Challenging ocularcentric fairness assumptions of the video assistant referee (VAR) system in football

Abstract

ABSTRACT Football’s video assistant referee (VAR) system is based on the assumption that reviewing plays on a screen refines precision and accuracy, resulting in fairer calls. The system thus reinforces ocularcentrism, the Western, modernist, rationalist thinking that privileges sight over other senses. Based on Turkey, I investigate the stakes involved in reinforcing and the conceptual opportunities opened in challenging these assumptions. The VAR system’s ocularcentrism, as foreshadowed by televisation, creates an ocular mode separate from that of the field by muting it and visually dissecting its plays. This leads to “false transparency” along with novel relations and socialities between referees, VARs and players. As such, rather than carrying referees to objectively based or clean moments of fairness, the VAR process in fact identifies the complex socialness of fairness itself.