In a game like soccer (association football), where it’s much easier to clear a ball down-field than to advance it great distances, under control, past defenders, an obvious strategy arises: keep your attackers near the enemy goal and your defenders near your own goal, and then pass the ball over the empty mid-field to your attackers whenever possible.
The original Sheffield Rules had no notion of offside, and players known as kick-throughs waited patiently near the enemy goal.
We don’t have a copy of the 1848 Cambridge rules, but they apparently include the notion of offside. The 1856 Shrewsbury School rules include Rule No. 9, a clear forerunner to the modern offside rule:
If the ball has passed a player and has come from the direction of his own goal, he may not touch it till the other side have kicked it, unless there are more than three of the other side before him. No player is allowed to loiter between the ball and the adversaries’ goal.
In 1925, the rule changed to two players, and scoring increased by almost one goal per game (from 2.5 to 3.4).
You don’t have to be a sophisticated game theorist to see that this style of offside rule invites the so-called offside trap, where the defenders surge forward and put an attacker offside just before he can receive a pass — and force a difficult call by the ref, which might easily change the outcome of the game.
Ice hockey takes a different approach.
Before 1930, hockey, like Rugby and earlier forms of American football, simply didn’t allow any forward passing.
In modern hockey, you can’t pass across the blue line to a player already in the attacking zone. An attacking player is offside if he enters the attacking zone before the puck itself enters the zone — and if the defenders successfully clear the puck out of their defensive zone, any attackers have to clear out as well before returning.
There’s much less ambiguity and much less gaming of a system with such (literally) clear lines.
Field hockey, by the way, started with soccer-style offside rules, amended them in 1987 to only apply within 25 yards of the goal line, and then abolished them completely in 1998.
Team handball simply doesn’t allow anyone past the goal perimeter, which defines the fairly large crease.
Basketball defines a key, or free throw lane, near the basket. There are no rules against passing into the key, but offensive players can’t linger in the key for more than three seconds.
Originally the key was just six feet wide; connected to the 12-foot diameter free throw circle, it looked like a key. Now the lane is 12 feet wide in college and 16 feet wide in the pros.
As you can see, there are many different ways to address the problem of attackers hanging out near the goal, cherry-picking.