on VAR and technology in football

“Don’t blame VAR, blame the rule” - Jamie Carragher, analysing Ayemeric Laporte’s handball after Manchester City’s draw to Tottenham in August, 2019

Carragher’s comments referred to the change in the handball rule this summer: any accidental handball involved in the creation of a goal would now result in the goal being disallowed. Accidental handballs were not automatically punished before this. The rule change followed a series of controversial incidents in Europe the season before, when VAR (video assistant referee) had been used to award handballs that were not only accidental, but barely noticeable to the naked eye.

When PSG met Manchester United in the second round of the Champions League, the referees inside the VAR shed outside the stadium watching multiple replays of every incident on multiple screens, saw something barely anyone on the pitch managed to catch. Marcus Rashford hammered a shot into Presnel Kimpembe’s arm from point-blank range, initially resulting in a corner. But the VAR officials having seen the replays asked the referee to view the incident again, and a game-changing penalty was awarded in Rashford’s favour.

For years, television pundits have been complaining about how goalkeepers have been allowed to step in front of the goal line and gain an advantage when trying to save a penalty. Television replays of penalties from multiple angles, slowed down to only a few frames per second, show how goalkeepers would often gain an advantage by shuffling away from the goal line and closing down the distance between themselves and the taker. This summer, an amendment to the game’s rules by the IFAB emphasised that keepers must have at least one foot on the line before the kick is taken. In the women’s World Cup in June with VAR active, decisive, match winning penalty saves were being disqualified on this basis.

The rules of football are inherently ambiguous. And a game as fluid and dynamic as football rarely works within binary confines. The new rules added for the penalty kicks this summer are a case in point. Law 14 states that before the penalty is taken, the keeper ‘must not be moving’. The explanation section for Law 14 then states that the keeper is allowed to take ‘one step’ in anticipation of the kick. What exactly qualifies as a ‘step’ and ‘moving’ distinctly is never defined. To define these terms would be to try and reduce the game to a series of rigid, calculated movements. Anyone who has watched a live game of football can tell you that the sport is absolutely anything but this.

The rules are full of contradictions and loosely defined phrases that have worked well for over a century in allowing games to eb and flow in the spirit of fair play. Far from simply highlighting infringements referees happen to miss, VAR is forcing people to realise and question ambiguities within the rules and fundamentally, is forcing the authorities to change and refine the rules as a response to this.

The point is that VAR is no neutral observer. The act of slowing a few seconds of football down and replaying it ten times means that there is always going to be some infringement of some rule that the referee has managed to miss. The game’s rules are so varied and vague that between 3 people sitting in a shed outside a ground, it is probable that at least one of them is going to see something worth questioning on a slowed-down replay. When Carragher says that the rules are the problem, he is only half right.

“The washing machine is a more useful invention than the smartphone” - Mark Fisher, Digital Bauhaus Summit 2016

Technology works best when it makes our lives easier. When like the washing machine, it runs in the background as something we hardly ever have to take notice of. The best example of this mechanism in football is probably goal-line technology. Sensors on the ball and on the goal line give the referee an instant decision as to whether or not a goal should stand. There is no debate, or need to consult the technology multiple times. It simply is what it is. Goal-line technology is one of the only instances in a game football that lends itself to a binary choice. No need for contradictory, loosely defined rules; plainly and simply, was the ball over the line, or was it not?

VAR’s insufficiency, the fact that so many people are so pissed off with it, stems from how inconclusive it is. You could watch the same close-up replay of a tackle fifteen times over, and have fifteen different theories as to why it should or should not be called for a foul.

Replays themselves have been developed and utilised by television studios, a product of the rapid growth of televised football since the ‘90s. The televised game has become a multi-billion pound industry in its own right. Revenue streams from television deals easily eclipse what a top-flight club makes in matchday ticket sales, or in transfer fees from player sales. The monetary stakes attached to staying in the Premier League or reaching the Champions League are so high that every match-deciding action on the pitch could dictate the fate of millions of pounds, in or against a club’s favour. In this climate, it’s little wonder that VAR has been introduced to try and provide clinical precision and definition when deciding where all this money ends up.

“Don’t take for granted the popularity of football...don’t take for granted the fact that football is the world game - one of the reasons for that is its essential simplicity and soon as you start messing with that, you lose things’ - Tim Vickery, WFPI, 17th August 2019

An article from Tony Evans in the Independent detailed current plans to change European football at UEFA. There are suggestions that the new plans will ensure 24 of Europe’s top teams are guaranteed a spot in each year’s Champions League, regardless of where they finish domestically. If this happens, football’s centerpiece will be showbiz style clashes between the richest clubs on the continent such as Liverpool and Bayern Munich throughout the year - a kind of never ending video game of football in exhibition mode, played out for viewers on Netflix.

VAR fits well into this emerging world of dark technological fantasy. Television and the internet were initially used merely as mediums through which the game could be popularised. Increasingly, they are being used to create and redefine the very turf on which the game is played. Young teenagers aspire to become official e-Sports Xbox team members for one of the world’s biggest clubs. Modern stadiums are built with more consideration to how they appear on screen than to the ease of access for match-going fans. Superstars such as Wayne Rooney are signed for clubs as part of a gambling company’s online marketing campaign. And while football is being endlessly copied, repackaged and rewritten as only a capitalist product can be, more and more people are being excluded from its genuine delights.

Football’s popularity blossomed with the rise of modern industry over the past two centuries. In England and across the world, clubs formed out of tightly packed villages and towns of factory and mill workers, looking for something to do in their free time. But since the changes made to the game in England following the Hillsborough disaster in 1989, clubs have found themselves increasingly at odds with the communities in which they were born. Ticket prices mean that thousands of working-class fans are being priced out of attending Premier League games every week and in the top flight, clubs are more interested in commercialising their own fans’ identity and culture through overseas markets than in preserving them.

As the 20th century wore on, football grew into what we now know as the true game of the working masses. If the current drive towards commercialisation and profit rolls on much further, it is unlikely that this will continue for much longer.