Goal-line Technology Overreaction

Posted on March 8, 2010

A lot of hyperbolic condemnation has gone on in the past few days from notable personalities and the media, since the International Football Association Board (IFAB) ruled out goal-line technology at a meeting in Zurich on Saturday.

FIFA President Sepp Blatter did not comment following the IFAB decision on video technology, leaving secretary-general Jerome Valcke to meet the press. (Agencia Brasil via Wikimedia Commons)

FIFA secretary-general, Jerome Valcke (known by many as the Frenchman flirting with Charlize Theron at the World Cup groups draw), said of the decision, “why should we have technology in a game where the main and unique parts should be the humans, players and referees?”

Personally, and I know I’m very much in a minority, I believe Valcke makes a valid point appealing to the human element.

At odds with Valcke is his countryman and Arsenal FC manager, Arsene Wenger.

"For me, it is difficult to understand, for one reason because you want as much justice as possible," said Wenger.

Interesting that the cause of justice is taken up by a manger whose club once provided a “loan” to a Belgian side that coincidentally started farming African talent (possibly on Arsenal’s behalf), around the same time the financial arrangement was made in 2001. But Wenger has an alibi for his selective reading of justice.

"I do not even think it is linked with the money factor. If you love football you want the right decisions to be made."

Here Wenger neglects many who love football that also wishes the game to be left alone despite its alleged imperfections.

Technology has a time and a place and this just isn’t it. I don’t want to see the fourth official going to consult with a video booth the way referees do in the U.S. National Football League. I also don’t want to see referees making a phone call to some central destination where video officials sit in a room and monitor every game and then bestow their verdict on the outcome several minutes later, from hundreds or thousands of kilometers away. That happens in the highly centralized National Hockey League.

One of the groups working on the techology, Cairos, says it can let the referee know instantly when the ball crosses the line. But if there is even one time that it fails, there will likely be calls for the Introduction of touchline video booths or central monitoring rooms at a distant location.

In our constant quest to sterilize everything in society, we are now trying to take away from sport one of the few things that still provide spontaneity and speculation. The reason why I don’t want to see video technology is because it strips away the very flaws that make the game more intriguing.

Removing the human element that referees provide and introducing reviewable technology will then extended to fouls, touchline decisions such as throw-ins and corners and before long, the matches will be stopping every 45 seconds and taking commercial breaks like they do in North American sports leagues, where starts and stops are painfully annoying and exist mainly to serve marketing and advertising purposes.

After removing the human element, how long before managers like Wenger lobby to be able to call timeouts to deliberately slow down the opposition’s momentum as coaches do in the U.S. National Basketball League?

I enjoy the debates that come after questionable decisions. I love that Jose Mourinho still speaks of the “phantom goal” scored by Luis Garcia; that during the Six Nations Championship in rugby, Ireland’s trip to France still had people talking about the Thierry Henry handball at a national level intermingling two different sports. These controversies add a sense of drama and occasion to events going forward and a certain amount of controlled tension rises.

The very members of the media that are deriding the IFAB decision would quickly find themselves out of ideas and possibly out of work, if they didn’t have speculative calls on which to unleash their fury to fill up the margins of their columns.

Television pundits wouldn’t get to scream into cameras if the game was sterilized to perfection nearly as much as they do today and who would find them interesting then?

Some things are just better left alone and the cause of justice shouldn’t be taken up by people who may have tried to bend rules to earn personal advantages.