How this corpus is built, and why you can cite it.
This database holds the full text of official rule books, decomposed to the individual provision and tracked back to source documents. It is built once, audited continuously, and intended to be relied on for decades: closer to a legal research archive than to a sports website.
Figures generated from the database at export time · the corpus grows nightly
Three corpus states
Partial coverage is a first-class state, not an error. Every edition is in exactly one of three states, and every screen renders all three cleanly.
Bibliographic record and preserved source document. Nothing extracted yet.
Full text extracted and searchable, not yet decomposed into rule nodes.
Decomposed to the provision: a tree of typed rule nodes, depth 0 to 4.
Provenance and fidelity
Every edition keeps exactly one canonical source document, plus any preserved variants (alternate extractions kept for provenance). Parsing is audited with a side-by-side QA viewer that compares source text against the parsed tree, with visible coverage gaps. When the tree and the source disagree, the source wins.
The nightly pipeline
An automated pipeline parses roughly 2 to 3 editions per night, so coverage percentages move continuously. No count, total, or percentage anywhere in this interface is hard-coded; every figure is generated from the database at export time, and the timestamp in the footer shows when. A full-text index (SQLite FTS5 over headings and bodies) stays in sync as the corpus grows.
Citing this resource
Every sport, series, edition, and rule node carries a stable identifier, and URLs encode the exact location being viewed, down to the node, including active search terms and filters. A citation block is available on every node and edition:
IFAB, Laws of the Game 2016–17 (IFAB 2016), Law 11 · Offside › 11.2 Offside offence. Rules of Sport Database, node ifab-2016/11-2. Retrieved 17 July 2026.
The methodology behind this database originates in the peer-reviewed study: Copeland, A. A., & Babiak, K. (2026). From Play to Policy: Examining Rule Modifications in Sport Through Organizational Learning and Performance Feedback Lenses. Journal of Sport Management, 40(1), 17-29. doi.org/10.1123/jsm.2024-0370