Something I found myself pondering this weekend: Soccer's rules are inconsistent. One of the major differences between soccer and football is that in the former, the "whole of the ball" must be all the way over the entirety of the white line for it to be a goal, or for the ball to be out of bounds, whereas in football it's enough for the ball to "break the plane" by even the tiniest amount. The famous 2017 incident when Gene Steratore slid an index card down the first-down poll to see whether the ball would move is a great example of the latter.
Yet when it comes to the offside rule in soccer, as we saw in the past few days, the rule is "breaking the plane." Consider how in the one game it was enough for a player's toes to be over the imaginary line, and in another game it was a part of a player's butt-cheeks that protruded across. I found myself thinking that it's peculiar how the rule is "the whole of the ball" for scoring and out-of-bounds but "breaking the plane" for offside and I found myself wondering why the rules are inconsistent in that manner.
