Controversial officiating decisions have been around as long as organised sports. As athletes have become bigger, stronger, faster the feeling is that officials have had a more difficult time making the correct decisions on close calls.
As sport has become more professionalised and exploited for their entertainment value, it has become big business. The sums spent on facilities and talent are vast, the sums riding on the results of individual games and competitions are astronomical. The cost of decisions can now be measured not only in heart broken fans, but billions of dollars.
Wherever you have a game of chance, there are always those willing to risk a bit on a wager. These wagers add up to huge sums. Most professional sports now support massive gambling industries. This creates risks for the integrity of results as the unscrupulous seek to corrupt for gain. Governing bodies are very sensitive to the perception of integrity and go to lengths to give the impression of fairness, ‘a level playing field’.
So we have the rise of the video replay, With the development of video technology games at once were much more widely watched, and every decision more carefully scrutinised by millions of people. Officials became very exposed, as being at ground level, operating at the pace of the game, having a fraction of a second to make a call, they made decisions which from the comfort of an armchair, senses heightened by passion and alcohol, were obviously wrong.
Some sports reacted by incorporating this new technology into the officiating, the National Football League in the USA among the first. The NFL like all American professional Sports Leagues were at once rich and localised, which meant that it was easy to implement new technologies across the League. The NFL like Cricket, also lent itself easily to video assistance because of the discreet passages of play, with a definite start and end to each sequence, allowing time to assess video evidence without disturbing the flow of the game.
By the mid 2000’s most sports were using video assistance in some way, depending on the nature of the sport. The major exception being football, the beautiful game. The global nature of the game, the disparity in resources across leagues, the old fashioned nature of football governance, the politicisation of the game, all meant that an agreement on how to use video was not going to be easy. Many sports have complex rules, but the vagaries and contradictions in the rules of football limit any scientific analysis.
Eventually commercial interests, not least the rise of the Americans in the ownership of professional football teams, led to a staged introduction of video technology, known as the Video Assistant Referee or VAR.
The details of VAR vary between leagues and competitions, but what is becoming clear is that it creates at least as many problems as it solves.
People see with their brains, the eyes collect light, transmit it to the back of the brain, there it is rearranged and interpreted, the information which arrives to the relevant part of the brain, is adjusted by filters, which remove seemingly unimportant details. The result is an image with our conscious mind can cope.
The way our filters act are dependent on our experiences, memories (some of which come from ancient long forgotten ancestors), feelings and emotions, general state of health and expectations. There are many other factors in the interpretation and filtering of the image we see, but one sure thing, is that no two of us see the same thing.
In everyday life this is not an issue, but in the fine lines of elite sports these differences in what we see can have billions of dollars of significance.
VAR is run by experts, past and serving referees with experience in officiating at the highest levels. Many retired players and managers pontificate on decisions after every game, and yet we are no closer to a system operating at the level of efficiency that the sums involved in the modern game demand.
Everyone is seeing something different, being influenced by experience and memories and coming to a conclusion, often in conflict with the decision.
The way to fix VAR is to crowdsource the decisions, Two hundred volunteers or low paid part time workers, logged into their assigned game on a secure website, wait for the moment when a VAR review is necessary, have the ability to choose on their screens different angles and 60 seconds in which to vote, majority wins. These reviewers need have no particular skill nor experience in football. An understanding of the rules and psychological assessment aimed at determining how willing they are to question their own judgment will be enough. There should be very few ex pros and officials.
This would result in much better decisions.
Gareth Southgate’s England setup has an advisory body known as The FA Advisory Board it is made of of people of varying experiences, Matthew
Syed, a ping pong player turned writer,Lucy Giles the first woman to head Sandhurst, a cycling coach, a rugby coach, entrepreneur, none football professionals. It is probably the single most important organ of the England setup at the moment.
Bring in eyes that see differently, lots of them.
Now that we are judging athletes on very fine lines using technologies how long will it be before athletes are technologically enhanced, with microchips in the brain so then can sense the line and keep their toe onside?
#ATHELETE # PEAKPERFORMANCECOACH #VAR #MICROCHIP #TOPTIER #EYES #ENHANCED #ENTREPRENEUR
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