The offside rule was not made so that millions of people, including a few supposed experts in the field, could start throwing lines on a screen and finding out if a part of the human being’s body is a few millimeters further forward than the part of the body of another human being. It was about energizing the game, promoting the spectacle, prioritizing scoring chances; The unmarking, the defenses, the tactics: everything revolves around how to break the rival team with the ball. It is obvious when there is an offside, and if it is not obvious, if the defender and the attacker are in almost identical positions when the ball goes in their direction, there should not be an offside: if it is 10 centimeters, if it is five, It doesn’t matter, it is not a decisive advantage for the striker. Offside, unlike penalties, cannot be faked. However, what has happened? That the rule made to encourage play, speed it up, stops it for five minutes and has us talking about it all week. We have consulted mathematicians.
It’s an example. In this modern and damaged football, the rules to save it sink it a little more. It was impossible that a match with VAR was going to have worse decisions than one with it, but it has been achieved, in the same way that it has been achieved that this VAR re-audits only what interests it in such a way that now a penalty can stop being called for two times: the one who is on the field does not whistle it and the one who is watching it in slow motion on the cameras decides if it is reviewable or not. Before things were whistled if they were illegal; The VAR now directly tells us what is legal and what is not, or worse: it steals that debate from us, as the match production company steals it so many times. Before you got angry and you consoled yourself, the one who consoled himself, because the second had to be refereed and we would have to be seen on the field: either you saw it or you didn’t see it; Now there is no consolation, even technology has come to tell us that perhaps the referees are not only bad unintentionally, but intentionally so.
The disaster is absolute and has found a breeding ground in the Spanish League because this competition, the best in the world for years, only manages to leave our borders when a referee, like this Saturday, whistles the end of the game during a cross into the area. . There is no other way to talk about La Liga if not for its great stars, which are the arbitration scandals since the Negreira case (“circulate: we intended to counteract Madrid’s traditional favoritism: demote them”) without consequences until today. Not even the Classics, those attended by millions of fans fifteen years ago, are a showcase for anything.
Of course it was a “fucking goal”, as Bellingham told the Valencia-Real Madrid referee (red for the Englishman), but what does it matter: it doesn’t matter. This competition matters to fewer and fewer people, and this is said by a fan of the team that is surely going to win it this year. But I’m not particularly excited that he does it nor did I care that Barcelona won it last year. I also didn’t see Valencia-Madrid (live). Something essential has been lost, beyond trust: the spirit of the game, the awareness that the game is above everything and therefore does not stop suddenly in the middle of a play that you yourself let begin but not finish, as if that metaphor, “play, play, but don’t get too close to the goal” summed up the poisoned daze of a competition in decline.
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