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How much is too much technology in football?

By on October 29, 2014

Watching Major League Baseball’s World Series over the past week has made me rediscover everything which I love about football. It’s not that I don’t find the World Series exciting, far from it – being a San Francisco native it may be one of the first times the sport has my nerves jangling. However, that excitement is something far different than that of the beautiful game. You watch a baseball game for two hours and the game won’t be even half over, though often times it is all but put to bed. The experience football provides is completely different. In the beautiful game, matches last 90 minutes, give or take a couple of minutes of stoppage time. And while studies showed that the ball was only in play for just over 60% of the average match in the 2010/2011 Premier League, that amounts to 55 minutes and 6 seconds of action over a 115 minute period, including halftime.  But numbers don’t do justice to the pace and constant action that the sport provides – especially compared to that of American football, in which the ball is only in play for an average of 11 minutes of broadcasts that last around three hours, according to the Wall Street Journal.

That is not to say football is necessarily a better, or more exciting sport than baseball or American football, though many, including I, may personally believe so.  They are quite different, however.  Both baseball and American football are played at a slower tempo, with the ball out of play majority of games.  Thus, they can afford, of many things that soccer can’t, to have video replays to make sure referees get correct decisions.  In both of the two sports, video replays are only consulted when a decision is challenged by a coach.  In soccer, technology has only recently begun to penetrate refereeing.  Mainly because many view technology as a disruption to the sport, a loss of its human element and particularly disruption to the flow of matches.  Then again, referees can’t always be 100% right.  Sometimes, they make errors, occasionally so bad they are comical.  Of course, it’s not as funny if you are a victim of the decision.  Diego Maradona’s infamous “Hand of God” has been immortalized in football history in part because it was key goal in Argentina’s 2-1 win over England that saw The Three Lions knocked out of the 1986 World Cup at the Quarterfinal stage – only proving that even the best referees on the biggest of occasions can make mistakes.  Thus, the debate has begun among what a good balance between technology in football and simply letting the game be.

So far, minimal technology, namely just goal-line technology, has been implanted into the game with zero effect on the flow of the game, yet still it has taken a long and controversial haul to get the technologies accepted and approved into the game.  The biggest and first example of this was goal-line technology, first approved by the International Football Association Board, the “Guardians of the Laws of the Game” in 2012.  This had been after a long fought debate that only really concluded when Frank Lampard saw his long-range goal wrongly disallowed during the 2010 World Cup. Still, goal-line technology wasn’t used widely in the top level of English football until the 2013/2014 season, in which it was used for the first time in the English Premier League and League Cup.  Over the past summer it was used for a first time during a World Cup, but while a variety of different systems have been invented goal-line technology has yet to be implemented in the Champions League, many major leagues across the world, or the European Championships, though it is rumored that Uefa president Michel Platini is considering using it in Euro 2016.

But aside from goal-line technology, and of course the popular vanishing spray used to make sure walls don’t inch forward on dangerous free-kicks, no other technology has been implemented in the game aside from that which makes it easier for the referee to communicate with his assistants.   That, though, will undoubtedly change in the near future.  Already, the Dutch Football Association is looking at various types of video review. Just at the mention of “video review”, fans are turned off. But what the Dutch are looking at is not, say, the video review like they have in baseball and American football. What they are looking at might actually work without interrupting the flow of the game.

Say a bad penalty decision is made, or not made, or another potential game-changing call. Not even offside decisions, just big calls. Then, a team of referees would consult it remotely using video reviews. What makes it unique is that they would do so in a targeted time of ten seconds, so it would hardly interrupt the match. The referee would not stop play until they have made their call if he doesn’t whistle, and if he does their decision would fit right into the usual time it takes for play to restart. For plays leading up to goals None of this sounds to unreasonable, and if you listen in on ESPNFC’s interview of a referee currently testing the program, it sounds even more appealing.

Don’t expect these systems to be across global football anywhere in the next few years – the Dutch FA have yet to even submit a request to the IFAB allowing them to test it on official matches. But it sounds reasonable and feasible, and certainly represents a wider motion – technology will and is penetrating the beautiful game, and the decision must be made on how much is too much.

About Alex Morgan

Alex Morgan, founder of Football Every Day, lives and breaths football from the West Coast of the United States in California. Aside from founding Football Every Day in January of 2013, Alex has also launched his own journalism career and hopes to help others do the same with FBED. He covers the San Jose Earthquakes as a beat reporter for QuakesTalk.com and his work has also been featured in the BBC's Match of the Day Magazine.