Yep. Nails it for me.
VAR and the encroachment of pure rationalism
VAR is a symptom. A worryingly advanced symptom of a creeping ailment that is mutating to infect not only football but society at large. I call this sickness bureaucraphilia — an abnormal fondness for, or infatuation with bureaucratic mechanisms of authority.
It is a lust for measurement, a desire for protocol and a fetish for quantity. It is the blindness that sees only in black and white without space for the grey, that exists in a matrix of binary devoid of shade and doubt. It is to kneel open mouthed with tongue hanging out, salivating at the prospect of just a few more boxes that might need to be ticked. You know what we like, don’t pretend that you don’t, stop being such a tease, please, just absolve us of any hint of uncertainty, we’ll do anything you want. Anything.
Just as the road to hell is paved with good intentions, these procedures are implemented under the guise of ‘fairness’. Because everything must be fair, haven’t you heard? For them to be not so, well, that would be inhuman. Of course, the fact that life is not and cannot be fair is immaterial to these crusaders of justice, these avatars of (self) righteousness. And who cares about the chaotic patterns of reality anyway? Why bother with such complexities when simplified models chime so much softer on the conscience? Why waste one’s oh so precious time with the spiralling beauty of the irrational when the straight line logic of blame will suffice? But their second goal was offside! Well, maybe it was.
To apply logic in everything is irrational. A football match is not a machine and so its outcomes should not be corrected through the crunching of data. Thin lipped men bunched together in softly lit rooms with no windows pouring over the freeze-frame stills of the incident in question, measuring and examining with their meticulous little tools of quantification. The players, coaches and fans in the stadium must put their emotions on hold as the soul of football lies prostrate on the table of the grand inquisitor while the white-coated experts extract the passion from the patient. They take time to make sure that they get it all out, they wouldn’t want to leave any in there, its powerful stuff that passion.
The introduction of VAR to football is yet another example of an attempt by humans to control the uncontrollable. It seems to be a great irony that as we revel in the unprecedented freedom of our contemporary, progressive societies that we are simultaneously the most surveilled peoples in history. Freedom is slavery, or something like that. The desire for control, to leave nothing to chance, has been a hallmark of the ego since the dawn of consciousness. The overtly rational mind has long been doomed to fall in love with its own creations. To become a worshipper of false idols.
It seems to me that a foundational aspect of football’s unprecedented and unparalleled popularity is its uncanny accuracy as a sporting facsimile for existence itself. The patterns that emerge during football’s performance seem to map sufficiently well on to those that manifest themselves in reality. And — judging by the actions of the 4 billion followers of football — we generally seem pretty happy about that. Joy, anguish, beauty, suffering, fortune and despair; individual virtuosity and collective harmony. In this sense, football is a team sport that may have more in common with music than rugby or hockey.
Football is the most fluid of team games, infinitely complex in its nature. No two moments on a football pitch can ever be the same, there are too many variables in play. And this complexity carries with it a tremendous degree of uncertainty. Uncertainty, that eternal bane of the ego, that about which one cannot be sure. It is an all too observable trait of modern man to assert certainty in domains where there can be none. Just listen to an economist or a politician.
So, here’s the problem — there are incidents in football that require a judgement call. Very few decisions that the officials must make are binary in nature. I am in favour of goal-line technology, as I am for Hawk-Eye in tennis and the Snickometer in cricket. These technologies are entirely appropriate to sort out these issues of binary, quantitative nature, they are questions of black and white. But these are rare in football. There are numerous incidents — I would suggest the majority — that require the subjective view of the officials.
I don’t imagine that there are many who are arguing that this is not the case. The advocates of VAR are merely pointing out that the implementation of the technology will reduce the percentage of decisions that, on later analysis, are deemed to be wrong. And who would argue against that? Why would one not want to see a decrease in the proportion of incorrect decisions? And fair enough, on the face of it these seem like reasonable questions. But on closer inspection we can uncover the deception.
There is a slight of hand in play here, the argument for VAR uses the language of quantity as its justification — ‘reduce the percentage’, ‘decrease in proportion’, ‘get more decisions right’. But football is not only a question of quantity, logic and cold rationality, it is a game of human relationships, of animal passions and natural desires.
And humans are not entirely rational beings, rationality is but an afterthought, we are evolved to act on instinct and our actions are often guided by passion rather than reason. When the goal-scoring striker rips the shirt from his chest and swings it wildly above his head as he sprints behind the goal before the celebrating masses he is not channeling the influence of logic and rational thought. His faculties have been taken over by Mother Nature herself, in this moment he is more Amazonian warrior than member of modern society, more raiding Apache chief than obedient little rat-racer.
The reality of the context really matters, everything is linked to everything else. Everything flows. As the great footballing iconoclast, Juanma Lillo explains in an interview with Sid Lowe for The Blizzard –
‘Do you buy a paper on a Monday morning for a Euro and the only thing in it is list after list of results? Do you go into a football stadium, in the last minute of the game, have a look at the scoreboard and leave? You watch 90 minutes, which is the process’
VAR interferes with the flow of the game. It interrupts the tempo. Football is as much theatre as it is sport, as much a drama as it is a game. Is there even a difference? After all, all of the world is a stage…
The quantitative increase in decision making efficiency is achieved at the cost of the emotive impact of the game itself and it is my contention that this represents an unacceptable infringement upon passion by reason. It is an attempted power grab by a bureaucratic faction gone rogue, an annexing of ground to which it is has no right. The relentless advance of the bureaucraphiliacs is like a zombie apocalypse. These sticklers and nitpickers indeed seem dead inside, devoid of human spirit, lost without a yardstick to consult. Their campaign to eradicate human error from humans is a tyranny founded upon an absurdity. These joyless bean counters need to learn how to ‘live a little’, to ‘let it go’ and embrace a touch of chaos. Its OK not to know, its OK to be unsure, its OK to proclaim that ‘God only knows’.
I am cautiously optimistic that as the introduction of VAR continues to cause exasperation and confusion among the football community, the opposition to it will become too strong and it will go down as a ‘good idea in principle’ that just ‘didn’t work out’. But it is not a good idea in principle or otherwise, it is a terrible one, and the fact that it has been allowed to get this far is a damning indictment of the governing authority’s understanding of the foundational nature of the game. It is profoundly worrying that the bureaucrats have been able to become so powerful and the pushback must be strong lest we risk losing the very spirit to which our love of the game is inexorably bound.
With respect to you Guido, that’s a load of pseudo-intellectual, melodramatic, football hipster cobblers. And I’m not a fan of VAR.
