In November, Tottenham Hotspur – my team – played Chelsea. It was one of the most extraordinary games in recent footballing history, with no fewer than nine appeals to the video assistant referee (VAR).
VAR is a relatively recent addition to professional football; it has only been used in England since 2019. The point of the system was to reduce the number of refereeing errors, and thereby increase fan confidence. But it has not done so, and therein lies a fascinating parable for the human condition.
When its use was first mooted, the idea was that it was intolerable for the outcome of football matches to rest on the judgement of a single human individual, the referee. Given the commercialisation of the modern game, there can be literally hundreds of millions of pounds at stake. This means enormous pressure on the men in black – although they don’t always wear black nowadays, and a few women have qualified as high-level referees (insert your joke about the priesthood here).
Much better, said the proponents, to replace the decisions of a flawed human being – with his inevitable lapses in attention, his mistakes of perception and his misunderstandings of human behaviour – with a technical fix, involving numerous camera angles being pored over by others away from the heat of battle, able to bring in, where necessary, the cool untiring rationality of computer algorithms. The fans could argue as much as they wanted to in the pub after the game, but we would at last have an objective answer to their disputes.
Of course, it has not turned out that way. Disagreements have not been eliminated, but pushed up another level. Instead of lambasting the referee’s assistant for missing an obvious offside, we grumble about the accuracy of the computer-generated line that is supposed to provide the definitive call. And ultimately, in many cases, there is simply no definitive answer to the questions that VAR has to answer, like whether a particular clash between players constitutes a foul or whether a foul took place inside or outside the penalty box. True enough, VAR reviewers are making decisions away from the high-adrenaline atmosphere of the pitch, without players shouting and screaming at them. But the fact remains that their decisions remain irreducibly human – and therefore impossible to perfect. Even when VAR has solved some controversies, it has created new ones.
I don’t want to labour the point too much – this is the Catholic Herald, not the 2024 Shoot annual – but the back-and-forth about VAR closely resembles one of the key social and political disagreements of our time: how exactly should we balance the tension between on the one hand allowing normal unconstrained human life, and on the other trying to make the world safer, more comfortable and more efficient?
Another example is our collective attitude to child safety in schools. Throughout my time at primary school (198-1994) one side of the site was marked by a rickety wood-and-wire fence, in parts only waist high. The elderly wooden gates were not locked during the day and if you wanted to drop into the office for something, you could just drop in. I was allowed to walk to and from school by myself for all of year six (aged 10-11) and a decent chunk of year five (aged 9-10). Now almost all schools are like Fort Knox; I pass my alma mater regularly and the wooden fence has long since been replaced by a tall metal spiked one. The gates all have electronic locking systems. At my children’s primary school none of the pupils is allowed to travel to and from school unaccompanied. Something has clearly changed in how we, as a society, think about risk; I had another instance of this recently when a steward at a Parkrun event scolded me for letting my eight-year-old son run on well ahead (this is technically against the rules, but the rule is clearly an insurance-related requirement and I am convinced there should be room for a “no harm, no foul” approach).
The fundamental thing to remember is that mistakes and failures will inevitably accompany normal free human life. If the price of a sterile, entirely predictable world where mishaps and the unexpected have been abolished is that humans must endure a stunted, crabbed, over-organised existence, then that price is too high. The perfect can be the enemy of the good. The case for real life, lived in accordance with truth and grace, is well put in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, by the Savage – ironically named because of his rejection of hedonistic conformity: “I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
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