Question Number: 17721

Law 12 - Fouls and Misconduct 11/6/2007

RE: Other

Rachel of Portland, OR USA asks...

This question is a follow up to question 17394

I have read several questions and answers about when a referee should punish the encroachment during a PK as opposed to when she should ignore it as "trifling". Some of you have said that if both teams accept the outcome then the encroachment was trifling.

Does this mean that when I'm a player, I should be calling fouls? Because if I (as a player) see the other team encroaching and say nothing, the ref is likely to consider it trifling. So, as a player, if I see encroachment, I should say something about it to the ref? Should I also yell "offside" when I see that foul occur?

Answer provided by Referee Steve Montanino

The question you need to ask yourself as a referee is whether or not the offense is in some way significant to the game. If the action has no significance then it very likely could be considered trifling. Often we will ignore if the goalkeeper carries the ball over outside the penalty area by an inch or two, so long as they are actually going to put the ball back into play.

Ignoring this does not impact either side in any real way and it is very very likely that the players won't even notice and only the biggest jerks will make a real claim for this.

The same thing might be true on your penalty kick situation, if a player puts half a foot into the area a half a second before the ball is kicked, it is technically a violation. But it's not worth the referee taking action and imposing himself on the game for a trivial offense that carries virtually no impact on the game.

If you go about making it known to the referee that you are spying the opponents make very minor infractions, you'll probably only come off as a tattle tale to the referee who will begin to hear your words as noise instead of meaningful language. Also, your opponents and perhaps some teammates will resent you for acting like that.

Referees who call every little offense are what we call "Gotchya" refs. Meaning, the referee looks for any opportunity to catch any offense, just so he can say "I caught you, ha ha ha."

By the way, we never ever consider an offside offense as 'trifling'.

You have to allow the referee latitude to do their job and part of that means deciding what is trifling and what is not. That is not a players job, it's a referee's job. Very obviously most players will want decisions to go their way to make it easier for them to win and harder for their opponents to do the same - that is why we leave it to a neutral party to make these calls.

Answer provided by Referee Keith Contarino

One of the beauties of soccer is that it is NOT Gridiron Football where every infraction no matter how inconsequential must be called. Offences that in no way influence the game simply don't have to be called.