This not a lament for a lost age of ignorance. And it certainly is not a justification for this specific decision, which was an open-and-shut case, and wrong. It is not a call for the abolition of VAR, although at times you wonder whether it might be better to chuck the whole thing out the window. There was none in the Copa del Rey and frankly it wasn’t missed. It is better that things are seen, that when laws are broken, they are acted upon.
But there is the letter of the law and the spirit of the law, and Monday was just another illustration of how this is not the panacea it was presented as being, nor the paradise promised. Not because mistakes can still be made, but because the impact of them is worse than it ever was before, the sense of injustice greater. Precisely because perfection was the promise. Sunlit uplands and all that. And that was always a myth. The whole thing is a myth, in fact. Right from the start.
The introduction of the VAR, like so many things, was predicated on a lie: on the lie that football had a really, really, really serious problem. That it was dreadful. That hideous injustices were happening all the time. They. Just. Weren’t. And they’re not perfect now, either. Besides, it’s not even about that. It’s about the decisions; it’s about play, about that great forgotten element: the actual game.
It’s about the impact, how they referee differently, conditioned by the all-seeing eye, how the tension increases and the time is wasted, how so many matches are decided by what feel like bureaucratic incidents, how what didn’t matter now matters more than anything else. How the introduction of VAR has necessitated other changes to make sense of it, to justify it, to try to get the best of it: endless circulars, changes made, explanations offered.
How things that were just left are now elevated to everything. How even some of the things it was supposed to bring, it hasn’t. The ultimate goal of VAR allowing for its own disappearance, bad habits removed from the game, will never happen. Take diving, which, counter-intuitive though it sounds, is inadvertently encouraged now: seek a contact, take the fall, hear the whistle, which is now more likely than ever precisely because there’s a video there as backup, a way out for referees, wait for the screen to show that there was a touch there, score from the spot.
It’s about the takeover of the machines, “objectivity” applied in a game where refereeing criteria was in charge and now is in collapse, but not completely. Machines still need men and women to work them. And when the machines take over, there’s no going back. The box has been opened now; it can’t be closed again. So you try to make it work. When you have the technology you want more of it, always reaching for some solution just beyond your grasp, so it invades more and more and so it never ends. It is about, in short, the pursuit of something impossible and not even desirable, conflicting interests conditioning everything.
It’s not even about the justice, the decisions themselves. That’s more incidental than it might appear. And anyway, there has not been a sea change in justice — which is an elusive concept anyway. According to Spain’s referee’s committee, more than 93% of decisions were correct pre-VAR. Now it is almost 98%.
Let’s assume that we can trust that calculation, that we even trust and share post-event judgements of “correct.” That’s an improvement, yes. Getting the correct decision 98% of the time is a high figure — very high — but 93%, many of the mistakes minor, doesn’t reveal a game that was broken. These weren’t referees that were a disaster or a sport that would sink. For a five-percentage-point improvement, the game gets changed. Is it worth it? Maybe, yeah. Or maybe not. And those percentage points look so much bigger now. And that’s the thing. Or at least it was this week.
As Monday showed, errors keep happening. How could they not? And that 2% is harder to swallow than the 7% ever was: the anger greater, the accusations harsher, the conspiracies easier to come by. The impact of all of that is greater, more damaging. The biases, meanwhile, are the same as they ever were, judge and jury, from clubs to fans to media, not exactly impartial. There’s a nice line from the former Barcelona sporting director Andoni Zubizarreta that says something like: we demand precision and objectivity, but with one condition … it’s on our side.
He said that pre-VAR; it hasn’t changed. Listen to those debates, the ones that were going to go away, and you know what the conclusions are going to be from each participant. Not because of what happened but to whom it happened. Because the VAR, that machine that was supposed to end all arguments is the subject of them, a proxy war serving to dig those trenches ever deeper. When it’s not a human error anymore but the machines, it’s so much more sinister, the conspiracy so much more compelling, acceptance so much harder, the noise so much louder, the paranoia so much more profound. And so it all goes on, the circus, just as it was always going to.
This would fix everything. There would be peace, they said. Oh, how we laughed.
