Tehnology opening doors to clean football games.

Many attempts have been made over the years to help referees in making better decisions in a football match. The linesmen were introduced in the late 1890s, then 10 years back the fourth official was added and shortly after we saw the addition of assistant referees behind the goal line. These did not deter bad incidences from happening during matches as we have all been seeing; goals in offside positions were occasionally awarded, many players would get away with bad tackles, penalties would many times be wrongly awarded amidst the numerous bad decisions that were spoiling the game of football.

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The introduction of technology in football has been a major step in cleaning football and making it honest for the fans and players. This started with goal line technology, where goals would only be awarded after crossing the goal line. Goal line technology ofcourse could not do much as incidences that would call for it were few.

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Then Video Assistant Referee(VAR) got deployed, changing the game of football massively. VAR is a team of video officials who use cameras to observe and then communicate with the referee whenever they observe a mistake in the match. They advise the referee and sometimes the referee consults them. To avoid the communication from taking a lot of time, 4 incidences were chosen as the only ones deemed for VAR consultations and that was goals, penalty decisions, direct red cards and cases of mistaken identity.

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As we have seen in games where VAR has been applying, including World Cup 2018, Copa America 2019, Africa Cup of Nations 2019, and a few other leagues the recent season, goals were not awarded wrongly anymore especially when it came to offsides, players would not get away with bad tackles, among many other bad decisions which we were so often used to in football. Technology has indeed changed the game of football for all the fans, players and coaching staff to fully get satisfied with results at the end of the game.