Daisy Christodoulou

The promise of VAR is simple: more right decisions. In practice, it complicates the very notion of 'right'. What is a handball? What is offside? What is 'clear and obvious'? Ultimately, what is truth?

The most traditional view of refereeing is that the referee's decision IS the right decision. That is, there is no such thing as an offside goal. If the referee gave it as offside, it WAS offside. His decision is final.

VAR completely destabilises this, and instead introduces the idea of a correct objective reality which technology will bring us closer to than one human on-field referee. But of course, the evidence from that technology still has to be interpreted by humans.

So in the worst-case scenario, VAR undermines the legitimacy of human judgement without replacing it with anything better. Far from removing arbitrary human judgement, VAR simply emphasises just how arbitrary it is.

This aspect of VAR reminds me of nothing so much as German Higher Biblical criticism. If we apply the latest scientific & technological tools to the excavation of Biblical meaning, we'll get closer to what God meant. Or we might just blow up the foundations on which it all rests

The arbitrariness is most clear with offside, where stray toes phases before a goal are proving decisive. I don't think this was anticipated. I thought offsides would be well suited to VAR because they are binary line calls. I was wrong.

The problem with VAR and offside is that it is not clear (at least yet) how teams should adapt, or that it is going to make a consistent impact. As an attacking or defensive team, what can you do to make sure you are not / your opponents are offside?

Of course there has always been an element of randomness in a goalmouth scramble, but it's a more natural and immediately intelligible randomness, not one that takes fifteen minutes to establish.

Contrast with DRS in cricket: like VAR it was intended just to 'get more right decisions', and its introduction has had a similarly unintended consequence in that it has led to more LBWs being awarded, and batsmen no longer being able to rely on the big stride forward.

However, this unintended consequence has worked out well. 1. it’s non-arbitrary. It's clear how batsmen have to respond: use your bat! 2. it's one of the few pro-bowler changes in the past couple of decades, and as such has made matches more evenly balanced between bat & ball.

Interestingly, cricket traditionalists who were opposed to the introduction of technology have been mollified because it’s led to the resurgence of the traditional art of finger-spin.

As @HelenHet20 says, crowds want big truths, not small ones. VAR succeeds not if it gets "more right decisions", but if fans & players think it improves the game. Like most governance, it's about consensus. If people think VAR is working, it's working. If they don't, it's not.

Cricket (& rugby & tennis) show tech can work. Why is it not working so well in football? Is it teething problems? Is it football’s arrogance, not learning the lessons from other sports? Yes, partly. But another problem is, paradoxically, the simplicity of football’s rules.

Rugby and cricket have far more complex rules than football, yet have adopted technology with much greater success. You might have expected the opposite. But perhaps it is football's very simplicity which works against it.

What VAR reveals is that for decades we have all been relying on a great deal of tacit knowledge in the interpretation of football's rules. 'Clear and obvious' is not clear and obvious. Even handball, the rule that practically defines the game, is not obvious.

In any field you can think of, technology is bad at solving problems which require tacit knowledge: that is, knowledge of all those things that exist, but that cannot be codified.

The risk is that football's intrinsic simplicity is unsustainable in an era of technological complexity. Attempts to get more right decisions will unravel the consensus on which the game is based & reveal the essential absurdity of our obsession with it.

The comparisons with 19th century Christianity are stark. Is football dead?

VAR check over, allowing a goal after what looked like a very obvious handball. Still, what is obvious and it only took about fifteen minutes! Great VARing, guys!