Confederations Cup 2017: VAR makes soccer more fair, but it hasn’t made the sport better yet

Because the soccer world complained about the supposed biases and incompetence of referees, the Video Assistant Referee was born. It’s simply a replay system to help the officials make the correct decisions — a machine to augment the humans and make certain the rulings that are usually left to the faulty eyes and judgment of the linesmen and main referee. It is like goal-line technology before it, which has been implemented so seamlessly and successfully that it seems nonsensical that we didn’t have it before — thank you, Frank Lampard.

FIFA has said that it will use VAR for the upcoming World Cup, and the system is already in use in the current Confederations Cup. But it hasn’t been without controversy.

The system made three correct decisions in the Portugal vs. Mexico and Cameroon vs. Chile matches. First, it ruled out an incorrectly awarded Pepe goal due to an unspotted offside player. In the second game, it ruled out what would have been Chile’s opening goal before halftime — Eduardo Vargas was shown to have been marginally offside. Then it rewarded Vargas in the end for Chile’s second goal, ruling that his strike was legal after the linesman had waved it off.

Still, there were complaints. Fans will always complain. No amount of replays and correct decisions will ever change that. The referees and VAR aren’t there to do the will of the people. Their jobs are to make sure that the rules are followed and to punish those who violate them — or in the case of Vargas, to vindicate those who follow them.

One of the arguments against the VAR is that the machine ruins the game; that it takes away the errors that are natural to the sport. Blown offside calls are part of soccer. The ensuing conversation around them, the anger from the aggrieved side and the snickering of those who benefit, all add to the culture of the sport. Imperfections don’t always have to be erased but sometimes need to just be embraced.

These errors are a consequence of human inability. The referee and linesmen don’t always make right calls because the game happens too fast and they can’t see everything. But that doesn’t mean that their faults are or should be vital to the sport.

It may be that because the mistakes have been unavoidable to this point, that it was a better stance to enjoy the ensuing chaos rather than fight against it. But the goal has always been to minimize these bad calls, and in VAR doing so with Portugal and Chile, the game still remained the game.

The biggest problem the machine review will face is that goals are absolute — either they crossed the line or they didn’t — and offside calls are almost the same. But penalties and other fouls are not. Humans get to interpret the rules according to the circumstances. A referee might not give a penalty if a downed striker embellished minimal contact, or s/he could use an early yellow card as a way of taking control of a game that threatens to grow tense, even if the flagged foul is similar to an earlier non-carded foul from the opposing team.

The further the machine goes away from the absolute, the less reasonable its objectivity becomes. Like all forms of justice, it’s problematic without some type of mercy or ability to look at each situation by its individual circumstances. Human bias still has a place in the sport.

That’s a discussion for the future though. More pressing is that the VAR took much longer — around 30 seconds — than initially suggested — six seconds — to make a judgment. Though it happened during what would have been time for goal celebrations, it felt like an eternity — especially when the decision is a no-goal and those 30 seconds are cutting into the restart time of the team that would get the ball.

A handful of those 30 second intervals would slow down considerably a game that prides itself on its fluidity. Another issue is that many soccer stadiums don’t have video boards, so while the review happens, the audience is left in limbo. The fans don’t have the ability to follow along, and it makes the lull even more noticeable.

Fans and players are faced with the predicament of getting exactly what they wanted. Even though the true nature of the complaining is just that they want their team to get the best decisions, the push for correct ones gave birth to goal-line technology and VAR. And these correct decisions take time. The game is fluid under human referees because of the acceptance that they will make incorrect calls when making split-second judgments. So in asking for objectivity, they’ve asked for and have gotten a system that disrupts the natural flow of the game.

VAR seems like it’s here to stay, so it’s not a thing that can be wished away but one that must be endured. The sensible path then is to not only wonder if it’s needed or not, but to find a way to implement it into the game so that it becomes an almost unnoticeable detail, in the fashion of goal-line technology. It can’t be its own spectacle but it must make sure that it’s limited to decisions that are absolute. Otherwise it will create more problems than it solves.

This is the burden of new technology. It’s unrefined, but the stakes are already too high for it to be given a grace period. And with things like VAR, it has to become a part of the game and not stand out on its own. Its goal is to make the game smoother; to make quick and correct decisions so that there are less controversies. But in doing so, it shouldn’t ruin the nature of the game itself. Soccer doesn’t need to become baseball. We shouldn’t be punished with 30 seconds more of watching Portugal play.

The VAR has proved its usefulness in the first few games of the Confederations Cup. It’s solving the problem of the offside rule that has perplexed the soccer world for generations. But after this tournament, it needs to be much better to solve the problem of itself. It needs to make those same correct decisions in the background, without noticeably slowing down the game. VAR has to at least get to that proposed six seconds.