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

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?