Portugal was one of the pioneers in adopting the video referee (VAR) in all Primeira Liga games, after initial tests in the Portuguese Cup final and the Cândido de Oliveira Super Cup, in 2017. After almost nine years, the feeling is that the technology, in itself, has stagnated. If there was evolution, it was due more to the improvement of the system through the experience accumulated by the actors than to a technological leap itself.
Although the system was designed to make football fairer (indeed, it did), it is undeniable that the price to be paid was the erosion of emotion. The climax of the immediate goal, that instant of pure explosion, gave way to a restrained celebration, pending a remote validation that strips the game of its most primitive essence.
VAR was promised as the “cure” for Portuguese football’s chronic mistrust. However, a new focus of “contagion” was revealed. This article does not intend to judge whether the tool is “good or bad”, nor to provide an account of who benefited more or less. In fact, this discussion is the biggest pathology in Portuguese football. Anyone who believed that technology would eradicate the controversy was completely mistaken. In Portugal, club culture is so deeply rooted that VAR has simply changed and diversified its focus: from decisions on the pitch to the screens of the City of Football.
The objective of VAR is to minimize human error, but its eradication is a utopia. The subjectivity of concepts such as the “intensity” of a foul or the “unnatural position” of an arm keeps the debate alive. Furthermore, the accuracy of the offside lines depends on a millimetric human selection of the moment of the pass, an error of just one framedefined by a scant 33 milliseconds, can generate discrepancies of 20 to 30 centimeters. While elsewhere these margins are accepted as part of the game, in Portugal they fuel conspiracy theories.
No matter how much it is criticized, football today is fairer and serious errors are less frequent than in the past. However, the pace of the show suffered a severe blow. The long breaks in Portugal, often longer than the European average, break the flow of the game and favor those who make a living from anti-gambling.
According to the protocol, the VAR should only intervene in situations of clear and obvious error. If the referee needs several minutes in front of the monitor, the doubt persists and the error is no longer obvious. This hesitation is the result of our toxic environment: “At home where there is no bread, everyone scolds and no one is right.” The referees, pressured by managers who communicate for retaliation and by television programs that dissect every second in prime time, try so hard to avoid mistakes that they end up falling into exaggeration. No human being, no matter how psychologically strong, is fully assertive under this level of poisonous scrutiny.
Finally, we have to talk about personality and hierarchy. The final decision must always be made by those who feel the “heat” of the lawn, and not necessarily by those who observe the images in an aseptic and cold environment. A referee with personality does not allow himself to be bent by the weight of the hierarchy or the name of whoever is in the VAR booth. The sensitivity of the moment is usually something that the camera cannot capture.
In a game made by humans, all protagonists are subject to error. VAR is therefore not a technological problem, but the mirror of our collective inability to accept error as an integral part of life and sport. As long as we demand machine perfection in a human-designed game, VAR will continue to be, not a solution, but the scapegoat for our own intolerance.
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