By Rory Smith
The New York Times
Somewhere amid the controversy and the chaos, there is the germ of a paradox. Every philosophical quandary requires a scenario, and this is a good one: On the opening day of the men’s soccer tournament at the Paris Olympics, Cristian Medina scored a late — 106th-minute late — equalizer to help Argentina salvage a point against Morocco.
The goal prompted a barrage of objects to rain down on the field from the stands, followed by a smattering of fans. In the interests of safety, the referee called the players off the field. The game, however, had not ended; it had merely paused. An hour later, when the stadium had been cleared of the general public, play resumed. Javier Mascherano, Argentina’s coach, called it a “circus.”
The game continued with the news that Medina’s goal, which involved around a dozen blocks and saves and ricochets, had been rescinded by the video assistant referee. There had been an Argentine offside in the comic scramble beforehand. Morocco played out the final few minutes, the stadium now empty, and won, 2-1. Officially, that is how the game finished.
But to those watching — the fans in the stadium, who had experienced the goal but left before discovering that it did not count, and the fans following along at home, who might have switched off the game, assuming that it had ended — what was the score?
What had actually happened? Is it what they witnessed, what they saw with their own eyes, what they felt — or is it what they were told, sometime later, after some deus ex machina had intervened in human affairs? Every philosophical quandary needs a name, and this offers a good one, too: We can call it Mascherano’s Paradox.
The sensation, of course, will be familiar. The idea that truth is a slippery, malleable concept is something that most soccer fans internalized long ago. Managers had been using news conferences to reel off “alternative facts” — usually pertaining to the competence of various officials — years before Donald Trump’s aide Kellyanne Conway introduced the concept to a broader audience.
Fans understand, maybe even welcome, the sense that there is no fixed truth or falsehood when trying to keep track of the transfer market. Separating fact from fiction, a sort of instinctive Kremlinology that has the added benefit of being about defensive midfielders, is part of the fun.
Indeed, fandom itself is based essentially on the idea that truth is a personal, subjective concept: Your team is the best in the world; your team is morally correct; your team is the one that is the victim of some widespread and indistinct conspiracy; your team is the one that has ultimate agency over the outcome.
Only one element of the game was immune to this elasticity: the result. Of course, it was possible to quibble about whether a win or a loss was merited, to argue over its root causes, but the score itself was immutable. Everything that happened during the week was contestable, but Saturday and Sunday brought concrete reality.
In recent years, that firm ground has started to shift. The most immediate, most obvious cause of that has been the introduction — yes, sorry — of VAR. In January, the Belgian top flight decreed on appeal that a game between Anderlecht and Genk should be replayed after an incorrect application of the rules.
That case remains, at this stage, unique: No other game in a major European league has been replayed. The general direction of travel suggests it is unlikely to stay that way.
In October, Liverpool manager Jürgen Klopp admitted that he felt his team’s game against Tottenham, in which a goal had been incorrectly ruled out after a VAR check, should have been replayed, though Liverpool did not take his grievance any further. A few weeks later, another Belgian team, Club Brugge, did apply for one of its games to be replayed. Its case was dismissed by the same body that ruled in favor of Genk.
As recently as April, Barcelona’s president, Joan Laporta — nobody’s idea of a generous loser — demanded that La Liga consent to the idea that its showpiece game, the Clásico, be replayed after a shot from Lamine Yamal that appeared to have crossed the line was not ruled a goal. La Liga is the only major league in Europe that does not employ goal-line technology.
The issue here is of authorities’ own making, of course: The introduction of an additional layer of refereeing, one that pretends to be able to find an objective truth even in matters that can, at times, be subjective, has overinflated expectations of accuracy. It was inevitable, though perhaps not foreseen, that when those expectations were not met, teams might contest the validity of any outcome deemed less than perfect.
But that is not the only development that has challenged the incontrovertibility of the result. It is hard to criticize soccer’s embrace of data. Its benefits, without question, outweigh its drawbacks: It has served to make both fans and those who work in the game smarter, more self-aware and, possibly most significant, more open.
Soccer was, for a long time, deeply resistant to outsiders. Data has helped to break down that self-imposed and self-limiting barrier: Players, clubs and leagues now employ countless people who have come to the game from academia; from science; from all manner of nontraditional, nonsporting backgrounds.
At the same time, though, it has — unintentionally and, it has to be stressed, without a hint of malice — helped to foster the idea that the score line is not the only authentic way of gauging a game’s outcome.
Soccer is now so awash in data that it is possible to cherry-pick it to prove almost anything: that the player who seemed to be little more than a passenger was, in fact, crucial to proceedings; that the team that was heavily beaten had, despite appearances, played extremely well; and, through expected goals, the metric that has seeped the furthest into the mainstream, that the final score did not, in many ways, reflect the truth of the game.
There is nothing wrong with this, of course. It is not doing any particular harm, not even when it is deployed by those sections of both the legacy media and its somewhat more raucous offspring, social media, solely in the interests of confecting controversy. Quite the opposite, in fact: Despite the miasma of hot takes and clickbait that fans must now wade through, they are, without question, better informed about the sport they love than at any point in the past.
An unintended consequence, though, is still a consequence. Data, as much as VAR, has helped to usher soccer conclusively into its postmodern age, where nothing — even the result of a game — is true or at least not subjective to the point of being a single, overarching truth. Everything is up for debate. We are all, to some extent, adrift in Mascherano’s Paradox, told that what we saw with our own eyes, in the flesh or on a screen, was not actually what happened.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
