What is the handball rule in football?

The first boundary is anatomical: the offence concerns the hand and the arm up to the bottom of the armpit. A ball striking the shoulder is not handball. The second boundary is behavioural: moving the hand toward the ball is an offence, while the ball striking an arm held in a natural position usually is not.

The key concept is making the body unnaturally bigger. A player who extends an arm away from the body accepts the risk that comes with it, and contact can be penalised without any question of intent. In attack the law is stricter still: a player who scores immediately after the ball touches their own hand or arm, or who gains a scoring chance that way, sees the goal disallowed even when the contact was accidental.

Handball is a direct free kick offence, with play restarting from where the contact occurred. When a defending player commits it inside their own penalty area, the free kick becomes a penalty. In matches with VAR, penalty-area handball incidents are checked by the video assistant referee, since penalty decisions are one of the four reviewable categories.

An attacking handball works the other way around: it cancels the goal or the scoring chance it produced, and the defending team restarts with a free kick. This asymmetry is the most debated face of the rule, because the same contact brings a penalty on a defender's arm and a disallowed goal on an attacker's.

The goalkeeper's privilege is strictly territorial: inside their own penalty area, keepers may handle the ball, and a handball penalty cannot be awarded against them there. Step outside the area, though, and the keeper is judged exactly like any outfield player; handling beyond the line is a direct free kick offence and, if it denies an obvious goal-scoring opportunity, can bring a red card.

Even inside the area the handling right has limits. The keeper may not pick up a deliberate back-pass played with a teammate's foot, nor a throw-in delivered directly by a teammate, and may not keep control of the ball in hand beyond the permitted release time. These goalkeeper-specific offences are punished with an indirect free kick rather than a penalty.