This season, the
English Premier League has implemented a new measure for measuring
offsides, penalties and the awarding of goals. It is called VAR,
which stands for Video Assisted Referee. While VAR technically refers
to a new match official sitting behind a screen at a hub in West
London, many miles from the stadium where the action is taking place,
it is widely used as shorthand for the technology used by the
official to reach his decisions. Over the course of the season, VAR
has been at the heart of myriad controversies surrounding its
decisions and wider impact on the game.
Of the many incidents
this season into which VAR has unwisely
imposed itself, one from the match between Burnley and Bournemouth
last Saturday stands out as the most surreal. Encounters between the
two sides are not known to be exciting. The reverse fixture last
season, which Burnley won 0-1 by scoring the only game's only shot on
target, out of five shots in total, has been debated as being the
worst in the league's history. This season, VAR decided to get
involved.
At around the hour
mark, Bournemouth were losing 1-0. Burnley were on the attack and
swung a cross into the box. Before reaching the winger on Burnley's
opposite flank, the ball deflected off the area of dubious football legality between
shoulder and upper arm on Bournemouth's defender Adam Smith. Despite
the crowd's protests, Bournemouth collected the ball,
counter-attacked quickly and scored an equaliser through their
winger, Harry Wilson. Or so they thought. VAR typically checks every
goal for signs of foul play, except this time it went further back to
Smith's alleged handball. It was decided that Smith had committed a
foul in his penalty box, meaning that not only was Harry Wilson's
equaliser scrubbed out but Burnley were awarded a penalty, which they
scored to take their lead to 2-0. They went on to score a third and
win the game comfortably.
Whether or not Smith
committed handball is almost beside the point. At the very least the
infringement wasn't clear and obvious, which is supposed to be the
criteria to be met before VAR becomes involved. The point is that VAR
technology has taken rules meant to be interpreted by a referee on the pitch in aid of fairness and a healthy
spirit of play, and implemented them in an authoritarian, puritanical
fashion. In the FA's rules of the game, Law 5 states that 'decisions
will be made to the best of the referee`s ability according to the
Laws of the Game and the spirit of the game'.
In practice, if we
accept momentarily that Adam Smith deliberately moved his arm to
connect with the ball, VAR made the correct decision. The ball did
not go out of play until Harry Wilson scored, making it the only time
the video assistant referee could replay the original incident and
make a decision. Because the original handball was given, all
subsequent action, including Wilson's goal, had to be wiped out and
the game pulled back to award Burnley a penalty. It is a perfectly
rational way of refereeing that particular passage of events. It is
also the wrong way.
One can dissect how
this exposes one of VAR's fundamental failings, the requirement of a
delay in which decisions can be made and how it disrupts the flow of
the game. That's a worthwhile topic, but not the one being addressed
here. This is about how VAR has moved power in football away from the
human being and over to the supposed rationality of technology.
A distinction must
be made between what I shall call human rationality and
technological rationality. Technological rationality interprets rules
in the manner of a machine. Rules are here a synonym for programming.
This programming is performed absolutely and amorally, without
consideration or context, as a series of individual decisions
enabling the correct functioning of a system. To a human being, that
system has a name: football. It has a grander purpose than its own
correct functioning. It is supposed to excite, to entertain, to bring
people together. Thus we come to the difference between technological
rationality and human rationality. Human rationality applies the
rules as well, except it applies them fairly rather than just
logically.
In life as in sport, no
law can be considered just or appropriate if it is applied without
context or flexibility. Laws, and the judiciary applying them, exist
to make societies fairer and more equitable, not to catch people out.
A referee's role is similar in regards to game management: calling up
every minor foul would make the game unwatchable. VAR determining an
offside by whether a player's armpit was a millimetre beyond the last
defender is technically correct, but egregious in the spirit of the
game. If rules are enforced
to such a pedantic degree that no player could be expected to make
such judgments in-game, the rule becomes about entrapment rather than
fairness. Red cards, another matter within VAR's remit, are often as much
about the atmosphere of the game and each player's role within it.
VAR operators are not present at the game and review each incident in
isolation. Despite these limitations, their decision is given primacy
over that of the match referee.
Human beings have long
doubted their capacity for reasoned judgment. Fearful of our imagined biases and shortcomings, we have looked to rational
omniscients to take the responsibility out of their hands. In the
past, that role was filled by God. As our technological power
increased and faith in the divine eroded, God's power was outsourced
to the surveillance state and the game theory algorithms behind free
market economics. Yet attempts to rationalise humanity have always
ended in disaster because human beings experience life on a richer
and more subtle level than pure mechanical logic. From Stalin's brutal attempts
to force Soviet society into the strictures of Engels and Marx's delusion of scientific socalism, to the public choice economics
behind the 2009 financial crash, the systems we have created to
circumvent our supposed failings have only led us into the
very outcomes we were desperate to avoid. Now, in attempting to circumvent the
fallibility of human referees, we have created VAR.
Football is
fundamentally irrational. Supporters become emotionally and
financially invested in results of no discernable benefit to them.
More than any other sport, supporting a football club is as much
about community as competition, a connection to both fellow
supporters and the players taking to the field on fans' behalf.
Everyone wants their club to succeed, but if success were all that
mattered, nobody would support any club beneath the mid-table of their top
national divisions. Supporting football is a distinctly human endeavour,
incomprehensible on paper but exquisitely enriching in practice.
The intrusion of VAR
into this world is unwelcome not only for its flawed decisions, but
for symbolising the sport taking another step away from the people in
the stadium and into the hands of those far away and unaccountable.
In the long term, it matters little that on February 22nd
2020, Burnley went 2-0 up rather than Bournemouth equalising.
Penalties have been scored and goals ruled out for contentious
reasons before. What matters is that miles away from the pitch, a man
behind a screen was influenced by technology to bring about an
outcome deemed rationally correct even if it meant destroying the
flow and spirit of the match. In that moment, football came a lot
more distant, a lot more authoritarian and a lot less joyful and
spontaneous.
In adding football to the many facets of life already ceded to the myth of technological rationalism, we have
ironically created yet another very human disaster.
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