IFAB urged to address ‘controversial law’ after Celtic vs Rangers incident as former referee speaks out

Football’s most persistently contested law has claimed another high-profile victim. Former Premier League referee Mark Clattenburg has called on IFAB, the game’s lawmaking body, to revisit the handball rule after a spectacular Olwethu Makhanya goal for Rangers was chalked off during Sunday’s 1-0 Old Firm win at Celtic Park — a decision Clattenburg himself believes was correctly applied, but which he says exposes exactly the kind of rigid, outcome-blind rule-following that has dogged this particular law since VAR’s

The incident arrived deep into Sunday’s derby, with Rangers already leading through Ryan Naderi’s first-half strike. Celtic attempted to clear danger from inside their own penalty area, but the ball fell kindly to Olwethu Makhanya on the edge of the box. After miscuing his first touch, the loose ball looped invitingly back up into his path, and the Rangers centre-back met it with a genuinely stunning volley that flew into the top corner, giving goalkeeper Viljami Sinisalo no chance whatsoever. For a few seconds, wild celebrations broke out among the Rangers players and staff — the kind of reaction reserved for a goal that would have put the result well beyond doubt against Celtic’s fiercest rivals.

That celebration was short-lived. VAR official Nick Walsh intervened, having spotted that the ball had ricocheted off Makhanya’s shoulder and onto his left arm in the split second immediately before he struck the volley. Under the current wording of the Laws of the Game, any handball by an attacking player immediately prior to scoring automatically invalidates the goal, regardless of whether there was any deliberate intent to use the arm or hand. The goal was chalked off, and Rangers had to settle for their existing 1-0 lead rather than the more comfortable cushion that strike would have

Speaking exclusively to Rangers News in the aftermath, Clattenburg — a former FIFA and Premier League referee with genuine standing in these kinds of debates — was careful to distinguish between the correctness of the individual decision and his broader concerns about the law itself. “The law is clear, and if a player touches the ball with his hand before immediately scoring, then the goal must be disallowed,” he explained. “Olwethu Makhanya’s brilliant strike was disallowed as the ball touched his arm before he struck the ball to goal. I believe the decision to be correct, but I feel IFAB need to address this at the next meeting, as it’s becoming more and more a controversial law, especially what we have seen in England and Scotland in recent weeks.”

That’s a notable position for a former top-level official to take publicly: full endorsement of the officials’ application of the current rule, paired with an explicit call for the rule itself to be reconsidered. It reflects a tension that has run through virtually every major handball controversy since the law’s most significant modern revisions — a recognition among many within the game that the letter of the law and the spirit of fair, sensible officiating have increasingly diverged, particularly in incidents involving fast, instinctive athletic movement rather than anything resembling deliberate

Rangers weren’t the only Scottish club affected by this exact strand of the handball law over the same weekend, which only added weight to Clattenburg’s call for wider review. Hearts sought formal clarification from the SFA after having a goal disallowed for almost identical reasons during a 1-1 draw away to Kilmarnock. Laurent Mendy’s effort was ruled out following a handball in the buildup to the goal — but with an added layer of complexity that made the incident even more contentious than Makhanya’s. Defender Cathal McCarthy had headed the ball on its way into the net after the initial handball contact occurred, raising a genuine question about who should even be credited as the scorer. Had the goal been recorded as an own goal via McCarthy, rather than a goal scored directly by Mendy, the current wording of the law would actually have allowed the effort to stand — since Mendy himself did not put the ball in the net with his own action following the handball. That such a fine, almost technical distinction could be the difference between a goal standing or being chalked off underlines precisely the kind of interpretive complexity Clattenburg believes IFAB needs to address.

To understand why this particular law has become such a lightning rod for criticism — considerably more so than most other Laws of the Game — it helps to trace its recent evolution, which has been unusually turbulent even by the standards of a sport that regularly tinkers with its rulebook.

Prior to 2019, the handball law centred almost entirely around the concept of deliberate intent: a player had to knowingly and purposefully use their hand or arm to control or direct the ball for an offence to be called. That standard, while imperfect, at least aligned reasonably well with most people’s intuitive sense of fairness — accidental contact, however costly to the outcome, generally wasn’t punished. The 2018 World Cup in Russia, the first major international tournament to use VAR, exposed the limits of that intent-based standard in the new video-review era. Slow-motion replay technology made virtually any contact between ball and arm look potentially deliberate, creating pressure for a more mechanical, less subjective standard that officials could apply consistently under video review. As one contemporary analysis of the tournament noted, the introduction of VAR led to nine penalties being awarded for handball across the 64 games in Russia, compared to just one at the entire 2014 World Cup — a staggering shift in enforcement driven not by any change in players’ behaviour, but purely by the increased scrutiny video review made possible.

In response, IFAB introduced a significantly more detailed, prescriptive version of the handball law in March 2019, effective from that June. The new wording introduced the concept of a player making their body “unnaturally bigger” with an outstretched arm, established that any handball offence became automatic if the arm was above shoulder height regardless of intent, and set out specific criteria for when contact with an attacking player’s hand or arm would nullify a goal or goal-scoring opportunity — including, critically, if a player gained control or possession of the ball after such contact and then scored or created a chance, even if that contact happened several phases of play earlier in the same move.

That 2019 rewrite was intended to bring clarity and consistency. Instead, according to extensive contemporary football reporting on the subject, it created an entirely new category of controversy, forcing referees to make split-second judgments not just about intent, but about the precise biomechanics of a player’s arm position during fast-moving athletic actions — decisions that even experienced officials, reviewing incidents repeatedly in slow motion, often disagreed on. Former Premier League referee Mark Halsey was among those who argued at the time that football needed to move away from over-engineered legal wording entirely, saying pointedly: “It’s not about the Laws of the Game, it’s about knowing the game of football. We need to drastically go back to interpreting handling the ball as we always have done.”

The backlash to the 2019 changes grew significant enough that, within a year, UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin took the unusual step of writing directly to FIFA president Gianni Infantino, formally requesting that IFAB revisit the law. That pressure led to discussion at IFAB’s November 2020 meeting of its technical and football advisory panels, and ultimately to a further significant revision announced in March 2021.

The 2021 changes specifically addressed the exact category of incident at the heart of Sunday’s Makhanya controversy: accidental handball by an attacking player in the immediate buildup to a goal. Prior to that change, any accidental handball by a member of the attacking team that contributed to a goal — even if it occurred multiple passes and several seconds before the actual finish — would result in the goal being disallowed. The revised law narrowed that considerably, limiting automatic disallowance to the “immediate” phase of the goalscoring action rather than the entire buildup. The change followed a specific, high-profile flashpoint from the Premier League: Fulham had a goal disallowed against Tottenham when Josh Maja’s effort was ruled out after the ball had cannoned into teammate Mario Lemina’s hand from a defensive clearance, despite Lemina being several yards away from goal and playing no direct part in the eventual finish. IFAB’s David Elleray, the organisation’s Technical Director at the time, offered a notably candid acknowledgment of the law’s inherent difficulty when explaining the reasoning behind the changes: “Handball will always be a problem in the sense it will always be a subjective judgement. And unless we went to the extreme of the hockey foot rule, where any time the ball hits the foot it’s an offence, that is the only way we can stop perceived inconsistencies. So handball is always going to be a journey to an ideal but we’ll never get there because it’s a subjective area.”

Crucially, however, that 2021 revision only addressed accidental handball earlier in the buildup phase — it did not change the standard for contact occurring in the truly immediate moment before a shot or touch that leads directly to a goal, which is precisely the category Makhanya’s strike fell into on Sunday. The ball struck his shoulder and arm in the same continuous action as his eventual volley, rather than at some earlier, more clearly separable point in the passage of play, meaning the more lenient 2021 standard simply didn’t apply, regardless of how unintentional or instinctive the contact appeared.

What makes cases like Makhanya’s — and the very similar Mendy incident at Kilmarnock the same weekend — so persistently difficult is precisely this narrow, immediate-phase category the 2021 reforms left untouched. A defender’s shoulder-to-arm ricochet occurring in the exact same fluid motion as a goalbound strike represents about as unintentional a form of handball as is conceivable in football, and yet current law treats it identically to a genuinely deliberate act of handling. For many pundits, former officials, and supporters, that equivalence feels increasingly difficult to justify, particularly as VAR technology continues to make even the most fleeting, marginal contact visible and reviewable in a way that simply wasn’t possible for on-field officials making real-time judgments in the pre-VAR era.

It’s a dynamic captured well by longtime football writing on the subject: the 2019 clarification was explicitly designed to reduce subjective interpretation and eliminate perceived inconsistency between officials and matches, but in doing so, it removed the kind of common-sense, spirit-of-the-game judgment that many within football believe should still play a role in adjudicating genuinely marginal, unintentional contact — especially in a sport where using the arms for balance during athletic movement is simply unavoidable

Clattenburg’s intervention adds his voice to a now well-established pattern: prominent officials and pundits calling on IFAB to revisit specific elements of the handball law whenever a high-profile, borderline incident generates significant public controversy, much as happened following the Fulham-Tottenham case in 2021. Whether Sunday’s Old Firm incident, paired with the near-identical Hearts controversy from the same weekend, generates sufficient momentum to prompt another formal review at IFAB’s next scheduled meeting remains to be seen — IFAB’s history on this specific law suggests genuine willingness to revisit and amend the wording when pressure builds sufficiently, as demonstrated by both the 2019 rewrite and the further 2021 refinement, but change has typically come only after sustained, high-profile controversy rather than any single incident in isolation.

For Rangers specifically, Sunday’s disallowed goal ultimately proved to be a footnote rather than a turning point — Naderi’s earlier strike was enough to secure the win and complete a double over Celtic within the space of a single week, regardless of how much more comfortable a two-goal cushion might have made the closing stages. But with a respected former official now on record calling the current law “becoming more and more controversial,” and an almost identical case playing out in Scottish football’s second tier of media attention via Hearts’ clash at Kilmarnock on the very same weekend, the pressure on IFAB to revisit this particular corner of the handball law — one it has already rewritten twice in the space of two years back in 2019 and 2021 — looks set to keep building heading into its next round of meetings.