The World Cup Is Over, and the Tech Squad Led by VAR Has Never Stolen This Much of the Spotlight

From the arc of a ball curling into the net, to how players perform, to the calls that decide a match, to the way a game is enjoyed — technology shapes every World Cup

"While Pitana was watching the video replay, it felt as if the whole world had paused." That is how CCTV commentator He Wei described the VAR moment in the World Cup final.

In last night's final, at 33 minutes and 30 seconds, a Croatian player was involved in a disputed handball. Argentine referee Néstor Pitana — pushed by protesting French players and by a suggestion from the video assistant referee — ran from near the penalty area across most of the pitch to watch the replay on the pitchside monitor. After nearly a minute of hesitating and weighing it up, he turned to leave, then turned back to watch the video again, and finally pointed to the penalty spot.

Amid the roar of 80,000 fans, players drifted around midfield, pacing, glancing over at the referee and his little VAR booth. In a 90-minute football match, those two minutes stood still and hurt.

As the most argued-over "player" at this World Cup, VAR (Video Assistant Referee) has drawn more heat than any other technology ever used in football. By changing the rhythm of a match, VAR has changed the way football is watched.

Does advanced technology kill the passion of human sport?

Anyone who knows the VAR rules can see the appeal at once: a remote team of officials, working from 33 different cameras around the pitch — live cameras, slow-motion cameras and offside cameras — alerts the referee to fouls and to the letter of the law.

A string of numbers shows video replay does make officiating more accurate. At this World Cup, VAR looked at 335 incidents; of the 17 that went to review, 14 produced a changed decision, lifting the referees' accuracy from 95% to 99.3%.

Yet the loudest voices against the technology belong to football's most fervent fans, to professional players and to coaches — the people closest to the passion of the game, or inside it.

Crystal Palace chairman Steve Parish complained that VAR ruins the flow of a match: "When rugby brought this in, I lost interest immediately, and the same with cricket. I hate stop-start games — we're heading down a dangerous road."

Is the flow of a football match more important than fairness? That depends on how the technology is used.

Next to cricket and tennis, where video officiating is already mature, football is deeply subjective. It is a dynamic sport, so many of a referee's calls are "dynamic" too: he has to judge not only the force of an action but the intent behind a foul. In tennis or cricket, a ball over the line is over the line, and right and wrong are obvious at a glance.

The International Football Association Board (IFAB) allows VAR in four situations: whether a goal should stand, whether a penalty should be given, straight red cards, and mistaken identity. VAR helps enormously with offside and goal-line calls, where a goal simply is not valid. Deciding on cards and penalties is a far more subjective business.

Under the current rules, the referee may choose whether to look at the video or not. The video assistant referee supplies information; whether to take it, and how strictly to apply it, still rests with a human being.

In Morocco's match against Portugal at this World Cup, Portugal's Guerreiro tugged Amrabat's shirt in the box in the 27th minute; near the end, Pepe was suspected of a handball in the area. Morocco's players and coach appealed again and again for the referee to consult VAR and award a penalty, and were turned down every time.

After Spain snatched a last-gasp equaliser against Morocco, Amrabat shouted into the broadcast camera: "VAR is shit."

In Serbia's 1-2 defeat to Switzerland, German referee Felix Brych refused to consult VAR and missed a penalty; FIFA upheld Serbia's appeal and sent Brych straight home.

If some incidents are reviewed and others are not, is that not unfair in its own way? VAR's supporters tend to argue that the row is not about the technology but about the people using it and the rules governing its use.

Some think the referee should lose his monopoly, and that each captain should get one request for a VAR review — which, underneath, is a question of moving power around, or splitting it up.

VAR began as a project called "Referee 2.0," run by the Royal Dutch Football Association (KNVB). It was ambitious: the point was to remake officiating. The goal-line Hawk-Eye technology used at the 2014 World Cup came out of the same project.

In football's old system, the human referee held a great deal of power. Once he accepts corrections from a technical official, that authority is badly weakened: decisions are challenged constantly, spectators and players will always want the video, and reviews could even become a tactic for running down the clock.

The other risk runs the opposite way: with VAR to lean on, referees may start doubting their own eyes and grow more and more dependent on the technology.

Given all this, there is good reason to think VAR will leave matches more broken up. A football match runs 90 minutes in regulation; former Premier League referee Foy once said VAR has just 40 seconds to get a decision right. In practice, one review at this World Cup took two and a half minutes on average, and at worst held the game up for four.

VAR time is a bad experience, and worse for fans who paid to be in the stadium. Television viewers at least have commentators to fill the silence. Fans in the ground have no idea what is going on (in tennis, which uses a similar system, the crowd can hear the umpire talking to the official off court), and after a goal, players do not know whether to celebrate now or wait.

The pessimistic view runs like this: once VAR arrives, officiating by living people will eventually be replaced, and in the end the video will decide everything. At least that way the rhythm of the game survives.

Football is a fierce, physical, contact sport. Bodily contact and legitimate blocking are essential to it, and part of its passion. Compared with the old days of the naked eye, every touch by a defender is magnified by the freeze-frame and the slow-motion replay, and looks unreasonable, unforgivable.

The result: 22 penalties at this World Cup, more than at any tournament before it. VAR may leave defenders timid and passive inside their own box, and the game less fierce for it.

In the vote on using VAR in the Premier League's 2018/19 season, two-thirds of the clubs chose to wait. Football commentator Zhan Jun has said more than once that the Premier League, famous for its ferocity and speed, is a poor fit for VAR, and that stopping matches for video reviews would cost the league the physicality and the spectacle it built its name on.

But now that VAR has reached the World Cup stage, its spread is beyond doubt. The British technology company Hawk-Eye developed it, and the Royal Dutch Football Association spent years testing it. From next season Ligue 1 and La Liga will use VAR too, which means every major European league except the Premier League has entered the "VAR" era.

How technology, VAR above all, will change this sport — its rules, the way it is presented — will be argued about forever, because that argument is how sport evolves.

From the first written rules, the Cambridge Rules of 1848, to the world's number one sport broadcast globally with 33 cameras a match, football has never stopped moving; FIFA, the sporting giants and the technology companies would not allow it to.

New products and technologies keep pouring onto the grass. Some are less conspicuous than VAR, but they still change the game itself.

Start with the ball. Adidas made the first World Cup match ball for FIFA in 1970 and has done the job for nearly half a century since.

Over the past decade or so the ball has stopped being the traditional 32-panel object; the sporting-goods companies keep making it rounder, closer to a perfect sphere.

At the 2006 World Cup in Germany, Adidas broke with the hand-stitched 32-panel design for the first time. The Teamgeist had only 14 panels, bonded with heat rather than sewn. It was rounder and smoother than any ball before it, and a nightmare for goalkeepers: it changed direction in mid-air along impossible paths and dropped into the net.

Four years later the Jabulani used only eight heat-bonded panels; four years after that the number fell to six.

Lynchburg College professor John Eric Goff explained why: "Fewer panels mean fewer seams, and fewer seams make the ball smoother, which significantly affects its aerodynamics."

Put simply, drag slows a ball down. When the airflow separates as it passes around the ball, it leaves a more pronounced wake, which drags harder on the ball — and that is why the "knuckleball" exists.

Different surfaces change the point at which that shift happens. The 2010 World Cup ball hit its critical transition speed at about 54 miles per hour, exactly the range of corners and free kicks, which is why that tournament produced so many shots with strange trajectories.

Four years on, Adidas brought the Brazuca's critical speed down to 38 miles per hour, so that in most situations the ball would not suddenly decelerate.

The official ball of the 2018 Russia World Cup, the Telstar 18, has been called "the roundest ball in history." It is easier to hit along a predictable path, less likely to turn into an uncontrollable knuckleball, and, so the claim goes, kinder to goalkeepers.

The Telstar also became the first ball with a near-field communication (NFC) chip inside it, so the ball can talk to a smartphone — though all it does for now is display product information.

This is the first time an NFC chip has gone into a match ball, and it is worth nothing to the game itself. Off the pitch, there is more to do with it. In 2017 Nike put NFC chips into NBA jerseys for the new season: touch a phone to the chip tag and you could pull up player news and game highlights, unlock games, or buy tickets early. In other words, more reasons to spend money.

None of it has anything to do with athletic performance, and all of it makes the products dearer. This year's Telstar costs more than US$100; an ordinary football costs less than $20. Once the World Cup reached the knockout rounds, Adidas brought out a colored version of the ball.

For this year's World Cup shirts, Adidas used a titanium-blend yarn and 3D aluminum cooling zones for an instant cooling effect, with the zones matched to the body's hot spots. On the parts of the body that heat up fastest, small silver aluminum dots deliver a cool touch all over, shedding heat while, the company says, feeling more comfortable than anything else.

Nike answered with VaporKnit, an upgrade of VaporAeroswift, lighter and more breathable — the best shirt technology Nike currently has.

And with France and Croatia, two "Team Nike" sides, making a historic run to the final, the scene from the European Championship two years earlier played out again: both the winner and the runner-up wore Nike. Nike also came out ahead in star-player sponsorships at this World Cup.

Beyond shaping referees' decisions and the business off the pitch, technology now feeds the coaches' decisions too.

Watching this year's broadcasts, you often see a coach or an assistant holding a tablet showing live footage and replays, along with statistics on player positioning, speed and passing. It also carries data on how much load a player's body is taking.

This is the FIFA-approved EPTS (Electronic Performance and Tracking System) wearable platform. It pairs optical tracking cameras with wearable technology and sends match footage and player data back to the coaching staff. Every squad has a data analyst on hand, and the medical team holds a tablet of its own.

In the semifinal against England, Croatia — who had gone to extra time in three straight matches — made no substitutions in regulation. After the game the coach told the press conference: "I wanted to make changes, but not one player was willing to come off. They all said they could keep going." Data support clearly makes such a judgment easier.

The technology has already spread through America's four major sports and Europe's leagues. La Liga, home to Messi and Suárez and watched closely by fans, has used a similar platform for the past few years. Its system was built by Mediapro and analyzes player condition, speed and distance covered in real time.

A Mediapro executive told QDaily that the system runs on a tablet, using high-definition cameras around the pitch and matching image algorithms to capture information on every player.

The coaching staff can watch only what they want to watch: how far Messi has run, say, or the gaps between defenders along the back line. The system can also work out where an opponent starts its attacks, which helps read the other side's tactics.

It can replay footage from any point since kickoff, which helps the staff work out new tactics and pass them on to players on the pitch by talking to them, or reshuffle personnel once they know how a player is holding up. Every La Liga club shares the data the system analyzes and stores.

What the technology has changed on the pitch is this: information that once could not be had in time is now real-time and visible, and data has begun to help a team's performance during the match.

That data has also changed what the audience finally sees. This year CCTV's mobile app launched a data-assisted viewing mode for live matches: pick a camera angle dedicated to the home or away side, or one that follows a star player, and watch passing routes and player movement, a team's tactical intent and its changes of lineup in real time.

American fans could use an Oculus Go or a Samsung Gear VR to watch a VR version of the World Cup on Oculus Venues; Fox Sports streamed several matches free. It looked roughly like the Champions League matches Oculus Venues had broadcast earlier.

Does advanced technology kill the passion of human sport? Not yet, at least.

Human subjectivity is still football's biggest variable. After the final, Croatia's head coach Zlatko Dalić said flatly: "I'm not going to pick over the referee's decision. I only want to say one thing: on the stage of a World Cup final, that penalty should not have been given."

Former greats Roy Keane and Gary Neville, and Mark Clattenburg, once one of the Premier League's top whistles, took the same view. Keane reckoned the referee could never have played the game himself to give a decision like that. Clattenburg said Perišić's arm was in a natural position, not a deliberate handball, so no penalty should have been awarded. A player's intent is not something VAR can rule on.

As long as the final decision belongs to a human referee, football's calls will always be disputed — and the pain new technology is causing the game comes precisely from the technology not being advanced enough.

Suppose that one day technology could rule on penalties and on red and yellow cards. Every problem VAR causes now — the broken rhythm, the wasted time, the unequal application — would be solved. Fans could then look back on the drama, the absurdity and the madness of 21st-century football the way they look back on Maradona's "Hand of God."

Even as they know perfectly well: that kind of classic belongs in memory only, and never in their own team's next match.

Cover image credit: FIFA.com, Mangalore Today, Best Wallpapers