The var judgment of the World Cup went “quite far”, says the professor

Ivan Perisic sends a cross into the penalty area like a suspicious toddler sending a letter to Santa Claus. More hoping than believing.

The ball floats in the air for a long time. The game tool hits Renato Veigan to the back of the head, bounces off it Mario Pasalicin thigh and finally bounces to where the wishes are heard.

Ruben Neves and If Guardiol dive into the ball in front of the goal. Guardiol is luckier. The ball is in the net. Croatia has equalized the game in the 13th minute of extra time.

The Portuguese players are in disbelief. Croatians are euphoric. Millions of TV viewers ride at full speed on a dizzying roller coaster of emotions that only sports can offer.

Football is amazing. Everything is possible again.

Then technology comes into play.

at Toronto Stadium the sports drama turns into a sci-fi dystopia.

The video referee (var) informs the referee that Pasalic was offside. Not when Perisic’s cross went but when Igor Matanovic touched the ball.

The only problem is that you can’t see Matanovic’s touch in any of the slow-downs. He does try to push the ball, but it continues forward in the same direction, speed and twist as before.

However, the microchip installed in the ball says otherwise. According to that, the ball will be hit exactly where Matanovic is.

Referee Espen Eskås reject the goal. Euphoria gives way to a huge experience of injustice. Stuff flies onto the field. Hope is gone.

Portugal continues. Croatia is relegated. Luka Modricin The World Cup career ends.

Football rules has been rewritten three times in 1938, 1997 and 2016. While the first two jobs brought a period of serenity to the rules front, the third time led to the complete opposite situation.

This is largely due to the fact that the person in charge of the 2016 contract David Elleray didn’t consider the rulebook when modifying the tech in any way really. Elleray drafted the rulebook completely for the needs of the time before the video referee.

When videos were introduced, it became clear very quickly that the rules of football were not designed to be interpreted with technological precision.

Since then, there have been attempts to fix the rules on the fly. Overshoots have been corrected, deficiencies have been patched, and a definition suitable for the video era has been searched for, for example, a hand error.

At the same time, technology has split the rules in two. A large part of the rules are still open to interpretation, or at least such that they require the opinion of an expert, i.e. a referee. Was the foul worth a yellow card, a red card or just a free kick? Were all conditions for manual error met?

Then there are purely measurable situations. Was the ball completely in the goal? Current technology is able to solve this issue almost seamlessly.

Was the player in an offside position at the time of the pass? Today, too, there is an almost precise answer to this. Be that as it may, it has led to toenail shirts measured by centimeter.

In recent years sensor technology has also been used to help, which tells whether the ball has been touched at a certain moment or not. So far, the technology has worked well. It has been able to measure, for example, whether the attacker played the ball with his hand in a goal situation or whether the hand was only near the ball.

The case of the Croatia-Portugal match makes you wonder if ball contact is only a technically measurable thing after all.

IMU sensors are used in racing balls. The name comes from the words inertial measurement unit. In Finnish, we speak of an inertial measurement unit.

Professor at the University of Helsinki Sampsa Old House says the sensor type is very common.

“They are in smart watches, devices and clothes. The smallest chip is a couple of millimeters in size and measures the change in acceleration and rotation.”

However, a chip alone is not enough.

“There is always noise in a flying ball. It does not move in a vacuum. The most difficult thing is to remove the noise and use the algorithm to find a change that is accepted as contact.”

Algorithms always have a margin of error. However, no one knows what the competition ball’s algorithms and error margins are, because Adidas, the ball’s manufacturer, has not revealed them.

Vanhatalo has seen the questionable offside decision in the Croatia-Portugal game and playfully estimates that the touch may have come from “hair, sweat or dandruff”.

However, on a philosophical level, the situation poses a big question.

“If the human eye disagrees with the algorithm, you have to decide which one to trust. It has now been decided that there is no need for a visible change in the movement of the ball,” says Vanhatalo.

“It has come a long way.”

Var should to correct obvious mistakes in football. In fact, the official name of a video referee is a video assistant referee. In other words, it is an assistant referee.

The golden guideline for assistant referees, on the other hand, has always been: “Help solve problems, don’t create them.”

The offside caused by touching the hair fights against both alignments. It’s not an obvious bug and dealing with it creates a problem that didn’t exist before.

Referee expert Jan-Peter Aravirta recently stated that one should not actually interpret the var according to one’s own opinion but try to understand what the general public expects.

“The referee cannot be right alone”, Aravirta said.

In the touch case, we went even further than this. In the situation, only the algorithm was alone right. The verdict was based on things that no human sense could prove.

Asetelmasta tulee mieleen tohtori Ian Malcolmin lausahdus Jurassic Park -elokuvassa: ”They were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

“They thought so hard about whether they could do it that they didn’t stop to think about whether it should be done at all.”

A technological can of worms was opened in Toronto. Now the decision-makers should think about how to catch it again.