Culture
Bellingham's non-goal shows us football’s full-time law needs to change
It is the final seconds of the NBA Finals. The clock hits 0.0 in a one-point game, but play continues for a few seconds because the Golden State Warriors are driving towards the rim.
The fight at Madison Square Garden is going the distance. The final bell goes in the 12th round, but the referee doesn’t stop Oleksandr Usyk’s advance, with the Ukrainian boxer close to a knockout.
There is one lap left in the Formula One World Championship and in a winner-takes-all situation, the race director refuses to drop the chequered flag because second-place is catching the leader. Actually, after the controversial end to the 2021 season, maybe that is not the best example.
Nevertheless, the point still stands. The circumstances above are ridiculous — every major sport has a clear ending, whether it’s an expired game clock, the final pitch, match point. They are objective, not subjective.
Football is an exception and the final moments of Real Madrid’s 2-2 draw at Valencia on Saturday night exposed its limitations.
This is what transpired.
Bellingham and other players surround the referee after the decision (Jose Hernandez/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Seven minutes of stoppage time came up on the fourth official’s board. After that, there was a two-minute delay when a penalty initially awarded against Real was overturned by the VAR. The visiting side’s hackles were up on an emotional night — winger Vinicius Junior had earlier scored two goals at a stadium where he was subject to racist abuse the previous season.
The delays meant the match continued into its 99th minute and as Luka Modric approached to take a Madrid corner, referee Jesus Gil Manzano signalled that this would be the match’s final play.
Valencia cleared — but only to the edge of the box. As Madrid winger Brahim Diaz prepared to cross the ball back in, Gil Manzano blew his whistle. Game over.
Less than a second later, Diaz delivered his cross. The referee’s whistle had not yet registered with the players awaiting it. Jude Bellingham, who has scored 16 La Liga goals this season, headed in. Wheeling away in celebration, he and Madrid thought this was the winner, another special moment in his spectacular debut season.
Gil Manzano was resolute. No goal. Bellingham rushed the referee alongside captain Dani Carvajal, Vinicius Jr, Joselu, Andriy Lunin, and Antonio Rudiger.
“It’s a f*****g goal,” Bellingham shouted at Gil Manzano — and was sent off. Speaking post-match, Carlo Ancelotti backed up his player.
“Bellingham did not insult the referee, he said in English, ‘It’s a f*****g goal’, which is what we all thought,” the Madrid manager said. “He came close to the referee, but given what had happened, that was pretty normal.”
Madrid’s official website called it an “unprecedented refereeing decision” — but by the letter of the law, they had no case. Gil Manzano had played enough stoppage time and signalled his intention to end the game and the final whistle means the game is over. No ifs, buts, or maybes.
The anger came from one of football’s unwritten laws — that when a team is attacking, the final whistle should not be blown.
“The ball is in the air — what the f*** is that?” Bellingham appeared to say during his protestations. From rewatching, the first blast of Gil Manzano’s whistle came before the ball was delivered — with the second and third occurring with the ball in the air, but before Bellingham headed it. Only the first whistle is needed to stop the game.
Football’s rulebook is vague about exactly when a referee should blow their whistle. According to the International Football Association Board (IFAB), the sport’s lawmakers, the referee “acts as the timekeeper”, “the additional time may be increased by the referee, but not reduced”, and “the allowance for time lost is at the discretion of the referee”.
IFAB Law 5.2 adds: “The referee may not change a restart decision on realising that it is incorrect if the referee has signalled the end of the first or second half.”
This wooliness has led to a subjective system. The game has developed in such a way that the expectation is that a half should not end if one team is on the attack, but without this being codified, referees can interpret this differently — if they recognise it at all.
What constitutes being on the attack? Being about to shoot or cross? What if there is a transition opportunity? What if a player has a clear run at goal from behind halfway? Is 60 seconds of patient build-up from around the edge of the box, a la Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City, one ongoing attack?
Every other element of football is tightly regulated. IFAB’s Laws of the Game is a 230-page-long document. Six of those pages, including diagrams, are devoted to what constitutes handball. Why does one of its most important elements — when a game is over — scarcely merit a mention?
After posting about this on X, formerly Twitter, some replied to say the law was clear — the game is over when the whistle blows. Why the widespread anger then? Others responded by saying this was only an issue because it happened to Bellingham and Real Madrid — but this is not the first time it has happened. It was only a matter of time before it occurred again in a high-stakes, high-profile match.
Going right back to the 1978 World Cup, Welsh referee Clive Thomas blew for full time with a Brazil corner in the air during a group stage match against Sweden — disallowing a Zico header that would have given Brazil a 2-1 win. The decision meant they only finished second in their group, placing them in a harder pool in the second round, from which they failed to qualify for the final.
In January 2021, Paul Tierney blew for half-time a handful of seconds before the allotted one minute of stoppage time was up. Liverpool, playing Manchester United in a crucial Premier League match, had the ball behind halfway, but Sadio Mane appeared to be through on goal. He would not have been able to put the ball into the net before the clock struck 46 minutes.
One month later, Craig Pawson was refereeing Manchester United’s trip to West Bromwich Albion. With the score 1-1 and the clock at 47.07 after two minutes of stoppage time, United broke from their own half — with four attackers against only one West Brom defender. Pawson blew with the ball still 70 yards from the opposition goal and was surrounded by irate United players.
Most egregiously, in November 2017, Spanish second-division side Ponferradina thought they had a late winner to lift them clear of the relegation zone, but referee Alvaro Lopez Parra blew as Andy Rodriguez chipped the ball over the opposition goalkeeper.
Gim. Segoviana – Ponferradina (0-0): gol anulado a la Ponfe en la última jugada. El balón entra mientras suena el pitido final (vía @rtvcyl) pic.twitter.com/zgUlU7z9E8
— El Partidazo de COPE (@partidazocope) November 2, 2017
The laws allow for subconscious bias, the possibility of home teams or favourites being given more chances, and for inconsistency, with referees interpreting what constitutes an attack differently.
Visit refereeing forums and the same issues arise. Dozens of grassroots officials have stories of being surrounded after blowing for full time. Their decision is final, but subjective. People disagree.
“It’s less aggro, believe me, to blow at a neutral situation,” wrote one referee, explaining one controversial incident. “But it isn’t necessarily always the correct thing to do.”
It does not need to be this way.
IFAB’s annual conference took place last week in Scotland. There, football’s lawmakers discussed permanent and temporary concussion substitutes, accidental handballs, and encroachment during penalties. What else might they have discussed had full time been on the agenda?
Football has a few challenges. Because of further stoppages after the 90th minute — injuries, substitutions, celebrations, time-wasting — referees cannot simply blow up the second that the clock hits the end of the allotted stoppage time.
If football had a system where the clock stopped when the ball was out of play, matches would swell to an unprecedented length — the typical ball-in-play time in the Premier League is roughly around 55 minutes.
Under the current system, however, teams complain if the whistle is blown while they are on the attack. Amid this indistinctness, no one is happy.
One simple tweak could help. During stoppage time, the referee could switch to a stopped-clock system and blow up exactly on the minute. For example, if a team scores after the referee has signalled there would be four minutes of stoppage time, the referee could stop time, before restarting when the ball is in play, and blow up exactly on 94.00. Professional stadiums all have clocks displaying the exact time, so players can remain aware.
It gives the law objectivity, allows for post-90th-minute stoppages and, by only being implemented in stoppage time, means games will not take over two hours to complete. It is not a complete novelty to the sport — futsal already has a designated timekeeper and a strict full-time whistle.
Bellingham’s ‘goal’ should not have stood, but the vagueness and limitations of football’s laws put referees in a difficult position. The game is already hard enough to control. This is not a case of a rule being changed — but of basic clarity being introduced.
(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Dan Goldfarb)
The result has been a terrible irony for a country that was founded as a refuge from intolerance: “How is it that the appeal to humanitarianism, tolerance, the rule of law and protection of minorities that characterized the beginning of Jewish self-emancipation gradually acquired all the traits of the relentless, remorseless and increasingly racist ethnonationalisms from which Zionism sought to liberate European Jewry?”
To answer this painful question, Bartov uses all the tools at his disposal, weaving together history, personal anecdotes, even some literary criticism, including a close reading of a poem — by Hayim Nahman Bialik and known to “every Israeli schoolchild” — about the perils of vengeance that has been misinterpreted and warped for political ends. Bartov writes unsparingly about Hamas’s murderous attacks, in which about 1,200 Israelis were killed and about 250 others taken hostage, which he calls an unequivocal “war crime and a crime against humanity.” It was a “slaughter of innocents” that “evoked collective memories of massacres and the Holocaust.”
Indeed, in a May 2024 poll of Israelis that he cites, more than half of the respondents said Oct. 7 could be compared to the Holocaust, and the Israeli media repeatedly depicted the massacre as a pogrom. Bartov understands why — for traumatized people, new traumas will revive old ones — but he maintains that the label is a category mistake. Israel is a state; it has an army, laws and government. A pogrom “is a mob attack, condoned or supported by the state authorities, against a minority lacking any attributes of a state.” (“To be sure,” he adds, “pogroms have occurred within the territories controlled by Israel, but when they take place, they were and are being carried out, with increasing frequency and ferocity, by settlers in the West Bank.”)
Israel doesn’t have a constitution. After its founding, its government was supposed to codify the protection of religious freedom and minority rights, but efforts to adopt a constitution were waylaid and arguably thwarted by political figures like David Ben-Gurion, the country’s first prime minister. Bartov believes that a constitution could have made Zionism “superfluous” after it succeeded in establishing a state that could be a refuge for Jews. Citizens could have turned toward the task of building a “just society” that aimed at “peace, truth and reconciliation with the Palestinians.”
This sounds nice, if fanciful; constitutions don’t magically prevent authoritarianism. Not to mention that attacks by surrounding Arab states did nothing to alleviate Israelis’ sense that they were constantly embattled.
Now that we’ve memorized the first half of our poem, let’s learn a little more about the man who wrote it. (Haven’t memorized anything yet? Click here to start at the beginning.)
For most of his life, Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-73) was a star. He was widely read, quoted, argued over and gossiped about, achieving a level of fame that few writers now — and not many then — could contemplate. His New York Times obituary did not hesitate to call him “the foremost poet of his generation.”
Celebrity of that kind is ephemeral, but Auden’s words have continued to circulate in the half century since his death. Maybe you’ve heard some of them before. In the 1994 film “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” his poem “Funeral Blues” is recited by Matthew (John Hannah) over the casket of his lover, Gareth (Simon Callow).
In the Gen-X touchstone “Before Sunrise” (1995), Jesse (Ethan Hawke) regales Celine (Julie Delpy) with an impression of Dylan Thomas reading Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening.”
In both these scenes, the characters use Auden’s poetry to give voice to a longing for which they otherwise might not have words. Auden’s poetry is often useful in that way. It speaks to recognizable human occasions, and it isn’t always all about him.
“The More Loving One” might not be something you’d quote at a funeral or on a date, but it is almost effortlessly quotable — the perfect expression of a thought you never knew you had:
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Ken Burns, filmmaker
The word “I” occurs five times in this stanza, but we don’t know much about the person speaking. His personality is camouflaged and revealed by craft.
Auden, born in the northern English cathedral city of York, began practicing that craft as a schoolboy, and honed it at Oxford. Not long after graduating in 1928, he was anointed by critics and readers as the great hope of modern English poetry. A charismatic, divisive figure, he gathered acolytes, imitators and haters.
He swam in the intellectual and ideological crosscurrents of the 1930s, drawing Marxism, psychoanalysis and mystical nationalism into his writing. Assimilating a daunting array of literary influences — Old English and Ancient Greek, French chansons and Icelandic sagas — he forged a poetic personality that was bold, confiding and seductive.
His love poems of that era were candid, discreet dispatches from a calendar of feverish entanglements, wrenching breakups and one-night stands, usually with other men. He also wrote about the feverish politics of the time — class conflict; the rise of fascism; the Spanish Civil War — in ringing rhetoric he later disavowed.
In 1939 Auden moved to America, acquiring U.S. citizenship after World War II. In New York he fell in love with Chester Kallman, a young American writer who became his life partner.
It was a complicated relationship, starting as a passionate affair and enduring through decades of domestic companionship and creative collaboration. Kallman’s refusal to be sexually exclusive wounded Auden, a dynamic that poignantly shades this poem’s most memorable couplet:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Yiyun Li, writer
In America, Auden distanced himself from the radical politics of his earlier career and embraced Anglican Christianity. His intellectual preoccupations shifted toward religion and existentialism — to the kinds of big questions we think about late at night, or when we look to the sky.
Making the leap from wunderkind to grand old man without seeming to stop in middle age, he became a mentor for several generations of younger poets. He was a prolific and punctual contributor of reviews and essays to various publications, including this one, for which he wrote a rave of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Fellowship of the Ring” in 1954.
Through it all, Auden devoted fanatical attention to the finer points of poetic technique. His notebooks are full of numbers, word lists and markings that show just how deep this commitment went. He counted every syllable, measured every stress.
He gathered rhymes and other words with a lexicographer’s zeal and a crossword puzzler’s precision.
The third stanza of “The More Loving One” is a miniature showcase of Auden’s skill. Of the four epigrams arrayed before us, it may be the most technically perfect.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
W.H. Auden, poet
The rhythm is flawless, without an extra syllable or an accent out of place. The grammar is also fastidious. Here is a single sentence, springloaded with equivocation, beginning with one idea and sliding toward its opposite.
This quatrain is the poem’s ideal formal representation of itself, a kind of proof of concept: four lines of impeccable iambic tetrameter in an AABB rhyme scheme. The by-the-book regularity of this stanza should give you a leg up in memorizing it, and you can test yourself below!
But the rest of the poem is an argument against perfection, just as it is a celebration of uncertainty and humility — as we’ll see tomorrow.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Your first task: Learn the first two lines!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
PERMANENCE, by Sophie Mackintosh
Sophie Mackintosh’s novels are always speculative in some way, with either the author or her characters forging a world governed by its own logic and rules. In their boldness and their ability to convey the violence of patriarchy, they recall the work of Jacqueline Harpman — not only the cherished “I Who Have Never Known Men,” but also “Orlanda,” her wild riff on Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando.”
Like Harpman, Mackintosh has a spare and confident hand. Her work is sometimes described as dreamlike; certainly, its contours are sketched with rapidity and confidence and relatively little detail. Her prose operates according to the same principle, at once lyrical and precise, like this from her second novel, “Blue Ticket”: “On the ground was a dead rabbit, disemboweled. Still fresh, the dark loops of its insides glistening like jam.”
When Mackintosh writes about masculine power, she does so in a way that articulates both its seductions and its terrors. Her newest novel, “Permanence,” is less explicitly concerned with the structure of patriarchy, but it has the same erotic charge as her earlier work, the same preoccupation with social prohibitions and the thrill that comes from breaking them.
Like “Blue Ticket,” “Permanence” turns on a highly pronounced binary. In “Blue Ticket,” adolescent girls are issued either a blue or white ticket on the day of their first period. A white ticket denotes a future of marriage and children, a blue ticket one of work — even, it seems, a career. The divide is stark and self-evidently faulty, its coarseness an expression of the brutalizing regime the characters are trapped in.
“Permanence” features a similar opposition, neatly delineated. Clara and Francis are conducting an illicit affair. One morning, they wake up in an alternate reality where they are openly living together. The novel shuttles between these two worlds, one ordinary and familiar, the other a curdled paradise for adulterers.
The thinness of this “city of impermanence” — “fluid, cohesive and yet disparate” — emerges at once. The sky is “uncannily blue,” the newspaper bears no date, the edge of the city is marked by “a slick ring of water, as far as the eye could see.”
Still, a boundary cannot keep the other world from seeping in. Initially, elegantly, this is a problem in the structure of desire. Having been provided the life they dreamed of, in which their longing for each other is fully met, Clara and Francis begin to experience, to their uneasy surprise, boredom and discontent.
Without absence, the intensity of their desire for each other wanes. They even begin, or at least Francis does, to long for the relief of their ordinary life: “Another day ahead of them of petting, giggling, lying around. It seemed insubstantial suddenly, though only the day before he had felt he could do it forever.”
Soon enough, it becomes clear that the problem between Francis and Clara doesn’t lie in the outside impediments of the world they live in, but in their relationship itself. Francis remains troublingly himself — a married father of a small child, reluctant to leave his family, however much he is in love with Clara: “He did love her, and he did want to be with her. … But he already had reality elsewhere, reality which he sometimes felt trapped by, he would admit, but which he could not truly imagine cutting loose.”
“Permanence” might seem like an outlier in the current array of articles and books about open marriages and polyamory, and at first glance the line of distinction between the two worlds, much like the division between blue and white tickets, seems almost old-fashioned. But as Mackintosh persuasively illustrates, the familiar emotions of jealousy, infatuation and eventually indifference — these persist and can flourish in any relationship, however free of prohibition.
“You want this,” Clara tells herself, and then, “You no longer want this,” as it occurs to her that “maybe it was in absence that they loved each other best, and most honestly.”
In her work, Mackintosh devises scenarios that are bold and almost aggressively simplified. But her terrain is complexity and contradiction, and in her hands these oppositions twist and turn in on themselves.
It’s hardly a surprise when the central character in “Blue Ticket” decides to eschew her designation and have a child, declaring, “True and false were no longer opposing binaries. My body was speaking to me in a language I had not heard before.” Nor is it especially startling when discontent chases Clara and Francis from one world to the other, unraveling their relationship.
What is more disquieting is the surreptitious ease with which Mackintosh’s speculative worlds start to align with our own, allowing the reader to see how so many of the old prohibitions and conventions — around choice, around marriage — remain, somehow, firmly in place.
That moment of recognition, in a landscape that is startlingly alien, is the source of Mackintosh’s power as a writer.
PERMANENCE | By Sophie Mackintosh | Avid Reader Press | 240 pp. | $28
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