Reflection 40 – How The VAR Should Make Us REASSES Things Around Us

Let us imagine this thought experiment:
It’s the year 1995 and you’re watching the final game of the UEFA Champions League between your favorite football team (this is their first time to reach the final) and its most competitive opponent. The game is very intense and in the 90th minute your team scores a goal that generates a huge stir among players because of a potential offside; but the referee insists on the goal (it turns out afterwards to be a clear offside that the referee didn‘t see). Anyhow, shortly thereafter the referee ends the game and your team wins! Based on this result, the winning team were showered with lots of financial rewards that made most of them pretty rich. Not only that, several of the players were offered very generous contracts at big clubs. Moreover, lots of multinational companies offered very generous advertising contracts for the club as a whole and some players in specific. In total, this win changed the entire roadmap for most of the players as they now embarked on their new professional lives, in which many of them were joined by their wives and kids. Their families now had to adapt to this new life in a foreign country! On the other hand, the other team’s coach got sacked and remained with no job for a decent period of time, and as a result went through some tough times with his wife. Some of the young players in the team were so devastated from the loss that they had to been attended to by a psychiatrist! Not to mention the financial losses the whole team had to go through.
Of course, all of this is a big stretch! But honestly not that big .
I couldn’t help myself not imagining these hypothetical scenarios as I follow the current World Cup. The recent VAR experience and all its associated technologies has shifted the sport to a very top-notch technical sport with very small room for human error for its good and bad (sometimes some spontaneous human errors are also good to have!). There is not much room to disagree anymore with the referee because everything is backed by data, sensors, and high-end super-technologies. We are now much more certain about the referee decisions than ever before. As much as this is a good thing, one has to remember the past and ask him/herself: how many times were unjust goals being scored? How many legit goals were not counted? How many tournaments went unjustly to the wrong team? How many players and coaches were negatively (or even positively) affected? How many families were also impacted as a result? It turned out that things we clearly saw with our own eyes were NOT ALWAYS TRUE! Now, this is a big GAME-CHANGER I believe!
The lack of a certain technology at one point in time meant a much larger room for human error and as a result the ensuing events. Would we be experiencing the same exact life events have we had the VAR 20 or 30 years ago? I highly doubt! I think what we should learn from this whole experience is to take issues more lightly . People get overjoyed or depressed because of game results. And it turned out that these results could be largely flawed. If we were to zoom out more, the events of our lives could be seen in the same way. Sometimes we view things with our own eyes but still they might not be real. The way we perceive certain events might change drastically if we had more data (in this case, some sort of a LIFE-VAR ). What might seem illogical at a certain point in time, might have a totally different meaning at another point in time. The VAR should teach us to reassess events taking place around us. Then to REMEMBER this life itself is no more than a GAME as Allah describes it!
And the VAR could be seen as the hereafter when all the data is construed and the FINAL results are out.
Unfortunately, DONE are the days when your hypothetical team can win with a faulty offside .