There was an interesting podcast about refereeing football recently
which didn’t quite get to the heart of the problem. The fans bemoan referee
quality; coaches claim that refereeing is getting worse, and all of them wonder
how VAR (video-assisted refereeing) has made things worse, not better.
The journalist quoted referees as noting that it’s actually
quite an intense game, a lot happens, and there’s a lot of pressure: pressure
that has only increased as the financial consequences have grown. 50 years ago
pride and some money were at stake. Now vast sums, more than anyone should be
able to earn in a lifetime, can hinge on critical moments in a game.
The referees also pointed out that some judgements are
inherently subjective. Things such as ‘excessive force’ don’t have a Newton
threshold cited, and you can’t judge precise force in Newtons by eye anyway.
They missed the point. The point is not that some things are
inherently subjective, but that knowing the truth is hard. The rules are the rules,
but seeing clearly how much contact there was, and guessing how much force was
used despite not having experienced it, is hard. If the referee could
telepathically experience the fouling player’s momentum, the contact and the
victim’s pain, he would know very well whether the contact was a foul or
reasonable. He simply cannot judge, and is not helped by both players
inevitably protesting innocence and wailing in agony respectively. That’s not
because there is no right answer, but because he cannot access all the information
he ideally would have.
But there is a further point about whether things are
inherently subjective. Everyone wants rules to bend in their favour: they
forgive themselves, and expect to be forgiven, for minor mis-steps. Everyone
wants to grasp a little bit more than anyone else: they want the last word. When
I was a tiny child, required to line up at the end of break before being ‘marched’
into class, other boys would try to push in front; and if I stepped back in
front, they would resent it. If teachers commanded us to stop jostling, they
would be outraged if I had maintained my position, and might continue to
disobey before citing good order as a reason for me not to retaliate.
The same happened in lunch queues all through school and
undergraduate life; the same happens in traffic jams; the same happens with tax
avoidance, speed limits, employing migrant labour… and on the football pitch.
If something should be split 50% between us, almost everyone hopes to sneak 53%
for themselves: we all regard ourselves as entitled to at least 50% of
this split. ‘Hustle culture’, named after a word for conning people, is about
grasping that little bit more: get what you can, how you can. For poor people
it’s working two jobs and working hard in the hope that the boss will promote
you; for rich people it’s disobeying the law trusting that the resultant
profits will fund enough lawyers and lobbying that the law can be changed or
avoided via venal politicians and spineless regulators.
However, the rules didn’t change. There is no rule that says
that as long as you’re not much further from the rules than anyone else then
you’re actually within them. That’s our own primitive herd instincts (for those
of you who are conformists, anyway: I’ve never felt this way). Just stay close
to everyone else and you’re alright.
The law, however, is not a rough guide; a wireless router
that we’re fine being distant from as long as there’s some sort of connection.
It’s clear boundaries; a cliff-edge on which you might sit, or even scramble,
but beyond which you cannot go.
This is the second source of people’s confusion about
whether right and wrong are subjective. Most people want to be forgiven for
being a bit wrong, and this mixes with the inability for others to know for
sure whether they were a bit wrong to create a world in which people believe it’s
fine to take between 100 and 110% of their share in life. They get away with
it, good-hearted people forgive them for it and the people getting 90% are
either friends and relatives who will take it back another time or unknown
strangers who don’t matter.
This is why dealing with
other people is frustrating. Drivers will drive down an empty lane to go in an
unpopular direction and then try to cut into the jam going a popular direction
because they don’t want to wait: they don’t normally, and they feel entitled to
at least their normal speed, without delay. Others will have to experience
delay until it hits someone who can afford it. It might seem like an equalising
approach to life, taking from everyone until someone who can afford to be
magnanimous lets it go, but sadly this is not what happens: we take from people
and it is the weak, powerless and king-hearted who get abused.
It is all perfectly demonstrated in football, where two
teams vie to win while following the same rules. There are no poor strangers from
whom to steal our entitlement: only the two teams, each of which wants that 55%
of decisions to go in their favour. Likewise the fans all expect a bit of
leniency for their team, as they would grant, such that real fairness feels
harsh.
This is why refereeing seems to be worse than ever and VAR
seems to have contributed to making football worse. We live in a world where we
all greedily grasp for a little bit more and true fairness feels unfair. We live
in fear of losing even the smallest bit of time that is ours, drive at at least
the speed limit and then get upset if anyone objects to speeding. We were
making sure that we got our entitlement… by taking someone else’s.
We have conflated ‘at most’ with ‘at least’: we all want our
100% share so badly that we forget that it’s not an entitled share, it’s a
limit. If we cannot tread the line perfectly, it is our obligation to step away
from it, not over it, to allow for our own inaccuracy.
In wider life such things are not so clear. There are
millions of strangers who invisibly bear the burden. Sport gives us no such
luxury: entitlement meets fairness and comes off bruised, confused, but
self-righteous.
