⚽️HOW TO FIX VAR
I'm calling it Automatic Perimeter Officiating, because it sounds like the kind of thing the authorities might go for.
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The most scandalous aspect of the Video Assistant Referee (VAR) system is how often it disrupts the flow of the game through a comically prolonged review process. There are sometimes multiple minutes spent watching the VAR officials draw lines from a player’s armpit to the ground from 400 feet away at a camera angle that is simply not useful for seeing along the defensive line. You know the famous phrase, “How could he stray offside, he was looking right along the line?” This is not the case for the people making the ultimate offsides decision. They cannot see along the line, so they’re drawing lines.
This is just a bad angle to adjudicate this decision, which led to Line-Drawing.
In the Champions League and Serie A, they’re using the “semi-automated offside technology” that we saw at the 2022 World Cup. The Premier League is reportedly monitoring this, and it’s certainly better than sitting on your couch watching Lee Mason do geometry1, but I’ve never loved the 3D renderings they throw up instead of showing you the actual play. Far be it for me to suggest anything untoward could go on in a match with (sometimes) millions of dollars on the line, but I’d just rather see for myself than trust the claymations.
I would humbly suggest a third option: install a camera, sensor, or some other contraption that moves up and down the touchline with the ball offering instant assessments of whether a player’s toe was offsides. The machine is aware of who’s offsides at all times and can instantly tell you about that one moment you’re concerned about. Maybe what I’m looking for is just the semi-auto system implemented in a way where you’re still looking at the actual play throughout. The SAOT currently relies on a dozen cameras affixed to the roof of the stadium, working in tandem, and it seems a lot more 2024 than my device.
But that’s not the last of my humble suggestions. The system should also be expanded to cover out-of-bounds decisions.
That Newcastle goal against Arsenal at St. James’ Park in November should have been ruled out when Joelinton shoved Gabriel in the back, but there was also a controversy over whether Joe Willock really kept the ball in play along the byline. In fact, all the time spent trying to microscope whether the ball went out-of-bounds at the beginning of the play probably put the officials under pressure, feeling like they needed to get the game out of VAR Mode as soon as possible, and in the process they failed to properly access an incident later in the play that constituted a far more obvious reason to rule the goal out. That initial dispute could have been instantly adjudicated with either a contraption that moves along the line with the ball or something like the Hawk-Eye technology in pro tennis.
This would take care of all the binary decisions in officiating, the ones resting on some kind of geometric truth. Those could be settled from the perimeter—or the roof, but shh—hence the name Automatic Perimeter Officiating. Or “semiautomatic,” if it makes people feel like humans are still in control.
This doesn’t sort out the rest of it, to be fair. There may be no cure for disputes over what constitutes handball, and it seems to regularly change within the actual rulebook. We’ll never all agree on what’s a red-card tackle, either, but in this sense the powers that be in the Premier League need to learn from the NFL. (They should take a summer-school class. PGMOL chief Howard Webb can live it up in New York for the summer, maybe catch the Copa America at MetLife.) Replay officiating has been incorporated into National Football League programming far more seamlessly than it has been across the Atlantic. While the American football authorities have the advantage of a rulebook that goes deeper than Delaware Chancery Court case law, eliminating some of the subjectivity from which association football suffers, there’s more to it than that.
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