Why football needs a Justice League: Furthering the case for use of technology

Another Howler. No big deal, that’s football.

Week in and week out, twenty five odd players train with utmost sincerity to increase team chemistry, work on honing their individual skills to take their game up a decisive notch and prepare themselves psychologically in order to come up with the goods in the big game on the weekend. The manager assiduously goes over footage of their oppositions, draws up strategies to counter them and thinks of ways in which he can extract the maximum potential out of his players. The trainers and the coaches work with players to keep them physically fit and ready for the game. Finally the big game day arrives. There is a buzz around the whole stadium. The Pundits are having a heyday lining the teams up against one another on their telestrators and discussing what a glorious game of football we are in for. The fans realize how important their support is in acting as the twelfth man on the pitch and buoyed by their unwavering and resonating chants, the team enters the playing arena ready to put everything on the line for the next ninety minutes.Unfortunately, what follows next is a bit of a tragedy. It’s not the players, not the manager, not the coaches nor the fans that make the headlines in the newspapers the following day, it’s the Referee! Surely, looking at all of this objectively, one has to wonder if there is something blatantly wrong with this whole charade! And if this is happening week in and week out, shouldn’t we be looking at this problem more seriously and trying to come up with a solution for it as soon as possible?

There were two huge games this weekend. Chelsea hosted Arsenal in the Premier League and Real Madrid and Barcelona locked horns in the El Clasico. Both games carried significant weight and would go on to affect title chances for the teams involved.

Andre Marriner had a horrible day at Stamford Bridge, the highlight of which was sending off Kieran Gibbs for a hand ball that his team mate Alex-Oxlade Chamberlain committed. That, to some extent, took the attention away from the fact that the sending off was harsh in itself seeing that the ball wasn’t going in and the act wouldn’t count as denying a clear goal scoring opportunity for the opposite team. Arsenal were routed 6-0 on the day. Two days later, the FA stepped in to address Arsenal’s post match appeals by transferring the sanction from Gibbs to Chamberlain and downgrading Chamberlain’s punishment, making him available for the next game. The bottom line is that a player was sent off for no offense of his whatsoever in one of the most important games of the most watched football league in the world and the fourth official who saw it all didn’t even care to interfere. Instead of watching a good game of football, the fans were treated to a horror show by the referee.

Let’s move on to the premier showcase event for La Liga, one of the biggest clashes in the football world: The El Clasico. The fans hoped for a thrilling encounter and the players definitely didn’t disappoint as the first half saw us witness one of the most entertaining halves of the season. The game was played at an electrifying pace with chances at either end and teams going into the break deadlocked at 2-2. But you know where this is heading, don’t you? What followed next was a wrong decision by the referee to give a penalty for a tackle that was made outside the box, followed by a penalty and a sending off based on inconclusive evidence and an extremely harsh third penalty of the game that eventually settled the affair. What a bummer!

Of course, this is not the first time ‘injustice’ has been meted out by the officials on a football field. Far from it, it actually happens all the time. Players are wrongly cautioned in the semi-finals of tournaments leaving them banned from playing in the final, hence spoiling the main event; Penalties are awarded for blatant dives immaculately performed by world class strikers. But surely, you ask, this cannot happen in the most premier footballing event, the World Cup. Can it? Some incidents from the top of my head: Thierry Henry’s intentional handball that dashed Ireland’s hopes of making the World Cup; Graham Poll cautioning Simunic thrice before sending him off in a WC match; The goal line disputes between England and Germany; Nigel De Jong kung-fu kicking Xabi Alonso in the middle of the park during the world cup final and getting away with it. There have been plenty more, of course.

This begs the question ‘Till how long are we going to keep contemplating What-Ifs at the end of the games instead of stopping these things from happening in the first place?’ A few weeks back, Barcelona had profited from a similar decision when the tackle from Demichelis was clearly outside the box. So, is this how it is going to be? What goes around comes around? Are we going to trust the universe to balance everything out by looking at teams’ past cosmic karma? Two wrongs making a right sometimes passes off as a good enough theory but two wrongs, separated by days of footballing action in between, in different competitions, involving different players and oppositions, surely has to be one ridiculous argument.

Without beating around the bush any longer, let’s get to the point. Referees are assuming the centre stage way too often during football matches and we’d rather have our precious footballers do that bit instead. So, how do we do that? Enter technology. To understand where we stand right now with respect to using technology in football, let’s first try and assess how the individuals at the helm of the two biggest ruling bodies of football feel about it. Enter Messieurs Sepp Blatter and Michel Platini. Platini has opposed giving match officials hi-tech aids in the past and would apparently blissfully go on and increase the number of referees standing around the box to provide different views of action instead of using a close to 360 degree view that the broadcasting cameras provide. They are sticking to that even after the incident involving the Euro’12 co-hosts Ukraine where they were knocked out of the tournament after wrongly being disallowed a goal against England.FIFA and Sepp Blatter have always been slow in bringing in major changes. They seem to enjoy preserving Football as what it has been over the years rather than helping the game evolve with the times. It took ages for FIFA to come around and accept goal line technology. It was only after England were denied a clear goal against Germany in the 2010 World Cup that the Goal Line Technology debate was reopened. With increasing number of games being settled by incorrect refereeing decisions, why the match officials are not being equipped to make better decisions when they clearly can be, is beyond the fans.

Popular arguments against use of technology are that it will slow down the game, that the players will abuse the system and ask for decisions being overturned all the time, that the game needs to be uniform across the world, that the cost involved in setting up these systems is vast and that the technology is still not accurate enough to be trusted. Let’s look at these one by one:

It will slow down the game

Will technology really slow down the game?

The referees aren’t total duds. More often than not they are right and decisions outside the penalty boxes are generally of much lesser consequence than the ones inside them. It is mainly incidents involving players being sent off and penalty decisions that need to be looked into since a man advantage creates a huge rift between the two sides and takes one team totally out of the game while a penalty mostly leads to conversion and a goal counts for a lot in a sport where scorelines with sum of goals less than or equal to two account for close to 50 percent of the games.

So, how many such critical incidents take place in a game? Let’s say five on an average. Presently, we get to see slow motion replays from multiple angles within seconds of the event. The maximum it can take for a decision to be made is possibly a minute. Does the possibility of five extra minutes at the end of the game seem so distraught that we are willing to disregard the possibility of totally eliminating the howler from the game? It is not as if we don’t have any stoppages at all right now. The referees stop the game to sort out heated arguments on the field. All sorts of injuries on the field are followed by the physio running in and the player hobbling off the field for treatment. Aren’t calls on red cards and penalties reasons just as important as these?

Won’t it be more useful if instead of increasing the number of officials close to the penalty box, we can have officials sitting by the touchline looking at slow motion replays and assisting the referees with the decisions? American sports generally have officials like this by the touchline that assist the referee. Calls regarding technical fouls, shots close to shot clock resets and even change of possession are referred from time to time.

In football, the fourth officials duties are listed as assisting with substitutions, maintaining backup records of score and caution/send offs and displaying the extra time to the spectators. Wow! The concept of the fourth official sounds more like them getting a day off from being in the middle than actually doing something worthwhile. The fact that they also get to derive sadistic pleasure by calmly turning a blind eye to the vehement protests on the sidelines by the two managers sounds like an added bonus.

The point is that the fourth, the fifth, the sixth, the seventh up till the Nth ( where N is a function of Platini’s whims and fancies) officials are all being underworked and not being utilized properly. From what we have seen, they cannot prevent a sending off for the wrong player, inform the referee that he has already cautioned the player before and that the next caution should be a red card, or simply be a good friend and notify him about the ongoing Kung-Fu events in the vicinity. For a game where twenty two players are spread all across the field and are involved in all sorts of on the ball and off the ball incidents, it only makes sense that there be more officials involved than the poor lone referee in the middle and they use all possible resources to ensure correct calls.

Players will abuse the system:

Cricket is a team game where the system of referrals has been in use for quite some time now. The team, led by the captain, take a quick call on whether they wish to review the decision and the off field umpire takes a call on the matter. In case the evidence is inconclusive, the on field referee’s decision stands. The teams only get a fixed number of referrals and they lose one if their review is unsuccessful. Tennis uses a similar system too for line calls.

The purpose of having such a system is to prevent an absolute howler from taking place. It gives a chance to the involved teams to plead their case if they feel they have been handed a horribly wrong decision against them. Football has lesser plays that directly affect the score line and even a single referral per side can reduce the possibility of injustice being meted out by a large amount. All it will take is a quick signal to the referee, who might continue the game as it is after the incident, only to hear back from the team of referees sitting outside, just in time to award a decision at the next stoppage of play.

Need to weed out the inaccuracies:

UDRS in cricket

It is not that there have been no issues altogether with the use of technology. The Indian Cricket Team has frequently raised questions about the accuracy of the setup. There was uproar against the DRS (Decision Review System) during the Ashes as well. But there is a huge difference. As compared to decisions that have to be made in cricket, which are based on what the umpire sees, hears and at times on his predictions regarding the ball’s trajectory, in football, the decisions are largely based on the referee’s view of things. What follows is the argument that since the referee can only see a certain part of the game and that too from one angle, it is logical to assist him with the use of cameras. The error involved in such a system is much less than in other sports and is something that at least needs to be experimented with.

The issue of uniformity:

Blatter has expressed his desire before for the game to be uniform across the world. “The game must be played in the same way no matter where you are in the world. If you are coaching a group of teenagers in any small town around the world, they will be playing with the same rules as the professional players they see on TV.” It is hard to understand how use of technology changes the way the game is played fundamentally. The rules remain the same it is only that the enforcement of those rules will be much more precise and accurate. What is wrong with that? Are the ‘group of teenagers’ being taught to dive to get penalties or work on their play acting and hysterics to get someone sent off? Those are probably the only elements of their game that will suffer due to the use of technology.

Use of technology ensuring correct decisions on the field during the biggest events of football with millions watching will in fact, set an example for how the game should be played: With integrity and honesty. Besides, now that they have agreed to the use of goal line technology, the ‘supreme balance of uniformity’ between the game as it is played around the world has already been disturbed. So ideally, they should drop that uniformity talk altogether.

Cost of implementation:

On many occasions, the cost has been cited as one of the reasons for not using the technology. Platini said that the use of goal line technology for the 280 stadiums used in Europe’s top club competitions cost UEFA around 71 million dollars over five years. He felt the money could be better spent elsewhere, like on youth development and infrastructure. Probably Platini and UEFA are in the best position to understand how the money should be utilized. But moving to camera driven assistance wouldn’t exactly require a lot more investment, especially for the top leagues.

As things stand, neither goal-line technology nor the five referee system is a compulsion on a league. Both are options that can be chosen and paid for by a specific league or competition organizers. The biggest events in football are also the biggest events in the world. The billions across the world at least deserve to watch a fair game. If the issue is put higher on the priority index, then surely the money won’t be an issue for the most popular sport on the planet.

While bringing in technology will have to be a gradual process, the bigger leagues and governing bodies must look at this matter with urgency. It is extremely important to understand that at the highest level, the margin for error is very small for the referees and the impending impact on the people and events associated with the game is extremely large.

In their book, Soccernomics, Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski write about the effect the game has on people world over. They look into statistical correlations between football and suicides in a country, the effect the game has on the happiness index of a nation and many other case studies that reveal how passionate people are about the game and how intertwined their life has become with this global sport, they so love. We also know that revenue wise, the impact of relegations and promotions on football clubs and the people associated with them is huge. The loss or gain of television and commercial revenue becomes a major factor in shaping a club’s future. Incorrect refereeing decisions influence the results that further go on and influence innumerable other associated aspects of the game.

Football has evolved beyond being just a sport and it will be extremely insincere on part of the regulatory bodies to keep on ignoring the basic fundamental flaw that plagues the game currently. If it stays this way, the fans might as well question their motives and intentions, for when the technology is there to be used, ignoring it makes no sense. Should we resign to the fact that the game we love so much has become more a farce rather than a platform for participating athletes to showcase their skills and talents that it was meant to be? Is it all just a big show? Twenty two players prance around the field for ninety minutes. A team loses, a team wins. The losing manager feels gutted and criticizes the referee for the call that turned the game around, the winning manager says he hasn’t seen it yet but it looked fair from where he was sitting. The pundits play the footage over and over and end up spending half their broadcast time discussing controversial decisions and convincing the viewer that they have witnessed a tragedy of epic proportions, only for it to happen all over again the following week.

The question that needs to be put across to the governing bodies is ‘What will it take?’ What will it take for them to notice the shortcomings in the current match officiating setup? Are the weekly signs not ominous enough? Will they only be willing to try something once a decision goes against Brazil in the final of upcoming World Cup? Perhaps a wrongly adjudged penalty awarded to Argentina in 90^th minute which Leo Messi will convert with aplomb, leaving millions of Brazilians who worship the game utterly displeased and triggering riots and civil unrest in a country already struggling with corruption, poor public services and rising living costs. Will that do? In the near future, FIFA and IFAB will have some decisions to make with respect to use of technology in football. We can only hope that they respect the voice of the fans enough to make the right ones.