The solution to all of this seems pretty simple: get better referees.
It would've solved Saturday's problem, multiple times. Better refs would've had a better real-time sense of space and time, and one of them would've been able to tell that Luis Díaz was well behind the Tottenham backline when the ball was passed by Mohamed Salah. The goal would've been a goal from the start, replays would've confirmed it, Liverpool would've gone up 1-0 and we all would've gotten the last week of our lives back.
It would've fixed the second error, too. Even much-improved refs may have still missed the call on the field -- it's really hard for the human brain to conceptualize the exact positions, in space in time, of multiple moving bodies and a ball. But more competent refs would've still ended up at the right decision after the Video Assistant Referee (VAR) check.
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If you haven't heard it by now, the released communication between the on-field referee and all of the VAR-related officials was a modern Vaudeville skit, a "Who's on First '' for the digital era. The communication is so vague, so stilted and so easily misunderstood that it's a wonder this doesn't happen more often. Competent communication would've quickly revealed that. No, we're telling you that a goal was scored.
Competence a level above that, too, would've fixed this. Competence among various decision-making executives would've created a better protocol for communication and offered a way to correct an error like this after the fact, during the game.
Pay all of these people more money, attract more people with the necessary fast-paced spatio-temporal-assessment skills, bring in those who thrive in intense moments that call for clear communication and this whole refereeing crisis goes away.
While this view has been expressed to me by people who work in European soccer, it still doesn't address the core of the issue: offside and VAR may have broken each other.
Why do we need video replay?
A couple years ago, soon after the Premier League's implementation of VAR technology for offside, Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola offered up a simple hope for what VAR might achieve. "Maybe the intensity and passion will leave," he said. "Hopefully, it doesn't make mistakes. If it's offside, it's offside."
In other words, the VAR lines should reveal the truth about whether or not a player is or is not offside. And once we're all equipped with the truth, we can stop arguing about whether or not the call was right. It's all in the lines, stupid!
The passion and intensity have, of course, not left.
Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp asked for a replay of the match against Tottenham. Just a few weeks ago, Manchester United manager Erik ten Hag suggested that the lines were wrong when VAR ruled out a goal from Alejandro Garnacho against Arsenal. Every weekend, fans are screen-shotting VAR decisions to show that the lines are crooked and that their favorite team got screwed. Fandom is tribal, and more technology isn't going to fix tribalism. Just look at the world around you.
However, this wider distrust of VAR is driven by something rational, according to Harry Collins, a sociologist at the University of Cardiff.
Collins spent most of his career writing about the sociology of gravitational waves -- the ripples in space-time first predicted by Albert Einstein in his theory of relativity. He's also written about the idea of expertise in society, but more recently, he's focused his efforts on referees -- how they fit into the larger social network of sports, what they symbolize and which ways they can and should be helped.
In 2017, Collins published a book, along with Robert Evans and Christopher Higgins, called "Bad Call: Technology's Attack on Referees and Umpires and How to Fix It." In the book, Collins & Co. argued that referees needed to be given some kind of technological aid to fix the disequilibrium pulling at the modern experience of watching a soccer game. With every match now being televised and with the advances in instant replay technology, fans and pundits now had the ability to watch every incident from multiple angles and at multiple speeds. Refs, meanwhile, had to do their best with watching everything at full speed.
As a spectacle, this couldn't hold. We weren't watching sport to see which refs were best at their job. We were watching to see some vaguely fair form of competition, and now there were all of these examples of how it wasn't fair at all.
"We put a lot of effort into showing that," Collins said. "We watched a whole season's worth of [English TV show] 'Match of the Day,' in which they run through Saturday's Premier League matches. We took the view of the pundits about whether the referee had got it right or wrong, and then we showed what would've happened if you took the pundit's view instead of the referee's view since the pundits have the advantage of slow motion replays. And we showed that it would make a big difference to where teams came at the end of the season."
They didn't believe that the variability of refereeing decisions was all random noise that would even out for everyone in the wash. No: it was just the inevitable outcome from how hard it was to judge offside in a sport that seemed to be moving at a progressively faster pace, year after year. Given how everyone other than the ref now had the ability to see which of his offside calls were obviously wrong, something needed to change.
"We were arguing, then, for some introduction of technology," Collins said. "But it was simple technology -- not this incredibly ridiculous, complicated drawing lines and judging things to a fraction of an inch."
VAR and the illusion of precision
Ever since VAR was introduced, it has just sat wrong with me. I couldn't quite explain why, but it went beyond how it slowed down a dynamic game and how it introduced this new doubt into the handful of celebratory moments in each game. I didn't have a problem with goal-line technology, but something about the use of technology to judge offside just created all of this friction in my mind that I couldn't quite resolve. Why couldn't I be OK with it if it were making the game fairer?
According to Collins, I -- along with lots of others -- am reflexively pushing back against the digitization of something that isn't black and white.
Digital technology is essentially the continuous separation of events into ones and zeroes, yeses and nos. And VAR uses a freeze-frame picture with digital lines to determine whether a player is offside or not. The lines move, then they stop moving, and then we're told what reality is: offside or onside.
Except, this isn't how it works. Offside isn't a simple "yes" or "no" in two important ways.
When you score a goal, you score a goal. The ball is either fully across the line or it isn't. There are no "degrees" of scoring goals. There's no extra value from kicking a ball harder and further into the goal as opposed to a little dink that bounces just across the line. But there are degrees of offside. If you're six feet offside, the advantage you gain if the ref doesn't call it is massive. If you're six feet onside, you don't gain any advantage. Furthermore, the competitive difference between being an inch or a part of a foot offside, and an inch or a part of a foot onside, is nonexistent.
"Some people think that offside is either offside or it's not offside," Collins said. "But they know that not all offside judgments are like that. Sometimes, offside decisions had to be made whether a player who hasn't got the ball is interfering with play. That is a judgment. And nearly all decisions made by referees have some element of judgment in them.
"In the case of offside, they shouldn't be trying to judge it anyway to within a fraction of a centimeter. I mean, it's definitely not accurate enough to do that."
The other problem with the current use of VAR to call offside is that it creates an illusion of precision. According to the Premier League, the lines used to determine the position of the offside zone and the attacking player in question are both one pixel thick, and both lines are manually positioned by the VAR operators. "The broadcast cameras operate with 50 frames per second," the league writes, "so the point of contact with the ball is one of those frames inside the 50-per-second."
However, according to Collins, a professional soccer player can run more than a foot in 1/50th of a second, so two separate images taken within the same 1-50th-of-a-second frame could show a player who is onside and a player offside. (You can see some examples here.) Even with the 5cm tolerance level the tech allows for, this process isn't showing us some true, objective version of offside and onside: it's showing a random combination of when the camera snapped its picture, and where the video operator dragged the lines and calling it either offside or onside. Offside is not offside.
Julien Laurens thinks Luis Díaz's disallowed goal in Tottenham vs. Liverpool is the biggest VAR mistake in the Premier League so far this season.
Plus, the VAR technology in the Premier League is run by Hawk-Eye Innovations, which is owned by Sony, a private company that is not going to make the nuts-and-bolts of its technology public. We don't actually know how any of this works beyond what the league tells us. In fact, Collins said that when he started doing his analysis of Hawk-Eye's margin for error, he was approached by lawyers from the company asking him to stop.
The same margin-of-error issues are true with goal-line technology, but the wider public has mostly accepted the process. The same issues would also still be true were the Premier League to introduce some kind of automated offside process. We'd see images accompanied by definitive "offside" and "onside" rulings, even though the technology isn't -- and might not ever be -- advanced enough to ever provide a definitive ruling. The images and the pictures with the lines will always be estimates, an idea that carries a wider (and perhaps more urgent) importance with the rapid advancement of Artificial Intelligence and the proliferation of real-looking digital images.
"I think we are moving into a period with technology where we want to teach the public not to trust computer generated graphics," Collins said.
So how do we fix it?
We know that even the technologized version of calling offside is an estimate. And we know that the Premier League's technocrat-icized process of outsourcing the calls both hasn't worked well, instead adding another opaque layer to a process that's already using black-box technology developed by a private company. Given all of that, Collins suggests simplifying the process.
"The digitization of offside is a sort of conceptual mistake," he said. "When somebody's half a millimeter offside, they don't get any playing advantage at all. You don't want to be ruling a goal out when a player has got the goal but without any playing advantage -- when he hasn't been cheating. So, what you should have instead is referees just looking at a replay from an advantageous angle. You don't need to draw all these lines. You just need to say, 'OK, has the offside player gained an advantage here?'"
The current offside rule, according to the English FA, is absurdly specific:
It is not an offence to be in an offside position.
A player is in an offside position if:
• any part of the head, body or feet is in the opponents' half (excluding the halfway line) and
• any part of the head, body or feet is nearer to the opponents' goal line than both the ball and the second-last opponentThe hands and arms of all players, including the goalkeepers, are not considered. For the purposes of determining offside, the upper boundary of the arm is in line with the bottom of the armpit.
A player is not in an offside position if level with the:
• second-last opponent or
• last two opponents
The current implementation then zeroes in toward these specifications, most of which now only exist because the rule gets such a fine-grained examination every match and needed somewhere for the one-pixel lines to rub up against. But the point of the offside rule, initially, was to prevent players from goal-hanging. The governing bodies have since decided that this specific version was how offside would be defined -- it's not some fundamental truth about how soccer works.
Any tweak to the rule -- using only feet to determine positioning, saying there needs to be daylight between attacker and defender, etc. -- would just move the zone of ambiguity to somewhere else. Instead, what if the rule was both redefined and then legislated more subjectively?
Plenty of other rules more explicitly leave decisions up to referee discretion. If the player gains an unfair advantage with his positioning behind the defense when the pass is played, then it's offside. If not, it's onside. If it's unclear, perhaps we just give the benefit of the doubt to the attackers, like the idea of "tie goes to the runner" in baseball.
Something spiritually feels wrong about ruling out a goal because one armpit is slightly ahead of another armpit. It's hard enough to score -- why make it even harder?
The simplest implementation would be for the ref to go over to a monitor and look at a few angles of the television broadcast before making a decision on whether or not the player gained an unfair advantage with his positioning. The images he or she is looking at could then be broadcast live in the stadium and on TV; the refs would get the same views as everyone else, and then they'd make their interpretation.
This would be much more transparent than what's currently happening, it would bring the implementation of the concept of offside closer to what everyone inherently understands its purpose to be, and it would also make clear what VAR attempts to conceal: that offside is subjective, not black and white.
"The crowd should see everything that's going on, and the referee should see everything that's going on," Collins said. "You don't need all these people stuck in offices miles away. You could still have the referee on the field looking at the screen and making a decision, and the crowd will see that the referee is making the right decision. Of course, not everybody will always agree about every decision, because some of them are ambiguous. But that's always been the job of a referee."