I’m at the pub watching football. It’s the semi-final of the FA Cup, the world’s oldest football (soccer, if you prefer) competition, between giant team Manchester United and second-division Coventry. I’m a neutral, feeling quite sleepy like the rest of the pub. An hour into the game, United are 3-0 up. For Coventry to reach the semi-finals is already unusual, a triumph of narrative over the foregone conclusion by which the wealthy top-division clubs dominate over the poorer, lower-ranked teams that lack the resources to employ world-class players and managers, a system based on a regular influx of money that keeps those on the top where they are. For Coventry to stage an upset would be something special. And perhaps things are changing. It starts with a beautiful, unexpected shot from Coventry’s striker in the 71st minute. 3-1. A few minutes later, Coventry’s midfielder takes a shot that hits the back of a Manchester defender and deflects straight into the goal. 78 minutes in, it’s now 3-2. The entire pub is watching the screen, incredulous, amazed. This may be history in the making.

A football game lasts 90 minutes, and the clock doesn’t stop. At the end of the game, the referee might add a few minutes to make up for time lost over injuries, player substitution, and so on. In this game, six minutes are added, and at the 92nd minute, the same United defender who had the ball hit his back now accidentally plays a handball. Coventry are given a penalty shot, where a single player faces the keeper uninterrupted. Coventry forward Haji Wright takes it on and scores, the 3-3 score line sending the game into 30 minutes of extra time as a tie-breaker. In the 119th minute, the absolute last minute that can be played, Coventry scores. It’s Wright again. The entire pub erupts with incredulity and joy—everybody loves the little guy.

Only wait a minute. The goal is to be reviewed by video-assisted referees, or VAR, as they are casually referred to in conversations about football, who suspect Wright was offside (offside means that the most forward-attacking player was ahead of the last defender at the moment the ball was passed to them; it sounds complicated because it is.) The pub moans in unison. I know that sound, that groan—the sound of displeasure, the sound of a narrative cut.

Video-assisted refereeing is new, introduced across major football leagues around the world in the past five years, and it has been unpopular with fans, pundits, managers, and players. It was first trialed in the 2019 Women’s World Cup, using the largest occasion in women’s football as a testing ground for a new technology, which was even then severely criticized for inconsistency and lack of compatibility with a high-pressure, quick-moving game. VAR referees monitor the game from an office away from the pitch, examining decisions in real time. When VAR recognizes an infringement, they can either inform the on-field referee of a mistaken decision or instruct the referee to look at a pitch-side monitor where he can reassess his call.

It’s a visual system. The referees pause and rewind; they draw lines to see players’ positions in relation to each other. They watch the players’ motion without context—a foul is only the moment of contact, a handball a question of the “natural position” of the players’ arms. On television, viewers see the three video-assisted referees in the VAR rooms in Stockley Park, a business center near Heathrow Airport, drawing each other’s attention to multiple screens. It feels intimate—these people watch other people up close, their action stops another action, their rewinding and pausing a form of paying attention to other humans.

Wright was offside, and the goal is rescinded. At the pub, everyone puts down their drinks with a collective sigh. We all resent this decision, whether or not it is correct. Football refereeing has always been subjective. The rules are the rules, but the referee and what he or she sees is always the only authority. For a long time, the idea of using technology to correct this was very popular with fans, who were used to seeing replays on television and couldn’t understand why the same medium couldn’t be used in-game. Until it was actually introduced.

VAR has inalterably changed the relationship between fans, players, and referees—all the people who participate simultaneously in the event. While fans watching on television can see what the video-assisted referees are looking at, in the stadium, the screens just read “VAR check.” When VAR was introduced, an executive decision was made to not show the process in the stadium to protect the referees on the pitch and their authority. But the result is that the stadium audiences don’t know what is going on, whereas the TV audiences do.

, asks: “Why? Why love sport?” And gives the simplest answer: “First, it must be remembered that everything happening to the player also happens to the spectator.” VAR severs this bond through doubt. There’s a doubt in the audience: Did something happen, or will it be taken away? They saw it with their own eyes, but somewhere in an office away from the ground are a few sets of eyes on a monitor whose version of the event may be more accurate, more technical. That doubt also reaches the player’s mind. A goal could be ruled out for offside or for something in the buildup that the player had not noticed. This same hesitation is translated to the fans: Do you jump, hug, and shout when a goal is scored, or wait for VAR to confirm the player wasn’t offside first? VAR breaks the flow of the game and the live event. That empathy that Barthes describes is one of my favorite things about watching football, about watching sports: that to pay so much attention to another human being in real time is a form of connection. To watch is to tell a story about emotion—glee and surprise, coming together, feeling the same thing as the people around you.

What happens when you break a narrative? Something happens in the game, but then it needs to be confirmed. “A football match immediately ceases to be interesting as soon as we know the final result,” suggests author Jean-Philippe Toussaint in his book 

. “As soon as the invisible thread connecting soccer to the passage of time is broken, as soon as it is stripped of its dimension of irreversibility, its grace and brilliance immediately vanish,” he writes. The invisible thread connecting football to the passage of time is also a system of representation: it’s television cameras that follow the ball, it’s the way the game is mediated through language and punditry, it’s the sense of occasion, the event.

The visual conditions of watching football on a screen already change this thin thread of time. I once watched a game at a pub with two televisions unsynchronized by one second, ruining anything just before you knew it could be ruined. The same goes for watching big games at home, hearing people cheer from other houses, where their connection may be a tiny bit better, putting them just ahead of you. With VAR, that thread of time becomes ever more knotted. Time expands and contracts, repeats, and shifts our experience. VAR is a specific kind of media experience: the screen often splits to view the replay and the players, the referee, or another version. It splits time, too: the replay is already the past, and the referee and players are living in the present.

It’s a story often told: be careful what you wish for. One day, I’ll say I am old enough to remember football before VAR. And I will sound like a Luddite who thinks technology ruins everything. But I will know: I will know how, for a while, when a goal was scored, fans could cheer or shout, never doubting that the decision could then be overturned by someone watching a screen somewhere. Everything that happened to the player happened to the viewer, and no line drawn across the screen, no check, could challenge it. You saw it with your own eyes.

And I know, from art, stories, and sport, that the meeting of time and narrative is a rich place. That legend builds through recounting. That I could say it a thousand times: there was a moment at the pub when there was a hush because all of us were having the same feeling—a could-it-be, a sense of the impossible—and then it was replaced by a whimper. The more I describe it, the more incredulous I am that legends don’t always work and that life gets in the way. Here is when it ceases to be interesting: Manchester United won.

The referee whistled to end the game immediately after the VAR call canceling Coventry’s last-gasp goal; the tie was then broken with a penalty shootout, where the team with the best of 5 penalty kicks wins. United won 4-2. The ending is unromantic: the rich, successful, famous team won. They won by the rules. Still, their win feels unjustified because it went against the narrative, against the story all of us at the pub wanted to tell. Where were you when Haji Wright scored that 120th-minute goal to send Coventry to the final of the FA Cup? “Oh, I was at a pub in North London, complaining with everybody else.”

Orit Gat 

I know that sound, that groan—the sound of displeasure, the sound of a narrative cut.

Seeing Is Believing

Orit Gat is a writer and art critic living in London whose work on contemporary art, culture, technology, and football has been published in many magazines. She is currently working on her first book 

Orit Gat

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Orit Gat