It happens every few months, like the change of seasons or the media’s en masse attempt to wring some fresh significance out of Sarah Palin: a referee misses an important call, a fan base is outraged, a UEFA executive looks on in silence, and lights flare to life over the metaphoric phone banks at the metaphoric talk-radio stations that, in the imaginations of writers, suggest a groundswell of popular interest. One minute Thierry Henry practices saxophone fingerings on the ball and stops Ireland from reaching the World Cup, the next Didier Drogba whaps like a volleyball player and helps secure the title for Chelsea (twice, actually, if you remember Man City 2006). Those wronged appeal for justice; those with the power to dispense justice are watching Rugrats DVDs in a hyperbaric chamber 500 stories below FIFA headquarters in Zurich, leaving their confused subordinates to issue prissy, bafflingly aggrieved statements from behind what I always imagine to be a resolutely locked bathroom door.
This is a state of things that we all find somewhat unsatisfying, which is why, every time it happens, the calls grow louder for some form of technological refereeing to supplement the human type. When the Enterprise sailed into the wrong kind of neutron cloud, there was nothing for it but to hand the ship over to Data, and the same kind of thinking leads us to conclude that when human refereeing fails, computers—the Data of our time—should intervene. A circuit board won’t fear being surrounded by Manchester United, which, come to think of it, is somewhat ambiguous as a point in favor of the circuit board’s intelligence. In any case, machines would be unbiased, consistent (even if consistency is often at odds with common sense), precise, and acute. And if fairness is the most important consideration in sports, why on earth would you keep those qualities out?
If fairness is the most important consideration in sports, there’s no reason, which is why the usual objections to the robot-officials argument are so lame and unpersuasive. Human error is “part of the game”? “Players make mistakes and officials make mistakes”? Thank you for the unqualified assertion and the false analogy, Derwent. Don’t let the aching obviousness of my rebuttals detain you on your way out.
More to the point, however: Is fairness really the most important consideration in sports? Here’s a thought experiment. Say we could guarantee that every match would be impeccably judged—every dive would be spotted, every penalty would be earned, every card would be correct—with the one condition that any non-obvious decision would require play to be halted till the following day. Matches would take several days to complete (no major change for Bolton fans, he said comically) but each discrete passage of play would be entirely consonant with the Vision of the Laws of the Game.
Would you take that deal? Obviously not, because while it would perfect the value of good refereeing, it would have the minor unintended consequence of utterly ruining the game. Most directly, assuming you don’t currently start for Barcelona, it would make the experience of watching a match a catastrophic chore. You’d nestle into the couch with your bottle of Calvados and your enthusiasm, only for play to be suspended in the third minute while the slow-drip gods of justice worked out whom to give a throw-in at midfield. If you actually went to the stadium, you’d either live in an impromptu tent city until the fixture had concluded, at which point you would die of meat-pie poisoning, or you would go home whenever play halted, in which case you would traverse the stadium steps so often that you’d soon require new knees. And you would gladly accept a few bad calls in exchange for a match you could watch in one go.
Thus it seems reasonable to conclude that there is something else worth valuing in football beyond virginal blind justice. The game should be as fair as possible, but it should also preserve the qualities that make it worth watching in the first place. It should be, you know, fun. Most of the time those qualities aren’t at odds, but when they are, fun has to win out. It’s only because the game is fun that we care whether it’s fair, and so forth.
I want to talk about a fear that exists in the heart of every American soccer fan. I don’t think British fans feel it, though I could be wrong: expectations are too different, grievances are too different. To introduce you what I believe to be this distinctly American fear, I want to utilize a video by Dutch artist Helmut Smits that I found on The Offside the other day.
This video makes real what many people had previously only imagined as part of a dystopic middle-term future (Sepp Blatter as a head suspended in a jar, that sort of thing): the entire football pitch replaced with a TV commercial reel, with tiny players dashing about on the cheeks of giant skin-care models and suavely zooming SUVs. It’s frightening because its suggestion of profiteering run amok feels so true to the aims of the responsible stewards and high-minded altruists at your neighborhood league office. Still, some of the “this is what they’ll do next!” commentary the video has provoked slightly, I submit, misses the point. They would love to show you more commercials. But their best bet to do so is not to turn the pitch into a giant green screen. Their best bet is to introduce scenarios into the game in which they can stop the clock.
That the clock might one day become stoppable in soccer is the secret dread of every American soccer fan. We don’t talk about it much, we try to ignore it, but we have certainly all confronted it in a gruesome midnight hour. You see, we have no native tradition of games that run without stoppages. Our games involve timeouts, constant substitutions, rotation changes, “resets,” and so on. When the ball goes out of bounds, the clock stops. When the coach needs to talk things over with the players, the clock stops. Almost every one of these clock stoppages is accompanied by a cut to commercial. At some point, in most of our popular sports, the powers that be started adding in periodic clock stoppages for no reason other than to cut to commercial. Over the past few weeks, during the NCAA basketball tournament, I watched the same 15 commercials so often that by the end of the event I had most of them memorized.
I’d guess I’m like most American soccer fans in that, before I discovered the game, I never quite realized how disruptive and annoying the constant commercial breaks were. Then I started watching soccer, learned what it was to concentrate on the match and only the match for 45 minutes at a stretch, and felt like I’d developed a new sense. As much as I love many American sports—and some international sports that act the same way—the timescale of soccer, where there’s only one clock stoppage and only one cut away from the action during the entire game, generally feels like the timescale of paradise.
Thus, my fear of clock stoppages is a fear born of understanding, of knowing in my bones that they will be used as an excuse to pulverize me with Buffalo Wild Wings commercials and (hands up, FSC) bewildering Proactiv ads. And thus my opposition to practically the entire idea of technology-assisted refereeing in football. It all starts innocently enough—a sensor that judges whether the ball has crossed the line, no stoppages necessary—but that softens us up for the assertion that “steps need to be taken,” and before long it becomes impossible to justify not having an instant-replay provision in which the referee looks into a touchline monitor to “get the call exactly right.” (“That’s the important thing, Jim,” the commentators always say over here: “getting it right.”) The instant-replay system is slow, it’s cumbersome—ask NFL fans who have endured the arcane and unwieldy “challenge” system—and it can’t be made to work with a game clock that can’t be paused. Somebody suggests adding a pause button to the game clock, because fairness is the most important thing! And before you know it there’s a mandated 36th-minute “field timeout” to cut to Robbie Williams endorsing Fishwick Minibus.
This must not happen. The game may not be flawlessly fair right now, but it’s really, really fun. And its pace and unsusceptibility to intrusive advertising are indispensable parts of that. Keeping those qualities in place should be at or near the top of our priority list. Better a few missed handballs than one interruption for a needless “adorable Google search narrative” advert.
Maybe this seems like a paranoid fantasy to you. Maybe you think “they wouldn’t do that.” And to you I say: really? Really? Think of everything else they’ve done or tried to do: the 39th Game, spiraling ticket costs, leveraged takeovers, Man City motorbikes in Indonesia, and so ons in terrible ranks. You really don’t believe they’d interrupt a match for a dollar from AIG? How much are you willing to risk in the name of slightly better refereeing?
Read More: Chelsea, Refereeing, The Marketing of Meaning
by Brian Phillips · April 15, 2010
An angle I hadn’t really considered before. I’m even more leery of technology now than I was before.
I put something in my dialectical journal not long ago (late in the evening) concerning this… might as well post it (forgive me its length):
For this discussion, I’m going to assume that the way in which one would view/observe/interact with a football ground on match day would include, at the least: a field (marked), players on each side (# of players to be addressed later), and a referee. In the way we understand “organized” sport, the referee is a notable part of the sporting event. Notable, because integral. This is not a race to the finish. Football is not relay, but rather an athletic strategy game overseen by a human lens (the width approximately: look at something right now——).
To use the delicate anachronism: what came first… the game, in its inception, had to be the activity first. The want to watch, or to regulate, came later.
If objectivity is the perfect judge, then the game could do without the passion from its followers. The abstraction has always been the goal of the observer. To accept the passivity of entertainment into the most volatile, emotional neighborhoods of the brain. It seems as though an inescapable part of human nature is to bond, form groups, and not only annihilate the opposition, but denigrate their followers/customs/culture/andthelike. We love it. I love it. It’s love.
Perhaps, it’s the frame all along. It’s no good without the frame—or rather—it’s not attractive.
A guaranteed way in which to change the view of a football match is to have a player sent off. This simple act—comprised of witnessing two infringements which were deemed more heinous than minor infringements occurring continually and removing the offender from the playing—will tug at our probability sensors with an emphatic “>”. If the game’s already a madhouse cracker, it pisses on the knob already turned to 11. And in a world where it’s impossible to watch everything as it happens, but digest it in highlights and blog posts, while still watching at least one full match per game day and that doesn’t even account for the matches and replays during the week. (Yes, I think it’s absolutely hilarious to say that TV is the death of true football. TV is an advertising medium and it’s the death of a good idea, but without TV, I wouldn’t give a shit about football.)
Controversy. Give me more of it. It’s hip to complain about things like the “inter-lull” or to love (or hate) “beautiful football” and I’m happy with or have rationalized most of those thoughts/opinions, but I still want to witness a contested goal, ricocheting off the crossbar and into the hairy zone like a well-struck ball ought to do. I want to see both teams do the pageantry; the raising of hands; the perceived regional hand motions; the theater of contest. I also want guys to get up after a nothing tackle. I want all sorts of stuff, but I know that I don’t want something dramatic coming out of my dramatic activity.
I like bad calls. Except when I don’t.
I never really thought about how much I enjoy the 45 minutes of uninterrupted sport. Now that you point it out, you are right. What makes soccer a beautiful game to me is the non-stop flow (this fits with my love of teams who play like Barcelona, Brazil, Arsenal, etc.).
How soccer handles commercials and advertisement has always been a problem for USA broadcasters. Certainly American companies would love the existence of clock stoppage in soccer matches. I would hate to give those American companies an opening to pressure other foreign companies to demand commercial breaks during the game.
So, while we should resists efforts to stop the clock in soccer, it might be helpful if the wisdom of the internet masses also thought up a way for companies to make their advertising money while not affecting our enjoyment of the game.
Of course, I have no suggestions to add. . . yet.
I’ve been able to turn a few of my fellow Americans on to the game precisely because I could say to them, “There’s no commercials! Less than two hours. Bang, zoom! You’re in, you’re out. It’s great. You’ll love it.” Shoot, that was an early reason why the game held my interest long enough for me to become a fan. Robbie Williams endorsing Fishwick Minibus circa 2000 likely would’ve made the college student edition of myself flick over to The Price is Right or, I don’t know, cable news.
It was the game’s passing and athletic skill required that ensured I had found a beloved lifelong obsession, but that doesn’t mean I’m ready to put a computer chip into the ball to make sure it went over the line – right after this quick 90-second commercial break while the officials ensure the circuitry was working properly.
I don’t want to sell you a tinfoil hat just yet, but consider this: Voting is taking place for the Webby Awards right now and Man City’s redesigned site is one of five nominees for best sports website. Here’s the link explaining their nomination: http://awardanon.com/mcfc/
Once there, you’ll find sentences like:
- “So, we dropped all format ads, choosing to integrate sponsors commercial messaging into the content.”
- “We’ve created an integrated shopping experience using a single basket, meaning we can cross-sell shirts and merchandise to people buying tickets for matches, something most club sites aren’t able to provide.”
That’s not too far of a stretch from, “While the officials check the call, please press the green button on your remote control to access special offers from our sponsors.” Don’t want to hit the green button? Then they make you hit the green button just to watch a stationary camera shot of the actionless, waiting-for-the-ref’s-decision pitch while the ads automatically play.
No thanks. Besides, one of these handballs is eventually going to go Liverpool’s way. I’m counting on it.
Another sign that we’re vulnerable to this: in NCAA Soccer, the clock already stops. There is an explicit reference to TV timeouts in the rules.
http://www.ncaapublications.com/productdownloads/SO09.pdf
@Joey My biggest fear is that it will be we Americans who provide all of the ideas that destroy soccer as we know it. You NCAA example is Exhibit A.
Brian, I never thought I would see the day where you would essentially agree with Sepp Blatter on something, albeit for a completely different reason.
I once watched a game in a bar in Turkey — Galatasaray vs Manchester United in 1993, to be exact — where they cut to a tiny ad break of just maybe 5 seconds at every throw-in.
“Third umpire reviews” in the Indian Premier (cricket) League are already sponsored. The image of a Kingfisher airliner “flies” across the jumbotron while the decision is being made, disappearing from view when “OUT” or “NOT OUT” goes up. BTW, the IPL is hyper-commercialized to a degree that even ESPN would blanche at.
That said, I think that there is a false dichotomy here. No one has ever suggested that every incident be reviewed, for exactly the reason that Brian states. And personally, I would rather watch an ad-filled Jumbotron for a minute than watch the likes of John Terry and his mates crowd the refereee while brandishing pantomine cards.
The technology debate makes me cry just a little.
Introducing any sort technology opens up the possibility of things getting ridiculous, while keeping it completely out of the game maintains the same problems that we have always had. It’s a tough one and I’m not sure where I stand.
One thing is for sure though: the reasoning of not having technology because not every level of the game can use it is simply wrong. It should be used where the stakes of the game (ie. money) are higher (top divisions in each country) because the consequences of those decisions are much greater.
Going round and round in circles in my mind though.
@Andrew Weber But the lid on that Pandora’s Box is already more than a bit ajar. The referee and linesman communicate wirelessly and it is very, very widely believed that the only reason that Zidane was sent off in the last World Cup Final was because the fourth official somehow got word of the headbutt to the referee (with many people thinking it was because he saw a replay). The latter scenario has been suspected of re-occuring in a number of high profile matches since 2006.
For me, the basic injustice here is to subject the officials to vicious public reactions on the basis of endless graphically-enhanced HD replays from multiple angles while denying them any access to technology to help them get inherently difficult (or, in the case of offside, sometimes physically impossible) calls correct. Doing that surreptitiously (which is what the vast majority of observers think is happening at the highest level now) is much worse than allowing an open debate.
Completely agreed with you on the vapidity of the “same at every level” argument, btw.
As an English football fan, I would say that the fear of the TV timeout is more covert due to our relative lack of exposure to it. However, there is a fear of Americanisation of football – see also our hatred of “soccer” – and the TV timeout would be a big no-no here too, and not just in football.
Ursos Actos is right – Indian broadcasting of the IPL now puts US efforts to shame, even the commentary is fair-game. Imagine John Madden calling a “Pepsi Paydirt” instead of a touchdown or an “Amex Moment of Success” rather than an interception and you get the idea.
Cricket is a sport which could almost have been designed for the TV timeout yet when, in the late ’90s, the BBC lost the rights to broadcast England matches to Channel 4, one of the main criticisms levelled against the switch was the introduction of commercials, even though this required absolutely no added delays to the match itself.
Are we even safe now? Have we forgotten Beijing 2008, when NBC cut away from an Argentina match, only to miss a goal? The announcers made no effort to recap the audience; no ‘welcome back’, no replays of the goal. It was as if they didn’t even know. Can’t you almost imagine Dick Ebersol, in some darkly-lit, undisclosed control room, finger on the switcher, smirking as he rolls to break, duplicitiously fulfilling obligations to sponsors?
@ursus arctos Very true, of course.
Very well said, Brian. And of course video footage is itself far from being infallible, at times magnifying the effects of contact in foul situations and other times lessing it.
Then there are those angles that it cannot cover. Take Terry’s supposed handball against Bolton for example. From no angle was it clear that it had hit the arm of Terry while it was quite clear that it had hit the shoulder and chest of the player.
Now when is the play supposed to stop to a make an adjudication on such incidents? Suppose the refs wave play on, and Chelsea score a goal at the other end.
I think the main reason so many wrong decisions occur is that the field is too big for just three officials. We need more of them on the field and they should all be empowered more to make decisions.
The offside situation is the tough one. You really cannot get this done perfectly without technological assistance but again the issue of divorcing incidents from the play and flow of the game rises up.
I’ve had the same fear for some time. I love attending football matches. They are exciting, non-stop, short break and bam game done. American football on the other hand, I HATE attending these games. They take way to f’ing long. TV time outs, time outs, changing between offense, defense, well it’s tedious.
man, that video…
if they just replaced the tv commercials with some trippy cartoons/animations and overlay futuristic dance music, i would watch it on repeat for hours. that needs to be a new tv channel.
like, that looks like the inside of my brain.
You just hate Data, Brian. Please keep your TNG preferences out of the soccer blogging and try to maintain some semblance of journalistic integrity. And if you dare try to get involved in DS9…..
Excellent post. I agree wholeheartedly.
Interesting perspective. I understand your concern for the pace of the game if the clock is paused everytime there is a video ref decision and it is one that is put forward so often (from what I read) in England (where I live) but I am still not convinced that this would actually be a result of the implementation of the video ref system.
I don’t know if many of the readers will remember that 2-3 years back Match of the Day (or a show of that nature) conducted an experiment where in they had a referee in a broadcast van outside the stadium watching the live feed and passing decisions on offsides and penalties (the two areas of video consultation I want to see). The conclusion of this experiment was that by the time that the ‘video ref’ had made his decision the players of the wronged team were still crowding the ‘on pitch ref’ with the traditional conviction associated with infants. If you think about it how long does it take the commentary team on any given broadcast to watch the reply and then give their opinions? In almost every case the decision could be given and play resumed quicker then when the referee sticks to his guns and the protests begin, thus meaning that, in actual fact, there would be need to have a pause in the 45 minutes (they add time on for injuries at the end of each half so why not 20 seconds for each offside and penalty shout that comes up?)
I am also reminded that Rugby has the exact video ref system that could be used. The referee in that instance calls for the decision very often in regards to whether or not the ball has been successfully grounded before rewarding a ‘try’ that he is not sure of, at worst this can take up to 1 minute and they have to deal with the issue of having loads of men in a heap on top of the ball so things would be twice as fast in terms of football decisions.
For me the question is not “Should we use video referess?” but “How should we use video referees?”. I would like to see an appointed referee watching the live feed who can then make decision on offsides, fouls in the penalty area and whether the ball crosses the goal line only. These are the areas that anger me all the rest of it I am happy to be left up to referee. It is just how to put this in place, should it be the referee’s descretion as to when to call for a video call? Would he ever use it? Should there be the tennis challenge system? How many challenges should there be? Is it possible to have the video ref give his call, via the referee’s earpiece, on every offside, penalty, goal mouth scramble as and when it happens in the same way that the linesman waves his flag? It’s either that or we are going to end up with the 5th and 6th officials behind the goal line for every game as in the Europa Leauge this season, judging by the reception one offial got from Benfica fans sat behind him then it could cause a lot of casualties.
There’s no reason why the game has to stop for several days. One referee, two linesmen and one added official watching the screens. A decision can be made in an instant. The NHL uses technology but doesn’t stop for days. Sometimes, even with technology, wrong decisions can be made (last night, Montreal vs Washington, OT, the Canadien was definitely brought down) but it’s better than what soccer is becoming. The game is not the same game Pele used to play. Everything has improved and players are now smarter about what can and can’t be seen, eg. Adebayor vs RVP’s face. We used technology to retroactively punish Adebayor, but technology could’ve been used to send such an unsportsmanly player off the pitch.
It’s not about justice, it’s about the environment and human nature. In games where the referee misses a rough tackle by one player, the victim, pumped with adrenaline, often takes justice into his own hands by attempting a rough on-the-ball-but-through-your-knee tackle. Sometimes other players start playing rough or dirty at the notion of injustice against one of them. It becomes like a blood-feud and the quality of play deteriorates as players are more concerned with what they can get away with rather than actually play. It becomes a different game, one of flying elbows, shirt pulling, rugby tackles, spitting and so on. It’s human nature, be it kids at school where the teacher doesn’t stop reported violence or abuse, or in the criminal justice system, where law enforcement is incompetent – people take justice into their own hands, and on the football pitch, it’s no different.
Justice is important, but it’s not the only element. A game without fairness is not just an unjust game, but really poor and not enjoyable to watch.
One of my favorite posts to date, and that’s saying something.
I hadn’t considered this before, but the lack of stoppages is a hugely important part of the game. Not reeeeally worried because I think there’s enough bias against anything “American” — arguably very justified — to kill any proposal like this before it gets too far. I could see it happening in the MLS though, further alienating American players and fans from the world game. Thank god I already don’t watch that.
Is it even that important to get the call right every single time though? Bad dives, wrong offsides, ludicrous penalties and blatant handballs. This is football. This is excitement, this is unpredictability, this is drama.
Our collective outrage is this extra connection that builds fan solidarity, this extra link that feeds these discussions, these websites. Without it you’d just have sycophantic and lightweight arguments over who was Barclays man of the match.
Incidentally, has David Fishwick now achieved worldwide fame? Excellent.
In all seriousness, the difference between pure soccer with no timeouts and the pause-laden land of American sports is like driving in stop-and-go traffic vs. heading up Route 1 during the summer with no other car in sight.
Compromise: Instead of replacing the pitch with commercials like in the above video just replace the fans. What have they ever done for the game?
As a fellow American, you nailed my thoughts exactly about discovering football and the constant commercial breaks of American sports. I now struggle to pay attention to what was once my favorite sport (american football) as there’s so little actual GAME going on. I think it was the Washington Times that analyzed an NFL game and said that there is only eleven minutes of actual game action in a 3+ hour broadcast.
Mad props for the Fishwick Minibus mention.
Hey man, advertising can be used for good.
For instance, after the NCAA tournament, I can now safely say that I will never, ever, EVER, set foot in a Buffalo Wild Wings, simply due to the sheer stupidity of the commercial they produced (you know the one…”Man, I wish this game would last forever….hey, barkeep, will you send it into overtime!?”) and too the frequency at which CBS decided I was subjected to it.
Video technology should only be allowed for big decisions (i.e. goals) for the reasons you describe. But I do think technology should come in for the big decisions. Managers can lose their jobs on the basis of one bad call. Is that really acceptable?