Should FIFA Implement Goal-Line Technology?

The Bolton Wanderers played the Queens Park Rangers last weekend. This normally wouldn’t qualify as news, even in soccer circles. But both teams are fighting to avoid relegation from the English Premier League, so the match was important. As ESPN commentator Steve McManaman noted more than once during the game’s broadcast, relegation can cost a team tens of millions of dollars in revenue and adversely affect players’ careers. It follows that a controversial referee call in such a game can have more serious consequences than a similar call involving teams at or near the top of the standings.

One such call occurred in Saturday’s Bolton-QPR game. In the 20^th minute, QPR appeared to have scored off a corner kick that was headed on goal by Clint Hill. Replays showed that Hill’s shot did in fact cross the goal line, with about a foot to spare, before it was batted out of the goalmouth by the Bolton keeper Adam Bogdan. However, the referees did not award QPR a goal, and play continued.

The botched call, along with Bolton’s eventual 2-1 victory, have renewed calls for the use of instant replay review, or “goal-line technology,” to scrutinize shots on goal that may or may not have crossed the line. Goals are too hard to come by and the stakes are too high, the reasoning goes, to fail to award goals due to referee error. According to a March 10 article by Martyn Herman about the Bolton-QPR controversy, “The FA issued a statement before the game had even finished calling for soccer's governing body FIFA to bring in technology to prevent so-called ‘ghost goals.’” Steve Davis posted a piece about the controversy on his new ProSoccerTalk blog, writing: “It’s a crying shame that, in 2012, we don’t have a little camera or even a wee chip in the ball to help adjudicate these occasional, difficult decisions on balls crossing the goal line.”

The Herman and Davis articles fail to mention the crucial fact that the missed call on Hill’s header was neatly atoned for in the 48^th minute, when the assistant referee neglected to call QPR striker Djibril Cisse offside on an attacking run. Cisse was a yard or two beyond Bolton’s last defender when the pass was struck, but the flag stayed down. This second important no-call of the game led directly to a QPR goal that tied the score. The decision to award the goal to Cisse was no more justified than the decision not to award a goal to Hill twenty-eight minutes earlier. Video evidence was just as conclusive in the case of Cisse being in an offside position, and yet few are calling for video review of offside calls, or even mentioning the missed call on Cisse and its effect on the outcome of the game.

I of course don’t know if the referees were, during halftime, made aware of their mistaken call on Hill’s shot, but the no-call on Cisse’s goal had the hallmarks of a make-up call. Then again, failing to call Cisse offside may simply have been another mistake by the referee, the kind of mistake that occurs routinely in soccer games at all levels and that often affects the final score. After Cisse’s goal, I was reminded of an old saying that I don’t hear much anymore, but that strikes me as apt nonetheless: A good referee is consistent, the saying goes, even if he is consistently bad. I do not mean to suggest that there is some cosmic law guaranteeing that all bad calls will necessarily be distributed evenly between two teams participating in any given game. But in the specific case of the Bolton-QPR match, the referees were consistently bad, and they ultimately called a fair game.

So while the Football Association is apparently using Hill’s shot as evidence that FIFA needs to implement goal-line technology to verify goals, the entire Bolton-QPR match (not just the no-call on Hill’s shot) could just as easily be used to support the arguments of those who would oppose goal-line technology. After all, if we agree that Hill’s goal should have been awarded, then we should also agree that Cisse’s goal should have been disallowed. Neither bad call—one benefiting Bolton, the other benefiting QPR—was overturned, so they were in effect a wash. Or as Ian Darke noted during the broadcast, “I suppose you’d say that evens things up in terms of one bad decision canceling out another one.” To overturn the first bad call and let the second bad call stand would not have served what we might loftily call sports justice. And yet if FIFA had already implemented goal-line technology, that’s exactly what would have happened.

I don’t pretend to know what FIFA should do about implementing goal-line technology or any other form of instant replay review to improve soccer officiating. But when a soccer league starts to electronically scrutinize borderline goals after the fact, then that same league should almost certainly also scrutinize other close calls, such as those involving players in an offside position and fouls in the penalty box. Do most fans, players, and coaches want this kind of match-delaying scrutiny in the fluid game of soccer? If the answer is no, then the Bolton-QPR match should stand as a cautionary tale. It shows that reviewing whether or not balls cross goal lines, while not reviewing other aspects of the game, can actually diminish the validity of a game’s final score.