F*ck VAR: Because Micromanaging Joy is Apparently a Sport
"If you notice the referee, he's having a bad game." But what happens when technology, in the form of VAR, takes center stage and turns every joyous moment into a soulless, bureaucratic exercise?
Like Victorian children, referees should rarely be seen, and certainly not heard. But what if the officials have more game time than the players themselves?
Rarely is there a situation in which VAR gets involved and it makes things better. In fact, let’s be unequivocal about this and say never. Even if VAR rules in your favor it feels tainted, less joyous, soulless.
One of the main reasons EURO 2024 felt a less enjoyable tournament is VAR.
It’s what VAR does. It’s what happens when you try to administrate and officiate the rare moments of unrequited joy out of a game that isn’t merely an exercise in taking turns to score.
But when VAR gets it wrong, it’s farcical; and we don’t mean wrong in the sense of the wrong decision - the fact that it doesn’t eradicate debate is its own argument - but wrong in the sense of being unable to make a decision.
The Argentina vs. Morocco game at the Olympics yesterday is the latest instance where the process overshadows an already fraught game.
From The Guardian:
The match on the first day of men’s football at the Games was mired in chaos after a pitch invasion forced it to be suspended for more than an hour. Play eventually resumed behind closed doors and although Cristian Medina thought he had salvaged a 2-2 draw for Argentina, when he scored deep into injury time, the goal was subsequently ruled out for offside by VAR when play resumed for a few minutes after the long stoppage to clear the stadium of fans.
The eventually ruled-out equaliser had sparked wild scenes at the Stade Geoffroy-Guichard in Saint-Étienne, with objects also thrown at the South American players by spectators in what had been an angry climate throughout.
Argentina were booed by sections of the crowd in what appeared to be a clear response to footage showing their players chanting a song the French Football Federation has labelled “racist and discriminatory” following victory at the Copa América this month.
After Medina’s goal both sets of players were taken off the pitch by the referee, with Paris 2024’s official website deeming the contest to have been “interrupted”. It was eventually announced that the final three minutes of the game would be completed behind closed doors, which proved the case – but only after Medina’s 106th-minute strike was disallowed for an offside infringement in the build-up.
Mascherano said there had been a lack of communication from organisers about what was going to happen as the team sat in the dressing room before the resumption.
As Javier Mascherano said after the game:
"It's the biggest circus I've ever seen in my life."
"We spent about an hour and a half in the dressing room where they never told us what was going to happen."
"The Moroccan captains didn't want to play, we didn't want to continue, and fans threw things at us."
While this could easily have been a post about Argentine / French relations and the broader political fall-out that appears to be engulfing soccer, we’ll save that for another day, and focus on how VAR is uniquely adept at turning its hand to either creating a situation out of nothing or making a situation worse.
Surely, this wasn’t the intention.
Not too long ago, Nick Cave was inundated by songs from fans who’d been pissing about with ChatGPT, asking it to write something in his style. While they were undoubtedly well-meaning, his response was wonderfully on point:
What ChatGPT is, in this instance, is replication as travesty. ChatGPT may be able to write a speech or an essay or a sermon or an obituary but it cannot create a genuine song. It could perhaps in time create a song that is, on the surface, indistinguishable from an original, but it will always be a replication, a kind of burlesque.
Songs arise out of suffering, by which I mean they are predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation and, well, as far as I know, algorithms don’t feel. Data doesn’t suffer. ChatGPT has no inner being, it has been nowhere, it has endured nothing, it has not had the audacity to reach beyond its limitations, and hence it doesn’t have the capacity for a shared transcendent experience, as it has no limitations from which to transcend. ChatGPT’s melancholy role is that it is destined to imitate and can never have an authentic human experience, no matter how devalued and inconsequential the human experience may in time become.
VAR does to soccer what AI does to creativity. It has no understanding of what makes it the beautiful game in the first.
It has robbed us of those unadulterated moments of sheer joy as your thoughts turn to ‘VAR Check’ in a nanosecond.
One of the best feelings in the world as a soccer fan should be a 95th minute bicycle kick to keep you in the World Cup.
Not with VAR. It’s the technological process that tells you to hold your beer.
Fuck VAR.
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Precisely. It creates incidents out of nothing and still manages to get the things it's supposed to be deciding on wrong almost as much as it did previously. And those are its good points! Honestly, I'd take egregious every day of the week over nitpicking through everything in a build up. I'm in favor of anything that can make an instantaneous decision such as ball technology to check if it's a goal. When they can do something similar for offsides, great. Until then, someone with a flag will have to do. :)
Great post. Coming around to the idea that VAR should only be used in special circumstances to save us from the most egregious mistakes. It saps the life out of the game otherwise.