The Rules of Football, in simple IT terms

Never quite got your head round the laws of the game? Picture the pitch as a beige tower PC circa 2003, the match as a slow-loading web page, and the officials as increasingly temperamental software. Here's every law of the game, finally explained in terms you'll actually remember.

Offside – loading into RAM

Picture the pitch as your PC's memory. Onside is when a player is safely loaded into RAM, ready and waiting to be called into use. The moment an attacker gets ahead of the second-last defender before the ball's played to them, they've tried to run before they've been loaded – like double-clicking a program before Windows has finished booting. The result's the same either way: an error message (a raised flag) and the whole thing's cancelled before it even started.

Handball – Ctrl+Alt+Delete

A deliberate handball is a player force-quitting the laws of the game with their own personal Ctrl+Alt+Delete, interrupting a process (the ball) they had no business touching. The referee's whistle is Task Manager popping up to shut the whole thing down.

Yellow card – the Windows warning dialog

A yellow card is Windows 98 popping up a dialog box: "This action may cause instability. Do you wish to continue?" You're allowed to click "OK" and carry on. Do it again, though, and…

Red card – the Blue Screen of Death

…you get the Blue Screen of Death. Total system failure. You're off, the match restarts without you, and your team has to run the rest of it on ten men – like a PC missing a stick of RAM.

VAR – buffering

VAR is dial-up broadband circa 2001. Everyone in the stadium stops, stares at a small spinning icon, and waits for a decision to load. Sometimes it takes eight seconds. Sometimes the page times out completely and everyone just has to go off what the referee remembers seeing before the connection dropped.

The offside trap – a firewall

A well-drilled back four stepping up together to catch a forward offside is a firewall: a coordinated block designed to stop unauthorised packets (attackers) getting through before they're cleared to.

Extra time – an overheating processor

Extra time is what happens when the system's been running hot for so long it needs another thirty minutes just to cool down and finish the job, like a Pentium 4 with its fan on full blast.

Injury time – lag

Injury time, or stoppage time, is lag: the extra few minutes tacked on at the end because everything ran slightly behind where it should have, on account of a dodgy connection – in this case, someone rolling around clutching their shin.

Throw-in – ejecting a floppy disk

When the ball goes out for a throw-in, think of it as ejecting a floppy disk: removed from the drive just long enough to be safely handed back in over the same side it came out.

Corner kick – the right-click context menu

A corner is the right-click context menu of football: a fresh set of options opens up right in the corner of the screen, and everyone crowds round waiting to see what gets selected.

Penalty – formatting the hard drive

A penalty kick is like formatting your hard drive: one attempt, no undo button, and if it goes wrong there's a strong chance you'll be in tears in front of your family.

Substitution – hot-swapping hardware

A substitution is hot-swapping a bit of hardware while the system's still running: out goes the tired component, in comes a fresh one, and, in theory, nobody has to switch anything off.

Full-time whistle – safe to turn off

And the final whistle is Windows' old shutdown message: "It is now safe to turn off your computer." Ninety minutes, plus however much lag, are up, and the system can finally rest.