Taking 110%

 

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.