Referees in basketball, rugby, and tennis have had the assistance of video technology since the beginning of the millennium, but in football, the breakthrough was only recorded in 2018. Nevertheless, it is an extremely traditional sport and changes significantly slower than the rest of society. From a sociological perspective, the working class is to blame. It resists. However, it will not be able to resist for long against the encroachment of artificial intelligence in stadiums.

It is now completely clear – it is a conspiracy. If there were still some who believed in fair referees and defended them with dignity by saying that ‘those who work also make mistakes’ when they persistently ruled against us, taking point by point, medal by medal, awarding us penalties and disallowing goals, it is now finally clear to even the most naive of naives that it is organized robbery. If a referee’s mistake could have happened back then, how is it that today – when technology is here to prevent injustice – referees still shortchange the Croatian national football team, robbing and pickpocketing it? The answer is self-evident: it is systematic harassment.

Or perhaps such a perspective fits our collective victim mentality that we strengthen through sports, which feeds on the eternal injustice done to the Croatian people and which has traveled from the furious ‘Gentlemen referees, what are you doing to us!’ to the desperate ‘Why is this not checked in the VAR room?’.

So let us tell a little about that unfortunate VAR, which the football public quite unanimously despises and which has been a major source of frustration for players and coaches, and above all for journalists and fans.

Two Angles

VAR is an abbreviation for video assistant referee, and it actually refers to the people who review footage and intervene in the case of a referee’s mistake, calling the main referee for additional analysis. Once the referee approaches that screen, the drama begins, and if we take a closer look at that process, we will easily notice where all the skepticism towards this system comes from, especially from those who believe that the referee is to blame for all our defeats.

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Do you know that meme that circulates the internet explaining how the same situation can be viewed from different perspectives? In the picture, a man is attacking another man with a knife, but when the image is zoomed out, the viewer realizes that it is not a knife at all, but the heel of a man who is running away from the man with the knife at full speed. At that moment, the killer in the picture becomes the victim, and the victim becomes the attacker. In essence, it does not even matter what that image is. Every situation we analyze looks different depending on the angle from which we view it. The same goes for VAR. Just a few weeks ago, during a match between Liverpool and Chelsea, there was a scene where the referee awarded a penalty, and viewers at home could see the situation from two different angles. From one angle, it seemed that the goalkeeper first touched the ball and then the Liverpool player, while from the other, it was quite clear that the goalkeeper missed the ball and only clipped the opposing player. One angle suggests that there is no foul, while the other suggests that it is a penalty. If a person is emotionally charged because of the team they support, or, God forbid, if the match is watched in ‘checkered’ jerseys, the brain will focus on one of the two recordings that will assert its own justice, that is, strengthen the identity of the victim.

Football for the Proletariat

And while referees in basketball, rugby, and tennis have had the assistance of video technology since the early 2000s, football only recorded a stronger breakthrough in technology in 2018. This was at a time when dating apps had already largely replaced flirting in pubs, Instagram influencers had revolutionized the concept of marketing, and cash was slowly being replaced by digital money. Football is an extremely traditional sport, and changes indeed happen significantly slower than in the rest of society. From a sociological perspective, the working class is to blame, which brought all the glory to football. Although it originated in England as a pastime for the aristocracy and the wealthy, the workers from cotton factories quickly took over and conquered football. Traditionally, the working class is attributed a conservative mentality, so it is not surprising that technological innovations in football have always been met with strong resistance. VAR, as the biggest change that has happened to the sport, was of course met with the strongest rejection, and in England, it has only managed to break into the Premier League, the strongest league in the country.

A new technology based on artificial intelligence, the so-called semi-automatic offside, has been introduced this season in the Spanish league, and it will soon appear in England, and that artificial intelligence will fundamentally change the sport is suggested by the biggest tennis tournament Wimbledon, which is synonymous with tradition and where artificial intelligence will replace line judges in the next edition.

And while the Premier League has made a full circle – from a sport for the aristocracy to a sport for the masses and back to a sport for the elite – the working caste, eager for authentic football experiences, mainly visits lower league stadiums, where technology has not yet penetrated.

Romantic Sliding Tackle

If we set aside the fan tensions and passion for club colors on which the entire football machinery rests today, there is one concept that transcends all these differences and symbolizes love for football as such, and that is romance. Technology and its agents may guarantee greater precision in making refereeing decisions, but as we concluded earlier, fans are not so much concerned with precision as they are with emotional satisfaction. What is romantic for a football fan? Well, it is romantic when a player slides tackles an opponent on the ankle, and the referee on the spot, under pressure from players from both teams, makes a decision and thus shows how much authority he has while 90 thousand people whistle from the stands.

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The whole situation begins and ends at that moment where the perceptions of all present are completely distorted under the incredible impact of emotions. Because that is what the working caste came to the match for. They did not come for justice; they came for the show. Romance was also, as fans would say, when the attacker had an advantage over the defender, and offside by about 30 centimeters was quite naturally not called, giving attackers the chance to score. Just to play. Romantic is above all that, as the Croatian dictionary would explain, which is imaginative, unreal, enchanted.

Unromantic Times

However, times have seemingly come in which technology has subdued the masses and made them entirely new beings, much more precise and sophisticated. And it is the same in life, isn’t it? Times are all kinds, but romantic and not. Let’s start from what romance is in its primal, loving form, from those romantic souls, from romantic romanticism and buying roses, kissing hands, and carrying across the pond. Dating apps, popularly known as dating apps, have replaced the entire romantic process with a click. Isn’t romance precisely in that fear, those emotions, and that authority that a person creates for himself before approaching a girl, when he says to himself: ‘Now or never!’ Every technological achievement is a blow to the ribs of the old good romance.

So damn it all, how romantic it was in 1930 when the footballers of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, otherwise bakers, milkmen, and workers, boarded a train to Marseille and there boarded a steamer to Uruguay, where the World Cup awaited them. And when they finally arrived in Montevideo after a few weeks at sea, they put on their best suits, put hats on their heads, and started courting Uruguayan women. Without Tinder, without mobile phones. And only when they got on the field and drunkenly beat Brazil, while back home people waited for the postman to bring the morning newspapers, and when the headline ‘Kingdom of Yugoslavia 2 – Brazil 1’ appeared, everyone finally gathered at the barber’s and celebrated for their boys who were left alone at the end of the world. Isn’t romance endless in that? However, there is no justice in that. When Uruguay welcomed Yugoslavia in the semifinals, the story goes that the referees were so biased towards the home team that at one point they even ‘turned a blind eye’ when a policeman from the goal line returned the ball into play, thus assisting the Uruguayans for a goal. It is quite certain that at that moment, that working caste of Yugoslavia would have given their lives if there had been so-called goal-line technology in Uruguay.

Impact on the Psyche

Technology has fundamentally changed society. Social media algorithms have practically merged with the human mind, people are slowly stopping driving cars, and cars are starting to drive people and even themselves. People no longer scroll through Instagram; Instagram scrolls people. The potential of artificial intelligence is such that society will be unrecognizable in a very short time, the concepts we lived with will remain part of history, and history will be written by a machine imitating self-destructive human intelligence.

That is why professionals are increasingly analyzing the impact of technology on the human psyche, so it is time to address the impact of technology on football players. Namely, one does not need a degree to wonder what happens in the mind of a football player when he scores a goal in the 90th minute in front of 90 thousand emotional fans and another 90 million scattered around the world, when he celebrates that goal with his teammates as if it were his last in the world, when he tears all his vocal cords and emotionally drained returns to the center of the field knowing that this goal will not only redirect the course of that match but also the entire tournament and the player’s life, and at that moment the referee blows the air into his whistle and shows that VAR has determined that there was offside.

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How to proceed after that? How to continue that match, that life, after you have been at the top of the world for a full half minute and suddenly lost everything? How can fans continue to cheer? That injustice is almost divine, and our infamous victim mentality will fall into divine despair. Technology is merciless. Many will not recover from it, certainly not by the end of the match, and those strongest will emerge undefeated from the emotional carousel. The best attackers, the greatest coaches will say, are those who do not despair too much but look for where to catch the next volley. So, the same probably applies to fans! Not everyone copes with the power of technology the same way. Despite the fact that, as they say in England, the number of correct refereeing decisions has risen from 82 percent to 96 percent with the arrival of VAR, there is currently more confusion in football than in times when all authority was in the hands of the referee.

Is the answer precisely in the authority of the referee? Namely, the most criticized aspect of VAR is that referees often lack the authority to confirm their opinion based on what they saw on the field, but rather completely succumb to the influence of footage, which can often be misleading. The key to everything, as philosophers and spiritual teachers of modern times say, would be to bring technology under control and use it as a tool, rather than being under its control. Until that control is established, technology will create mental cases, and VAR will exploit people just as Instagram scrolls us.