WTF is red card?

WTF is a red card?

A red card is shown by the referee to eject a player from the match permanently. That player cannot return. Their team plays short for the remainder of the game.

Okay, but how bad do you have to be to get one?

Bad enough that the referee decides the game is better without you. That bar is higher than you think.

Picture this. Your team has the ball. An opposing player lunges in from the side, both feet off the ground, studs aimed directly at your midfielder's knee. The referee blows the whistle. Reaches into his pocket. Shows red. The offending player walks off the pitch. He showers, sits in the locker room, and watches the last seventy minutes on his phone. His team plays ten versus eleven and everyone hates him.

That is a red card. The clearest version of it, anyway.

The wrinkle is this. A red card is not just for violence. It also applies to a player who deliberately stops a clear goalscoring opportunity, usually by handling the ball with their arm or fouling a player who was clean through on goal. Soccer calls this a Denial of an Obvious Goalscoring Opportunity. The referee calls it a red card. You will call it outrageous. The replays will prove the referee was right.

How is this different from American sports?

In the NFL, if you do something catastrophically stupid, you get ejected. Your team plays on at full strength. In hockey, you go to the penalty box for a few minutes and skate back out. Soccer does neither of these things.

A red card is permanent and your team absorbs the punishment for the rest of the match. One player gone. Ten left. No substitution to cover the gap. No timer counting down. Just ten humans trying to play a game designed for eleven, for as long as the referee decides.

Losing a player in soccer is closer to losing a starter in basketball who fouls out in the second quarter. Except in basketball you have a bench. In soccer you have ten men and a lot of screaming from the sideline.

What about the yellow card?

A yellow card is a warning. Two yellows in the same match equal a red. The player goes, same rules apply.

The yellow-then-yellow structure is where casual viewers lose the thread. A player can pick up a yellow in the first minute and spend the next eighty-nine minutes playing on a knife's edge, knowing one more reckless challenge ends his afternoon. Coaches know this. Opponents know this. The player absolutely knows this. It changes how the game is played in ways that won't show up anywhere on the scoreboard.

That is me. I am the scoreboard. I am telling you this free of charge.

Does the punishment carry over?

Yes. A red card usually means an automatic one-match suspension at minimum. The player misses the next game while his teammates deal with the fallout and do not look at him directly in training.

Accumulating yellow cards across multiple matches can also trigger a suspension. A player does not need to get a red to miss a game. He just needs to be reckless and consistent about it, which describes roughly forty percent of central midfielders at the international level.

For a tournament like the World Cup, suspensions are timed to hurt as much as possible. A player who picks up two yellows across the group stage sits out the next round. This has ended World Cup dreams more reliably than any opposing striker.

Still confused?

You are not confused. You understand that red means gone, yellow means warned, and two yellows make one red. You are processing the fact that a single player's bad decision can change the entire structure of the match and there is nothing his team can do about it. That is not confusion. That is dawning horror.

Bookmark this page anyway. June is coming faster than your understanding of the offside rule.

If you want to know what happens when a referee gets the red card decision wrong, read our breakdown of VAR at wtfis.soccer. It will explain why everyone in the stadium is staring at a screen and nobody is clapping.

— The Scoreboard