When it comes to football, there aren’t many things that can get people’s blood pressure to spike quite like refereeing decisions. Whether it be the awarding of a free-kick that you think should have gone the other way, or the giving of a penalty that ends up in your team losing the match, officials have the ability to make or break a football game.
Part of the reason for that is the fact that commentators and pundits regularly muddy the waters around refereeing decisions, saying things that simply aren’t true or don’t help the matter.
Perhaps one of the best examples of this is ‘ball to hand’, which isn’t actually a thing in football.
A Misunderstanding of the Handball Rule
In the International Football Association Board’s Laws of the Game, handball comes under Law 12, Fouls and Misconduct. Nowadays, it feels as though the law has been bastardised beyond belief, with officials having to consider the likes of where on a player’s arm the ball actually touched. The outline of a player is looked at in instances when the ball touches it, on account of the fact that the officials have to decide if the player’s arm was in an ‘unnatural position’. It all means that pundits can be entirely clueless around the fact of whether or not a player has actually committed a handball offence during a football match.
@refsneedlovetoo Handball considerations are very different than they were 10 to 20 years ago. Every day I still hear people using considerations that are irrelevant and are not being used by modern referees. I wish everyone had to take a Laws of the Game class every single year. 😅 ##handball##referee##footballtiktok ♬ original sound – Refs Need Love Too
When people say ‘ball to hand’, what they mean is that the ball has moved towards the hand/arm before striking it, as opposed to the hand or arm intentionally moving to the ball in order to interfere with its direction. The problem is, this is entirely irrelevant when it comes to a referee’s considerations around the handball rule. A really good example of this occurred in the February of the 2025-2026 season during the game between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest at the City Ground, when Alexis Mac Allister made an attempt to close down the Forest goalkeeper and saw the ball strike his elbow before going into the net.
Given the fact that the Argentine had his back to goal, it was quite obvious that he had made no intentional movement towards the ball and the ball had ‘gone to’ his arm. In spite of this, the goal was ruled out by the Video Assistant Referee. Many old-school observers might have suggested that that was ‘ball to hand’, but because that isn’t something that the referee will even begin to take into account, it was never really considered as part of the scenario. In other words, if you hear someone say something was ‘ball to hand’, you can happily ignore pretty much everything that they have to say as they are a clueless dinosaur.