Every four years, a familiar scene unfolds in living rooms, sports bars and group chats around the world. A woman celebrates a goal, wears her team’s colours or expresses support for a side she wants to see win. Almost inevitably, a man appears with a question he believes will expose her as an imposter.
“Do you even know the offside rule?”
It is one of football’s most enduring traditions. Not the rule itself, but the assumption behind the question.
She probably does not know the offside rule. Then again, she may know it perfectly well. In either case, it does not matter.
As the World Cup arrives once more, so does the ritual. It is as predictable as the Brazil-Argentina arguments and the shock group-stage results. Men who have appointed themselves guardians of the sport suddenly feel compelled to defend football from people who are simply trying to enjoy it.
The question is not really about football. It never was. It is a screening process, a small act of gatekeeping disguised as casual conversation. It appears most often when a woman enters a space that some men still imagine belongs primarily to them.
The goal is not to educate. The goal is to establish, quietly and with plausible deniability, that her presence requires approval. That her interest is conditional. That she has not quite earned her place in a moment of collective excitement. Above all, it allows the questioner to reassure himself that he still knows more and therefore somehow belongs more.
This is patriarchy at its most ordinary. Not the dramatic kind that produces obvious villains, but the everyday variety that survives through raised eyebrows, patronising remarks and questions nobody thinks to ask the man standing beside her.
What these men are doing, whether they recognise it or not, is policing access to collective joy. Why should she be allowed to share in the excitement if she has not devoted years to studying formations, transfer windows and league tables? The assumption is that enjoyment must be earned, and that some people are more entitled to it than others.
The irony is that women were excluded from organised football for much of the sport’s history. They were told the game was not for them and, when the formal barriers eventually disappeared, many encountered an informal version of the same argument.
The Football Association banned women’s football from its member grounds in 1921, declaring the game “quite unsuitable for females”. The ban remained in place for fifty years. When it was finally lifted in 1971, there was little acknowledgement of the damage done. Half a century of exclusion does not disappear overnight, nor does the culture that justified it.
So when men deploy the offside test, they are not inventing something new. They are participating in a long tradition of deciding who belongs and who does not.
The World Cup is not a test of football literacy. It is one of the largest shared cultural events on the planet. Billions watch because their country is playing, because the drama is irresistible, or simply because there is joy in being part of something larger than themselves. Most viewers could not explain the difference between a false nine and a second striker, and they are under no obligation to do so.
The real problem lies with the gatekeeper’s fragile sense of ownership. If your enjoyment of football depends on questioning whether someone else deserves to enjoy it, then you are not protecting the sport. You are protecting your own status within it.
A woman watching football because she loves the spectacle is not a threat to anyone’s fandom. She is simply doing what everyone else is doing: watching the game, sharing the moment and enjoying the World Cup.
The fact that this still requires defending says far more about football’s gatekeepers than it does about the women they seek to exclude.
