{"id":638,"date":"2020-10-15T11:25:50","date_gmt":"2020-10-15T11:25:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.football-stadiums.co.uk\/professional-fouls\/"},"modified":"2023-12-28T17:24:54","modified_gmt":"2023-12-28T17:24:54","slug":"professional-fouls","status":"publish","type":"articles","link":"https:\/\/www.football-stadiums.co.uk\/articles\/professional-fouls\/","title":{"rendered":"History Of Professional Fouls In Football"},"content":{"rendered":"
You can read about the history of yellow and red cards<\/a> elsewhere on this site, which we\u2019ve covered in great detail.<\/p>\n This page is more about the history of fouls and the manner in which a decision was taken to introduce disciplinary procedures to the game of football. It is arguably the key thing that finally saw football began to move fully away from rugby as a sport after the two were so closely linked initially.<\/p>\n It was, of course, seen as a gentleman\u2019s game during its more formative years<\/a>, so the idea of needing to create a system in order to stop players fouling each other seemed alien to the members of the Football Association<\/a> when they were creating the rules of the game<\/a> hundreds of years ago.<\/p>\n It was something that was developed after years of the game being played and the real world scenarios that it threw up.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n A professional foul is the phrase given to an action in the world of professional football. Essentially, it involves a player on the defending team fouling a player on the opposition side in order to stop them from scoring or having a clear goal scoring opportunity. Equally, defending team players can\u2019t handle the ball in the manner that will deny a clear goal scoring chance.<\/p>\n Because the resulting free-kick<\/a> or penalty<\/a> may provide the attacking team with less of an opportunity to score than they had originally, there is a clear incentive for the defending player to weigh up whether to foul or not. Referees<\/a> are then faced with a choice of whether the offence is worth issuing a caution for, with yellow and red cards the choices that they are faced with being able to issue.<\/p>\n Many football supporters will refer to a player being the \u2018last man\u2019, but in actuality that is irrelevant when it comes to the referee\u2019s decision making. In fact, the phrase \u2018last man\u2019 has been part of the Laws Of The Game. Supporters might well feel that a player should definitely be sent off because of a foul if they\u2019re the last man<\/a>, but that isn\u2019t automatically the case and the phrase \u2018last man\u2019 can be misleading.<\/p>\n Referees will weigh up the likes of the distance from goal that the offence took place, the likelihood of the player keeping the ball under their control before the foul happened, the direction of the play and both the number of defenders and their locations when deciding the punishment that should be given in addition to the awarding of the foul. It is informally known as a DOGSO, or Denial of an Obvious Goal-Scoring Opportunity.<\/p>\nThe Definition Of A Professional Foul<\/h2>\n
The History Of The Professional Foul<\/h2>\n