World Cup 2010: The (Un) Revolutionary Cup
1789, 1791, 1869. Revolutionary years. 2010: remains to be seen, but certainly the World Cup is jockeying for its own revolutionary position in the history of football, and not necessarily in the way one might think. As teams fizzle out we’re still left with some of the notorious bigwigs—Brazil, Argentina, and Germany—but revolution is asserting itself especially in the realm of technology.
The latest offering: the possible institution of video technology as a viable alternate to human refereeing.
The news comes in the last week as analysts caught their breath after a weekend of terrible refereeing that affected teams and fans. In an elimination match against German, the referee and linesman were the only ones to miss an English goal in the entire stadium, and in a match between Argentina and Mexico, ditto an offside that led to an Argentine goal.
In response, Sepp Blatter, FIFA headman, said today for the first time that FIFA would be looking into video or like technology after the World Cup in order to remedy the situation.
The promise comes just weeks after FIFA head referee Jose-Marcia Garcia-Aranda acknowledged that not all referee calls were “fully correct,” but that he was nevertheless completely “satisfied” with the quality of refereeing at the 2010 World Cup. In his words, some of the calls are “not good decisions on the field of play and this for human beings, is natural. We are trying to improve those decisions that we consider are not good enough and for that reason we are training every day."
In the wake of recent events human training has obviously shown itself to be not enough. At the same time, FIFA authorities have indicated that although technology is a likely avenue, they will be precise in its innovation and probably avoid video technology. On football video replays, Blatter said:
“Football is a game that never stops. You have seen, if you go back to the special game [England-Germany] we are speaking about now, at the moment there was a discussion of whether the ball was in or out. On the other side there was a goal scoring opportunity. Because it goes so fast. Football never stops. So what should we do? Give the possibility of a team to call once or twice like in tennis to have a look? This principle has not been accepted after having been discussed. The only principle we are going to bring back for discussion is the goal line technology.”
So if there is to be a technological revolution, it won’t be in the form of video.
The problem with the suggestion of Blatter’s goal-line technology is primarily that it will fail to account for so many other contentious areas of debate on the field. For instance, as is well known, players dive to win cards on the other side and penalty kicks. We saw this with Italy, heck, we always see this with Italy, as well as with other teams (Kaka vs. Ivory Coast). Without video technology, what measure do we have to judge it, aside from (1) human referees who have already repeatedly indicated fallibility, and (2) video technology?
The advantage to video technology is precisely what Blatter seems to think of as its disadvantage, that it records a scene just the way it actually happened in real-time images. This offers a second glance for the human eye, which can therefore still be the ‘ultimate arbiter’ of the given situation. And in the case of theatrics seeing a situation on a human level is absolutely necessary.
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