In August, the English Premier League started using a video-assistant referee system (V.A.R.) during all its matches. V.A.R. is soccer’s first serious attempt to incorporate technology into the umpiring of the game, like Hawk-Eye, in tennis, or the replay system, in the N.F.L. It’s a complicated affair, involving a separate referee and his or her assistant, sequestered in a room, watching the action from all of the available camera angles and checking on four matters: that goals are legitimate, with no fouls or players offside; whether penalty kicks should be awarded; that red-card offences aren’t missed by the on-pitch referee; and that the referee doesn’t get players muddled up. Soccer should flow, without endless stoppages, so V.A.R. is supposed to be as unobtrusive as possible—a voice in the referee’s ear, spotting things that are suddenly obvious when they’re replayed on TV. Fans in the stadium often have no idea that a review is underway. When a goal is checked, the idea is that it shouldn’t take more than about thirty seconds. In 2017, Major League Soccer became the first league in the world to use V.A.R. in every game, and the system has been up and running—with some success—in the German, French, Italian, and Spanish leagues for more than a year. It added a bunch of drama at the Women’s World Cup, in France, this summer, when referees reviewed critical, nerve-shredding decisions on screens next to the pitch, before the action carried on.
But soccer in England is different, and V.A.R. is not going well at all. The E.P.L. is the world’s biggest soccer league, by revenue, and has a fragile superiority complex to go with it. Until now, the E.P.L. has maintained a remarkable balance. English soccer might be stuffed to the rafters with Brazilian goalkeepers, Gabonese strikers, and Spanish coaches, but it also retains a connection to certain unalterable truths about the sport in this country: that soccer is played hard and fast, often in the rain and on the outskirts of deindustrialized towns, that the language in the grounds is interestingly appalling, and that the referee is a wanker. The last of these might be the truest of them all. For about ten years, I used to go, religiously, to watch Arsenal, the North London team that I support. Invariably, at some point in the first half of each game, a sleepy, ragged rendition of the chant “The ref-er-ee’s a wank-er” would rumble around the stadium. By the second half, in response to a serious mistake, like giving a penalty to the visiting team, the chant would be deafening. There was often the rendition of a touchingly rude accompanying song, “You Don’t Know What You’re Doing,” during which everyone would point at the referee as he scampered about, trying to do an impossible job. Then we would go home in the dark, happy or fuming, but at least agreed on one point: that the referee was a wanker and always would be.
The goal of V.A.R. was to make subtle, but noticeable, improvements in all this. According to Professional Game Match Officials Limited, a company of referees that looks after top-level professional matches in England, élite referees made accurate calls eighty-two per cent of the time last season. The target for V.A.R. is to raise that figure to eighty-seven per cent. In May, Mike Riley, a former referee who runs P.G.M.O.L., said that V.A.R. would be best at clearing up supposedly objective questions, such as offside decisions, and would only correct “subjective” decisions by referees when there was a “clear and obvious error.”
In the opening nine rounds of E.P.L. matches this season, V.A.R. was a quiet, uncertain presence. People knew that it was watching but not what it was capable of. In England, video referees work from a centralized hub in an industrial zone, named Stockley Park, not far from Heathrow Airport. This season, viewers have got used to commentators saying, “Stockley Park is having a look at this,” or “We’re waiting to hear from Stockley Park,” as if it were a kind of refereeing Mount Olympus. In the first weeks of the season, Stockley Park tidied up a few offside calls but stayed mostly silent. On October 19th, during a match between Tottenham Hotspur and Watford, Gerard Deulofeu, a sharp Spanish forward who plays for Watford, got past Jan Vertonghen, a Tottenham defender, who slid in and tripped him. It was, in the argot of English soccer, a penalty all day long. Watford, the underdogs, were leading 1–0 at the time. Another goal would have put them on their way to an unlikely victory. Stockley Park said nothing. The game finished 1–1.
In the first ninety matches of the E.P.L. season, V.A.R. overruled a “subjective” error just once. What was happening? Keith Hackett, a former Premier League referee, wondered if the problem was psychological and that the video referees were taking a “happy, patty, nicey nicey” approach to their on-pitch colleagues. “They are kidding each other,” Hackett told the Daily Mirror. Everyone agreed that the bar for intervention had been set too high.
Last weekend, the bar came crashing down. After not ordering a single penalty or red card in the first three months of the season, video referees awarded four penalties and a red card and overturned a goal, for the merest of reasons, in the space of forty-eight hours. V.A.R. was everywhere, and it was a mess. Decisions were taking almost two minutes. Crowds in the stadiums knew nothing. “Fuck V.A.R.!” they chanted. For presumably another set of psychological reasons, referees on the pitch suddenly appeared subservient to their masters in Stockley Park. Gary Lineker, the BBC’s main soccer presenter and the closest thing to a moral authority on the English game, tweeted that V.A.R. was “presently shambolic and destroying the football experience.” On “Match of the Day 2,” the BBC’s Sunday-night highlights show, the host, Mark Chapman, joined the growing number of players and commentators criticizing V.A.R. “This system completely ignores the lifeblood of the game,” Chapman said, of the fans who pay to watch their teams. “They are being treated like idiots.”
V.A.R. is currently damaging English soccer in two distinct ways. The first is by interrupting the beautiful, and often painful, surprise of a goal. Nick Hornby, in “Fever Pitch,” his book about Arsenal and soccer, celebrated the rare value of goals, compared with points and hits and touchdowns in other sports. In the E.P.L. this season, there have been two hundred and eighty-seven goals, which works out to roughly a goal every half hour of play. Goals can be scrappy, they can be emphatic, they can be seen coming from a mile off, and they can occur with no warning, but they almost always carry a feeling of release, of life going right. I have no trouble recalling individual Arsenal goals that I saw more than twenty years ago—the slant of a player’s body, the ball angling in, the whole scene going awry as strangers grabbed at strangers and yelled with relief. Hornby called this “the powerful sensation of being in exactly the right place at the right time.” In the E.P.L. this season, V.A.R. has tampered with twenty-two goals, roughly one in thirteen. Not many, but enough to start infecting celebrations with doubt, to break up the exact time, the exact place, to syncopate something that used to be whole.
More profoundly, the technology—as it is practiced in England, at least—is altering how the narratives of soccer matches are constructed. Until now, games have been the work of the twenty-two players, the referee, and his or her assistants—the cast of characters on the field of play. In the middle of it all, the referee has been a flawed, pivotal performer, subject to the same pressures as everyone else. Chanting “the referee’s a wanker” early in a game isn’t just about indignation; it’s about trying to affect his judgment. In a century of English soccer, a whole idiom has developed to describe the imperfectability of refereeing and the subjective, human nature of the business. Referees “even things up” when they make a mistake. When a player gets a soft penalty, we’ve “seen them given.” My favorite is the rare quasi-legal term “adjudged,” as in, when something is adjudged to be a foul, which means that it probably wasn’t.
Before V.A.R., refereeing could drive you crazy, but it was part of the story taking place before your eyes. The first time I saw V.A.R. rewrite a soccer match in England was earlier this year, in the second leg of the quarter-finals of the Champions League. Manchester City, playing Tottenham Hotspur, were winning 4–3, with a few minutes remaining, but still needed a goal to progress to the semifinals. The game was worthy of a last-gasp goal, and it duly came, in the ninety-third minute, when Raheem Sterling, a Manchester City forward, swept home a low cross and fifty-five thousand fans lost their minds. Sterling dropped to his knees. The cameras shook. The goal was disallowed a minute later for a fractional offside decision that no one on the pitch seemed to have registered. The game had the wrong ending, and it came from somewhere else. It was pure deus ex machina. Even the Tottenham fans knew it. Up in the stands, they sang, to the tune of “Kumbaya,” “V.A.R., my Lord, V.A.R.”
