I am not much of a soccer fan, but I do generally follow the World Cup when it rolls around every few years. I have probably paid more attention to the current one simply because the US is co-hosting with Canada and Mexico, so the games have been in time zones where I could see what was happening in real time.
Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be a soccer newsletter. I couldn’t pull that off anyway. I did want to use one thing that happened as a jumping-off point to something else, though.
In the USA’s Round of 32 game, a key player named Folarin Balogun was tossed from the game after a referee gave him a red card. A red card means ejection for some kind of really bad on-field transgression in soccer. There is a rule in place that if someone gets thrown out with a red card for some set of reasons, they’re suspended for the next game. It has a real feel of “someone ejected for targeting in the second half sits out the first half of the next game”, except there’s no dividing by halves here.
The governing body for the World Cup, FIFA, chose to go back and overrule the red card in advance of the US’s Round of 16 game against Belgium. It announced that upon further review, it wasn’t that bad and Balogun wouldn’t have to sit out.
Now, it turns out it didn’t matter much. Balogun is a scorer, but the American defense completely fell down in a 4-1 loss to the Belgians. However before the game, there were many cries of corruption: home cooking for the host nation, deep political conspiracies, possible financial considerations, and so much more.
FIFA doesn’t help itself here from being comically corrupt for a long time. I won’t go into detail, but it doesn’t take much Googling to see how it’s about as crooked as it comes.
However, I have seen corruption. I’ve seen it in the incredible number of holds that Nick Saban’s offensive lines got away with at home. I saw it (maybe, possibly, probably) in the one second the refs put back on the clock to help Texas win the 2009 Big 12 Championship Game. I’ve seen it in targeting called or not or waved off or confirmed, and in generous schedules produced by conferences for headlining teams. I know the story of the 1984 SEC title. I’ve seen it.
And it really sucks when it happens for everyone who isn’t the beneficiary. Those teams get an unearned boost, some other team loses something directly from it, and everyone else gets a game they hold in a little less high of regard.
But that’s not the only thing that’s got people in a tizzy over in soccer world from what I can see. There is also the tyranny of VAR.
VAR is short for “video assisted referee”. It seems to be a fancy system of cameras that try to make 3D reenactments of things that happen on the field to determine if the human refs got the calls right. Like with American football replay breaks, some things are reviewable and some aren’t. It’s not infallible, and it has apparently been involved in some pretty controversial call overturns and reversals.
Adding technology to help sports officials has always sounded better in theory than it’s been in practice.
There are few unqualified wins. The robo-umps in baseball are pretty clearly one of them though, made possible by the fact they have a very well-defined job to do in determining balls and strikes. They’ve allowed for more transparency into umpiring, with the worst actors now readily identifiable — and in some cases, fast-tracked to retirement.
Football’s video replay isn’t a complete win. Sometimes there just isn’t enough good video evidence to tell what exactly happened on a football field. There can be thin margins between what is a good play or not, and the camera’s not always pointed in the right direction at the right angle. And sometimes, defenders will rather inconsiderately put themselves between the camera and the offensive player who’s trying to get a foot down in bounds. It also doesn’t help that questions like “what is a catch?” and “what exactly is targeting?” do not have perfectly objective answers.
But while you can’t count on replay resulting in the right call, you sure can count on it sapping all energy and momentum out of a stadium. Reviews can be downright interminable, and refs can take multiple minutes even when it takes about 15 seconds and two camera angles for viewers at home to see what was the right call.
I don’t look forward to a world in which football gets VAR, not that I’ve heard of any movement on that front. Someone will from time to time talk about embedding position-tracking chips in footballs to help determine if the ball crosses the plane of the end zone, but I would want to see a lot of documentation and proof about accuracy and reliability before having that count in a game.
The World Cup is heading towards its conclusion later this month on some day or another. I don’t know off the top of my head, and I don’t care enough to look it up now. It’s nice to drop in on a major sport in which a lot of people get really passionate about it from time to time, but it’s not going to be my next new obsession. For me, I’m still just looking forward to toe meeting leather — the kind that covers an oblong spheroid, not a perfectly round ball.