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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7627371" data-attributes="member: 4937">The VAR at the women's world cup has been anything but elegant in application or result, but for me it hasn't really suggested VAR is the problem.  Let me compare the soccer VAR to the situation in Sumo which adopted video review I think back in the 1950's after a notorious bad call by the judges on the floor where everyone on TV could see just how ludicrously bad the call was created a scandal.  The Sumo judges are vastly more autocratic in origin and demeanor than even soccer referees, inheriting an actual feudal aristocratic mindset.  But VAR in Sumo almost immediately created a situation where the VAR judge was for the most part deferred to in practice more or less immediately.  Sumo's problem comes when the VAR judge doesn't have clear and unambiguous evidence, which can occur in a couple of narrow situations, and then the floor judges who are so reliant on VAR now don't know what to do.  What we are seeing in the soccer VAR world is that situations that are ambiguous and subjective actually come up more often than not, and that sport is so used to calls being ambiguous and subjective that it's find it pretty much impossible to explain and justify the calls even after applying VAR.   The problem isn't just that VAR is taking up a bunch of time, because the referee can't trust the guy with video replay to say, "You got it wrong."  It's that for the most part, the guy with the VAR can't say whether it was right or wrong at all, so then the referee has to make a judgment call and it really is a judgment call.  VAR can't be used to resolve issues that are judgment calls, but the more soccer relies on VAR the more the audience will naturally and reasonably suspect that VAR will explain things in a way that they'll be forced to agree with or validated by.   But, if it's all a judgment call, what good is the objective evidence of video replay really?The two problems soccer has is answering the questions: "What is a foul?" and "What is offside?"  While there are some unambiguous cases of what is a foul, historically soccer has basically said, "A foul is what the referee says is a foul.", and it mostly doesn't have a rigorous standard and certainly doesn't have a rigorously applied standard.  But if a foul is just what a referee says is a foul, what good is video evidence?   Likewise, the offside rule seems simple once it is explained to you, and most people after they get the offside rule are like, "Ok, now I understand soccer."  But the offside rule contains further bits of ambiguity that are really subjective and yet in play come up all the time.  The most important is the idea of "interfering with a play".  Because a lot of the time there is someone that has made a run that failed for some reason, and the run would have been onside but now the player is offside.   But then play immediately continues and reaches some conclusion with the runner still offside.  Is that offside?  Well, it's subjective.   Basically, the rule is that offside is what the referee says is offside.  And again, what use is objective video evidence if the rule is subjective?This wouldn't matter much except that it is a game which often ends with a score of 1-0, and the only penalties it can apply tend to turn the entire result of the game.  So it's not like football or basketball were one bad call usually doesn't alter the outcome or at the very least, still leaves the team unfairly penalized with a reasonable chance of overcoming the hardship.</blockquote>

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