reason Dixie Dean’s legendary 60-goal season for Everton came in the late 1920s. In this period, football was about goals, goals, goals.
Some teams still wanted to hold an offside line, however, in roughly the modern manner, to prevent handing the initiative to the opposition. The problem was that two defenders were no longer sufficient when playing in that manner.
Whereas previously opponents had to position themselves according to the position of the penultimate defender, knowing they would still have one final defender to beat, now they could keep players on the last line of defence. Long diagonal balls in behind were extremely effective, with the two defenders caught between covering the centre and the flanks.
And therefore, defences adjusted.
Referee S F Evans outlines the offside rule to public schoolmasters at Mill Hill School, London, in April 1934 (E. Dean/Topical Press Agency/Getty Images)
Most notably, Arsenal manager Herbert Chapman, after encouragement from one of his players, Charlie Buchan, used his centre-half — previously in the middle of the ‘midfield three’ — as a ‘third back’. Herbie Roberts became known as a ‘stopper’ or ‘policeman’ centre-half, in stark contrast to the previously accepted style of a centre-half, which was to act as a dominating, attack-minded figure.
This move helped to transform Arsenal, at this point without a league title to their name, into the most successful club of the time. Their ploy was copied and the ‘third back game’, as it was then known, became the standard system.
The 1925 offside rule, therefore, initially created incredibly attack-minded football, and then provoked considerably more cautious football.
History does not just happen; people make history happen.
What may seem from the 1925 IFAB minutes a dry and bureaucratic amendment stemmed from the flesh and blood of the game on the pitch. Offside was a talking point in British football for the years before and after the First World War — and it was British football shaping IFAB and the sport then, though the Paris venue for the 1925 meeting is an indication of expanded horizons.
To reduce such a momentous decision to one individual would be an exaggeration. However, there were plenty in England who had been doing just that for some time — aiming fingers, verbal abuse and various objects at a certain William McCracken.
McCracken was a Newcastle United player of such offside prowess and defensive influence that ‘McCrackenism’ became a term of reference. McCracken was a character; Hollywood handsome, a thinker and one of the greatest players to grace St James’ Park. Over a period of 19 years, he made 432 Newcastle United appearances, placing him fifth, even today, on the club’s all-time list.
McCracken and referee C R Hall prepare for kick off at a game against Woolwich Arsenal at Plumstead in September 1912 (Topical Press Agency/Getty Images)
Between 1904 and 1911, McCracken was an essential element of the finest team in England — Newcastle won three titles and reached five FA Cup finals in those years. On top of that, along the way, McCracken gathered an unofficial title: ‘The Offside King’.
A biography bearing that title will be published soon, written by Newcastle United historian Paul Joannou, who is keen that McCracken receives due recognition.
“I have not found anyone in terms of a footballer on the field who we can say is largely responsible for changing the game itself,” Joannou says. “There have been one or two off the field, such as George Eastham and Jean-Marc Bosman. But McCracken, in forcing a change in legislation, is unique.”
McCracken was not a Geordie. He was born in Belfast in pre-Partition Ireland in 1883. His first club was Distillery in inner west Belfast, close to his home on Nansen Street. Aged 20, he won the Irish League and Irish Cup with ‘the Whites’ before being quietly ushered across the Irish Sea by Newcastle as a director of Glasgow Rangers knocked on the door in Nansen Street and Liverpool’s (Irish) director John McKenna waited at Anfield. McCracken was a wanted man, and to some, he stayed that way.
Not the first imaginative, truculent Irishman to play the game, nor the last, McCracken’s militancy and principles put him at odds with the Irish Football Association. They banned the best Irish footballer of his generation from playing for Ireland — for 12 years — for arguing Irish players should be paid the same rate as England’s.
McCracken took it on the chin. His personality was as vivid as his talent. In an early sports questionnaire, he said his ambition was to be ‘King of Ireland’. By the end of his playing career, The Guardian newspaper had given him another name: ‘The Irish Mephistopheles’.
It was Don Davies who wrote that. Davies, an England amateur international, was to die in the Munich air crash in 1958 while covering Manchester United; he had seen McCracken play and he left a vibrant profile.
Davies described McCracken as a “setter of offside traps of unwonted slickness and cunning”. These were designed to force opponents “to think — and that has never been a popular mission”.
“Crowds flocked to watch him, composed mainly of angry and prejudiced men, and few were there who had the patience to acknowledge the beauty of McCracken’s technique in the abstract,” Davies wrote.
Davies partially understood the public antipathy toward McCracken — “Who but a snake charmer would fall in love with a serpent?” — but his admiration was clear.
It was shared on Tyneside.
In a 1913 match report, the Sheffield Star referred to McCracken’s display as “one of those whole-hearted exhibitions that have made the rollicking son of Erin so popular at St James’ Park”. Joannou makes the point that this appeal was and is unusual for a defender: “He wasn’t a goalscorer or a flamboyant midfielder. He was a full-back and very rarely are they the stars. But he’s right up there.”
McCracken called himself “an overlapping wing-back before the term was invented”, and Joannou says McCracken and his fellow Newcastle team-mates came to realise their need to perfect offside on a train journey back from a defeat at Notts County.
“Every club played the offside game and Notts County were a top-level side then,” Joannou says. “Newcastle were caught offside all the time. This was 1907. On the train back from Nottingham to Tyneside, the club had what was called a ‘council of war’ — this was before managers — and the players themselves decided on how to play. After that drubbing, in offside terms, McCracken was one of the four or five players who were really scientific in their tactics. Over the next few weeks and seasons, they perfected the offside trap.
“They became the best in the land at it. As an individual, McCracken became the most hated man in football.
“There are lovely caricatures of him with his arm up, appealing for offside. But he ran into all sorts of arguments with other players and with referees, who didn’t like it as they felt it was unsportsmanlike.”
McCracken shakes hands with Arsenal captain Joe Shaw as football resumes in August 1919 (Topical Press Agency/Getty Images)
When football resumed after the First World War, so did McCracken, by then club captain. Newcastle finished eighth in the First Division in season 1919-20, but they had the best defensive record. McCracken was 37 by then and stayed at St James’ for another three years. Then, in February 1923, a couple of days after his 40th birthday, second division Hull City offered him the post of manager on a five-year contract.
Hull were neither wealthy nor prestigious, but McCracken was there for eight years and took them to an FA Cup semi-final in 1930, lost on a replay to eventual winners Arsenal. In the quarter-finals, Hull had beaten Newcastle, Hughie Gallacher and all.
The headline in Tyneside’s Daily Chronicle was ‘Newcastle In McCracken Trap’. The match report said: “One of the most piquant features of the match was the frequency with which the visiting forwards were manoeuvred into offside positions — shades of William McCracken, now Hull’s manager, who when at Newcastle, taught the rest of the football world how to play that game.”
Distracted by the cup, Hull were relegated. But McCracken had made his mark.
He had made another in the 1925-26 season. In the immediate aftermath of the IFAB Paris offside decision, as goals flew in everywhere — Newcastle conceded 75 that season, as opposed to 37 in McCracken’s last in 1922-23 — there was one club bucking the trend.
The club was Hull City. They began 1925-26 with a 0-0 draw against Derby County (who apologised for arriving late, having missed a train connection at Selby). Hull followed that with a 2-0 win at Southampton, then a 1-0 win at Bradford City. There were then 4-0 and 3-0 victories and, after five games in football’s new world, a world created by the likes of McCracken, of the 88 clubs in the top four divisions, only Hull City had not conceded a goal.
The local paper, the Hull Daily Mail, saluted “the astute manager” and his players’ “intelligent interpretation” of the new offside clause.
Davies was rather more lyrical: “Chilly doubts again assailed observers. Not McCracken again, surely! But facts were facts and soon the alarming rumour spread, later confirmed by eye-witnesses, that the enterprising coach, critic and tactical adviser to Hull City Football Club was none other than our old friend the Irish Mephistopheles, William McCracken… the game’s arch-obstructionist.”
McCracken talks to Meta Seinemeyer of the German Opera Company on board the ‘President Roosevelt’ at Southampton in 1923 (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
McCracken moved on from Hull to manage Gateshead, Millwall and Aldershot before returning to Newcastle United as scout, often in Ireland. He would begin reports, “Here is the latest bulletin from the land of spuds and buttermilk.” He recommended a 17-year-old George Eastham, who was playing in the Irish League. Newcastle bought him and Eastham, too, would shape the entire sport via his contract dispute and victory.
Living in south London, at 75, McCracken then started scouting for Watford. He recommended they sign Pat Jennings from Newry Town, which they did for (apparently) £10.
McCracken filed his last scouting report to Watford in 1971, from a reserve team game between Crystal Palace and Leicester City. He was 88. Visiting his son in Hull, he was 95 when he passed away in January 1979, quite a distance from Distillery and Paris 1925.
Some remembered all of that, though, the Sunday Express announcing: “Bill McCracken, the famous old Irish international full-back of Newcastle United, whose offside tactics led to a change in the laws of the game in 1925, has died.”
McCracken died as he lived: onside.
