On Being in the Wrong Place: The Role of Children’s Conceptual Understanding and Ballgame Experience when Judging a Football Player’s Offside Position

Judging the Offside Position

The current study investigates children’s understanding of the offside-rule in football (FIFA, 2015/16, Law 11, pp. 36, 99, 102, 110– 118). The offside rule is special as it forbids a player to take an unfair advantage by scoring a goal from a place behind the ‘enemy’ line where the defence of the opposing team is circumvented. If a footballer scores from such a wrong offside place, the resulting goal would be disallowed and would not count. Hence, we trained 7- and 9-year-old children in the offside rule and thereafter tested their judgment of the offside rule by asking them to identify whether a player is in this wrong kind of place. While research on the offside rule has been carried out with adults (e.g. Gilis et al., 2008; Ogilvie, 2000), this current study tests for the first time whether children can already understand the offside rule.

There is currently more research about adults and referees than children judging the offside position. Studies of real football games found a substantial amount of error obtained from live videos: In the evaluations of 200 national and world cup games, of 305 erroneous decisions, 62.2% were flag errors, that is, there was no offside, but the referee had raised the flag (false positive). There were 37.7% no-flag errors, that is, there was a player in an offside position, but the referee did not raise the flag (false negative) (Oudejanset al., 2000). This seems to be a large number of slips of attention, however, this proportion varied when just refereeing decisions in FIFA games were analysed, and more false positive (86.6%) than false negative errors (13.4%) occurred (Helsen et al., 2006). That is, few offside situations escaped the attention of the referees, but they did blow the whistle more often than necessary. In the current study, this was tested by having trials with a designated player who is either in an offside position (target present), or not (target absent).

The Development of Spatial Representation in Children

In short, a football pitch is a spatial expanse where players need to occupy strategic positions. Different to current belief, not just the spectators may move in crowds and can be so noisy that they disturb the referee’s judgment (Nevill et al., 2002). Also primary school aged players often move together across the pitch as if in a swarm which means that they cannot pass the ball towards different points on the pitch. To understand strategic positioning in the field, children need a cognitive understanding of projective space to grasp that playing in a team does not mean that you stay physically close - in talking distance - to other team members, but that you occupy a point in space to pass the ball across the field into an area where there is another free-standing team player with few opponents, who then can score from an unexpected angle. Piaget and Inhelder (1956) regarded empty space as a core notion for the understanding of spatial expanses because it involves ‘decentration’ from figures which occupy space (Lange-Küttner & Reith, 1995).

Proximity is part of an early topological concept that conceptualizes space as neighbourhoods of figures, while terms such as distance and angle are part of the more advanced Euclidean concept of space. Only from about age six, children represent spatial fields with spatial axes, boundaries and vectors (Lange-Küttner, 2009, 2014). Because the development from a ground line with lined-up figures to an area where figures are distributed in the field varies considerably in children, we used a ready-made half of a football field (Lange-Küttner, 2004, 2009), see Figure 1 right, where children just had to draw the figures, but not the spatial field as such.

Young children may also draw players as tall as the whole ballgame field. The only reason for young children to reduce a players’ size in a drawing is if more figures on the page use up space and hence they need to be shrunk (Lange-Küttner, 1997, 2004). However, 11-year-olds often draw top-down views and draw players particularly small (Lange-Küttner, 2009). Their representations of players have actually become very similar to those of FIFA in Figure 2: Players are depicted very small with only shoulders and head visible. The important aspect is not how they look or who they are exactly, but where they are standing in the field. Hence, we asked children to only draw the players as stick (wo)men. This top-down view is more conducive for offside judgments than (Ogilvie, 2000) the natural view of a referee (Oudejanset al., 2000).

In order to judge whether a player is in an offside position, linesmen have to create an imaginary spatial axes for the defence line-up of players of the attacked team. This line is imaginary and dynamic because it can briefly emerge and quickly disappear when the defending players align differently by running into other places in the field. In Figure 2, these projective lines are depicted in orange.

We explained the rule with a red thread in a three-dimensional Subbuteo setup (Figure 1, left) and tested children’s understanding of the offside position using a two-dimensional spatial field depiction (Figure 1, right). Children were drawing two teams with one football player in an offside position, until the offside position was correctly depicted. They had to achieve this as a learning criterion for being admitted to an offside-rule computer task. Also adults improve their offside position judgement with web-based training, whether on video from real-life scenes or drawings (Put et al., 2015), and both methods improved offside position judgment accuracy to the same degree.

The Current Study

The UK Football Association (FA) has a mini-soccer league and has published the FA Laws for Mini-Soccer (FA, 2016a). A referee for the mini-soccer league can train from age 14. The Laws for Mini-Soccer apply to children under ten years. There are several modifications to the adult game. For instance, there must be at least seven players in each team and the playing time should not exceed 60 minutes. To protect young children from becoming too competitive, there is no published league table and only three trophy events. However, fouls and misconduct are sanctioned like in adult games with free kicks and penalty kicks. There is no offside-rule in place. Hence, in the current study we investigated whether already 7- and 9-year-old children can understand and apply the offside rule when they are identifying whether a player is in a wrong place in a football field - even though they could not have had any formal teaching. Instead, we provided children this age with some training using a Subbuteo game to introduce them to the offside-rule.

We created a computerized offside position identification task similar in appearance to visual search tasks that assess the identification of a unique target amongst distracters (e.g. Donnelly et al., 2007; Remington et al., 2014; Woods et al., 2013; Zare & Nahravanian, 2014, see Fig. 3. However, our task differs from visual search tasks insofar as the target player is easily recognizable because an arrow is pointing towards the footballer. Hence, the score was not given for finding a unique object like in a visual search task, but for identifying whether an indicated player was in a wrong place, that is, in an offside position. We predicted that reaction times in this two-step process would be longer compared to visual search tasks.

We expected to see a developmental progression towards more successful identification of the offside position in 7- and 9-year-old children because many changes occur at the same time in their spatial cognition (Lange-Küttner & Green, 2007). Children become much better in remembering locations because they can keep track of complex spatial configurations over time (Lange-Küttner, 2010a, 2010b, 2013; Uttal et al., 2013) and they begin to represent spatial fields in their drawings (Lange-Küttner, 1997, 2004, 2009).

We also expected gender differences to emerge because boys appear to be especially good in scanningdisplays from an early age (Wilcox et al., 2012). Moreover, we controlled for underlying factors such as the experience with ballgames with a questionnaire. We assumed that children’s practice was important because the gradual detachment of visual attention from figures in favour of places can be acquired without spatial concepts just by repeated visual experience (Lange-Küttner & Küttner, 2015).

Method

Results

Children answered the questions asking them if they played, liked and watched ballgames and how often as follows: 90.9% of the children answered that they liked ballgames while 9.1% preferred other types of sports, and 87.9% of the children said that they would watch football games. Children reported that they played on average four different types of ballgames (M = 3.65, SD = 2.38; range 1– 10).

Children answered to the question about how often they played a ball game “more often than 3-4 times a week” (42.4%), “1-2 times a week” (39.4%) and “less than 2 times a month” (18.2%). There was a significant effect of sex on this variable, χ²(2, N = 33) = 8.80, p = 0.012. Girls played more often just 1-2 ballgames per month (girls: 38.5%, boys: 5%), while boys more often played more than 3 ballgames per week (girls: 15.4%, boys: 60.0%), but about a comparable percentage of boys and girls played 1-2 ballgames per week (girls: 46.2%, boys: 35.0%), see Figure 4. Thus, there were more boys than girls in the sample who were very experienced in ballgames.

Discussion

This is the first study that investigates understanding of the offside position rule in children and does so with a new computerized task. It is a paradigm where a social rule (you should not take an unfair advantage) is applied to a spatial configuration of players in the football field. On the one hand, the offside rule of football forbids to send a spy behind the defence line who then carries out an operation where the success is only the result of circumventing the opposing team that tries to defend their half of the spatial field. But on the other hand, there is the offside trap where defence players isolate a striker and build up a defence line behind this attacker (from the view of the goalie) so that the striker finds himself in a wrong and illegitimate position without actually having had the intention to short-cut the defence. This strategic move was already mentioned by a 9-year-old boy.

Children showed higher accuracy when recognizing an offside position than when the player was not in an offside position, similar to adult FIFA referees (Helsen et al., 2006). Seven-year-olds’ judgments were much slower (M = 7604 ms) than in 9-year-olds (M = 3970 ms). However, in both age groups, these reaction times are relatively slow (Lange-Küttner, 2012). They were longer than in visual search tasks where children between 6 and 12 years do not have reaction times above 3000 ms (Darby et al., 2014; Merrill & Conners, 2013). We presume that this may be the case because in order to think about the location of a figure’s place, the particular figure needs to be ignored, while in a visual search task, the target is an outlier figure that just needs to attract selective attention. However, the amount of ‘distracter’ players in the current task was also comparably high and may have been another reason for the relatively long reaction times.

An important underlying factor in the successful identification of the offside position was the actual experience in playing ballgames. While all children had learned from our introduction with the Subbuteo game, the consideration of the action-based experiential factor revealed that boys who played ballgames several times per week showed as a group a better and more systematic approach than the girls in the present study.

This demonstrated that boys’ experience of being and acting within in a spatial field was crucial to decision-making about the offside position at age seven and nine, like in adult male-only samples (Gilis et al., 2008). Our result is in accordance with a recent study showing that football training on the ground did not only improve physical scores such as sprinting and jumping, but also a visual discrimination score which measured figure-ground perception, perceptual grouping and discrimination of detail in 7–11 year old children (Alesi et al., 2015). Moreover, in a recent study of the role of experience in the quicker game of table tennis which is played within a smaller area with a lighter ball, the acceleration of the ball in the game was the most reliable indicator of expertise and experience (Padulo et al., 2016). Hence, it may be a possibility that the visual tracking of the football in the game improves visual discrimination that benefits children and adults also in computerized assessments such as the offside rule task that wedeveloped.

There is an ongoing debate whether spatial cognition is based on experience, or on spatial concepts (e.g. De Goede & Postma, 2015; Hund & Minarik, 2006; Lange-Küttner & Küttner, 2015; Rieser & Pick, 2007). Specifically in children, it may also be the case that the fierce competition for the football that needs to be learned by young children who often do not appreciate competitive games (Priewasser et al., 2013) acts as a mediator for tracking the position of the ball, respectively tracking who is in possession of the ball. A “caring” kindergarten approach would allocate each player a ball so that there would be no fight, but also no monitoring or search.

Thus, the current experimental study with children confirmed the general insight from adult studies on the offside rule that conceptual knowledge may need enrichment with action-based participation in the field in order to result in intelligent decisions. While our dry-run training with the Subbuteo game forged an understanding that allowed both boys and girls to discriminate between offside and non-offside position, the more frequent real-life learning-by-doing that boys reported may have sharpened their visuo-spatial perception.

A limitation of the current study is that game experience was not an experimental design factor. Follow-up studies may be able to include the gender factor based on specific play experience rather than just based on the biological difference between the sexes. For instance, if one recruited a select group of girls who competitively train to play women football and compared these against boys who prefer libraries over the football ground, the offside rule task may show the same effect of football game experience, but reversed in terms of gender distribution.

Author Note

We thank the Deputy Head Teacher Sue Laney, the teaching staff as well as children and their parents of the CE Sir John Cass’s Foundation Primary School, London, UK, for taking part in the study. We are grateful to our technician John Hucker for guidance with the development of the E-Prime experiment, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments.