Word.ws English Dictionary

off-the-ball

off-the-ball adjective: occurring away from active play.

Adjective

off-the-ball (not comparable)

  1. Occurring away from active play.
    • An off the ball incident led to N'Zogbia confronting Wilshere before leaning his head into the Englishman and giving referee Lee Probert no choice but to show the red card.2010 December 29, Mark Vesty, “Wigan 2 - 2 Arsenal”, in BBC

Questions about off-the-ball

What does off-the-ball mean?
Off-the-ball means occurring away from active play.
What part of speech is off-the-ball?
Off-the-ball is an adjective.

Words near off-the-ball in the dictionary

  1. off-stages
  2. off-staging
  3. off-street
  4. off-target
  5. off-the-air
  6. off-the-ball
  7. off-the-books
  8. off-the-charts
  9. off-the-cuff
  10. off-the-grid
  11. off-the-gridder

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: off-the-ball (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “off-the-ball.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/off-the-ball. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.