Football in England has come an incredibly long way since the playing of the first-ever FA Cup game on the 11th of November 1871. On that particular day, the players of Upton Park and Clapham Rovers arrived to play on a pitch that was manicured by the local sheep and left the field afterward having earned nothing but pride for their troubles.
Let’s just say that is it worlds away from the current setup at EE Wembley Stadium in northwest London where FA Cup matches take place today.
Indeed, fast forward 147 years to the latest game to be played in the FA Cup, a win for Chelsea against Man City, which coincidentally makes them the favorites with Betway as of the 19th of April to win the 140th edition of the FA Cup; and the difference in the two realities couldn’t be greater. Indeed, the Wembley pitch could have been mistaken for a billiard table and all 22 players had achieved multimillionaire status. It goes without saying so but, in many respects, parts of football are almost unrecognizable from the first games played 150 years ago, which, of course, isn’t a surprise, but the pace of improvement has been astonishing, especially in recent times.
Technology is to be credited with the speed of change, but have we come to a point where there is too much of it? Is the beautiful game being ruined by the forever meddling and invasive technology that supporters are beginning to detest?
Table of Contents
In the beginning
To start with, football is the most popular sport in the world because of how frighteningly simple it is. In essence, four billion people enjoy football due to the fact that that there are 22 players, two goals, and 90 minutes in which to get a result, it could hardly be more straightforward. Obviously, within that simplicity exists complexity but that has more to do with the level of skill that it takes to score a goal.
Without a doubt, technology has made the art of scoring a goal even more beautiful over the years when you consider that it has helped the world’s best players harness every bit of potential they have. Indeed, thanks to the advent of new technologies like the GPS tracking vest that records how far players run every game, the coaching staff now have an extraordinary amount of in-game data that they can analyze in a beneficial way. Additionally, the development of sports science now means that players can avoid injury and keep playing for longer.
All of this means that the on-field product that fans see is vastly improved from years gone by. You just have to look at an athletic specimen like Cristiano Ronaldo to appreciate how much players have been aided by technology, and how the football world benefits from the newfound ability these players have.
Indeed, there won’t be a fan out there that doesn’t value the role that technology has played in making football all the more enthralling. But once you go down the road of using technology to better the game, it’s hard to put that innovation back in the bottle.
The genie can’t be put back into the bottle
What we see more and more these days is technology rearing its head during the 90 minutes of a match in order to try and stamp out any clear and obvious errors made by referees. If you didn’t know by now, this system is called Video Assistant Referees or more commonly referred to as VAR. In fact, until some of the most self-serving football clubs in Europe tried to break away and form a European Super League, VAR was the biggest talking point of football in the 21st century.
In essence, VAR should have made football a lot fairer and it is, of course, commendable that FIFA made it their important business to set a goal in order to achieve that. Unfortunately, the reality is that the introduction of VAR has been somewhat of a disaster, admittedly more so in England than elsewhere around the world.
Is it a case of better the devil that football knows?
The problem is the technology that is being used to make football matches more just is disrupting the free-flowing nature of the beautiful game. Strangely, this technology was meant to save time.
The actual program that pinpoints the mistakes is not the problem, this software was tested many times by FIFA and it works well, rather the issue is how it is being interpreted by the humans using it.
In reality, it is this fast-flowing attraction that makes football the worldwide phenomenon that it is today and when that is taken away, well, football looks unrecognizable and loses its age-old appeal.
The great irony of course is that if the various governing bodies that control the game of football decide to remove the VAR technology, there would then be a deafening din of indignation about how clubs are being robbed by bad refereeing decisions. As mentioned earlier in the piece, there are no simple answers once you go down these routes. Football is in somewhat of a crisis and solutions aren’t forthcoming.
