The New Yorker: V.A.R. and the Rise of Our New Tech Overlords

I watch the World Cup with a tinfoil hat on my head. Every alleged plot feels real, every iteration of international bias and geopolitical scheming seems plausible. These days, almost all soccer-related conspiratorial thinking gets processed through the Video Assistant Referee, which, in the World Cup, involves an unseen, mysterious group of officials who hawk over every moment of the game from multiple camera angles and determine the legality of every touch, every foul, every pass, and every decision by their colleagues on the field. This setup, wherein a group of arbiters hide behind a curtain like the Wizard of Oz and hand down decisions that inflict generational trauma on entire countries, almost feels purposefully built to invite all sorts of wild speculation.

The most unfair part, at least to me, is that when the V.A.R. officials call down a missed penalty decision or draw their little pictures showing that a fraction of a big toe is offside, they beckon the head referee to a TV monitor to pronounce a final decision. The referee then has to stand in front of the monitor, hands on hips, and go through a charade of free will. In reality, the refs just do the bidding of the cowards behind the curtain. While the referee watches the replay with a very serious look on his face, the entire world watches a slow-motion replay over and over on television, hears the sober commentary from someone like Mark Clattenburg—the officiating expert for the World Cup’s Fox broadcast in America—and decides for itself whether the truth was served.

This process isn’t anything new; televised sports have been serving up mass-jury trials since well before the invention of slow-motion replay. But when it’s tied to a famously corrupt institution like FIFA, the claims of grave injustice intensify and feel almost like the buildup to war. The supposed precision of V.A.R., which purportedly can tell when a Croatian player’s hair has touched a ball (but apparently not when a ball hits a camera wire suspended in the air) or when half a kneecap pokes itself offside, makes everything worse, because these tiny infractions feel like violations of the spirit of the world’s beautiful game. During this World Cup, people have begun to question the technocratic finality of V.A.R. by asking a variation of the old adage about statistics and the lying statisticians who produce them: Who are the people behind the curtain, and do they have their own agendas?

I attended the game in which the American striker Folarin Balogun received a red card. After the foul was committed, play was stopped and the players argued with the referee. Nobody in my section, way up in the nosebleeds, could tell what was happening. The stadium announcer did not provide any guidance, and the big screen did not show the replay. I didn’t even know the review was for a possible red card until a friend texted me to complain about the call. I quickly assumed that this in-stadium replay blackout was done to control the crowd, who would have protested Balogun’s sending off, especially if they had been able to watch the footage everyone else was watching on television. This led me to another thought: If you know that your adjudication system for a game’s biggest moments can so badly rile up a crowd that you might withhold the evidence for a game’s most crucial decision from the very people who paid to watch it happen, what does that say about the system? And about your level of trust in paying fans?

One of the persistent story lines in this tournament—the subject of extensive howling online, accompanied by lengthy compilations of video evidence—is that FIFA and its head honcho, Gianni Infantino, have rigged the tournament for Lionel Messi and Argentina. In this context, the supposed infallibility of V.A.R. becomes proof of a conspiracy rather than the bulwark against human imperfection. If V.A.R. catches everything, then what about this missed call, people say, or that obvious dive, this questionable red card, or that phantom penalty? The complaint against V.A.R., then, operates on two levels. There is rage at the machines for turning what should be a spiritual game into the strictest and most tedious rule-following exercise possible. And then there is a separate anger, because this mechanistic objectivity is not applied evenly.

Donald Trump, drawing upon his particular talents, made a farce of all this when he seemingly got FIFA to rescind the mandatory suspension of Balogun after his red card. Trump, who pointed out that any contact between players can look like an assault when replayed in super slow motion, wasn’t wrong to question the red card, but his meddling—and his close ties to FIFA, as both the leader of a host nation and the recipient of the first-ever FIFA Peace Prize—turned the supposed objectivity of the machines into a referendum on power. (One cannot imagine Cabo Verde or Curaçao getting a suspension lifted.) Last week, when it was announced that England’s Jarell Quansah would receive a two-game ban for a contested red card during his team’s match against Mexico, the disparity in punishment felt more like a reflection of England’s failing global clout than anything else.

V.A.R., in other words, has become more proof that the impartiality of technology and cameras can be subverted by politics, which should be obvious by now. The international outcry over V.A.R. has also shown that human beings will resist ostensibly objective truth-making, especially when it doesn’t help their team. These aren’t especially dangerous or new revelations, but I do think they’re interesting at a time when A.I. evangelists are telling us that machines could replace a great deal of human fallibility and elevate us to some higher, still only vaguely described, plane of existence. Will humans ever simply trust the computers and abide by their decisions, or will these other computers, too, strike us as mere tools of power, ones whose decrees can quickly be swept aside when the real rulers decide they need to make an appearance?

Wimbledon, which has been quietly running alongside the World Cup, might provide some insight. Tennis has used the Hawk-Eye system for two decades now. It automated away the most controversial part of the chair umpire’s job: calling balls in or out. Except at the French Open, where humans still inspect skid marks on the red clay, in tennis, the pretense of any agency over the machine is gone. In some tournaments, Hawk-Eye Live, which tracks the trajectory of every ball and then predicts where it will land, observes every shot and even calls balls in and out with an automated voice. Players can rage and yell at the robot eye but, unlike V.A.R., Hawk-Eye has mostly been accepted by the fans. (How many of you reading this realized that there were no line judges at Wimbledon this year?)

Baseball recently introduced its own Hawk-Eye-style machine called the Automated Ball-Strike Challenge System. It does not make every decision; a player can protest a call by an umpire, and the robot decides if the umpire was right or wrong. To date, it has also been fairly popular, especially considering baseball’s staid, tradition-loving fan base. It now seems inevitable that, at some point in the next twenty years, such a system will completely replace umpires.

Why do tennis and baseball fans accept Hawk-Eye and A.B.S. while so many soccer fans spend a good portion of their emotional energy screaming at V.A.R.? This is partly, I suspect, on account of when these systems are deployed: Hawk-Eye and A.B.S. are frequently used to make minor decisions about, say, a random point in the first set or a strike call in the second inning. In soccer, however, the decisions that V.A.R. makes are almost always highly consequential, and so emotions run high. What’s more, though, V.A.R. is guided by fallible, corruptible humans who have been obscured from the public’s eye. Following tennis into a fully automated system would help, theoretically. But, even if it’s easy to teach a machine to determine whether a ball was probably in or out, it’s hard for a machine to make a series of judgment calls such as the ones the referee made in the Argentina-Egypt game, when, for instance, an Egyptian goal was taken away because a foul had been committed in the buildup to the shot, which is not anything that can be strictly defined, and which now apparently includes something that happened a hundred yards from the goal. (Unless, of course, it happens again later in the match, but this time Argentina is the team committing the foul. Then it doesn’t count.) So many decisions in soccer are judgment calls along these lines. Did the hand that was placed on the chest of the defender actually cause them to fall back or was that just more theatrics? Was the defender whose elbow blocked the shot in the box making a natural motion or was he sticking his arm out to purposefully make his body bigger? How do you automate such determinations without coming up with an entire new rule book that would dictate, for example, the length of a “build up” to a goal? Do you put little gauges in the shirts and socks of players to tell how hard they actually got hit?

All these systems generate little graphics to demonstrate their accuracy. Tennis broadcasts during the challenge era would show an image of a line and the mark the ball left, which gave the impression that Hawk-Eye was a camera fixed on the contested spot rather than a series of calculations about where the ball should have landed. V.A.R. produces graphics that show the plane of offside and the offending kneecap poking through. When a Croatian goal was disallowed because it was determined a ball hit a player’s head despite super slow motion showing no change in its trajectory or spin, V.A.R. produced a seismograph from a chip placed in the ball that supposedly detects even the slightest impact.

The machine, in effect, makes a decision and then prints out a receipt that tells you that your protests are incorrect. When you say you saw something with your eyes, it will point you right back to the graphic and say, in effect, Sorry, the line is the line. The ball hit the hair and here is a little bump in a graph to show you just how wrong you were. How much of our lives can be taken over by such automated processes? And will we trust that our new machine overlords operate without the meddling of powerful humans? Lately, the answer to the first question has started to seem like, quite a bit. And the answer to the second, if the World Cup is any indication, is an emphatic no. ♦