Comment | A disallowed goal in the European Championship led to a storm of outrage on social media

Dortmund

of Denmark coach Kasper Hjulmand on Saturday blamed the video referee, or VAR, for the fact that Denmark lost 0-2 to Germany.

Hjulmand thought it was wrong to reject by Joachim Andersen goal, because Andersen was only offside by the tip of a shoe – a centimeter according to Hjulmand.

So VAR was again to blame.

On social media, many football fans sided with Hjulmand. There was a storm of excitement. Football is dying, they complained. We talked about the big toe offside, nail size, millimeters, punishing the Big Shoes.

The decision was called against the spirit of the offside rule, because the attacker did not get any advantage from the tip of his boot. Many demand to change the offside rule, to create a reserve, to remove millimeter decisions.

I disagree.

True I guess such a meager offside is annoying, I understand that completely. Still, the current rule and the semi-automatic offside detection used by the European football association Uefa in the European Championship are the most objective way to decide on offside.

Let’s look at the facts: at the heart of the EC competition ball is a chip that measures the position of the ball 500 times per second. The players are also tracked, 29 different parts of their body, such as the toe and heel of the shoe. Of course, the players don’t have a chip, but are tracked with video images, i.e. 50 still images per second.

The first contact with the ball is decisive in the modern offside rule. The chip in the ball records the contact as a kind of jolt – these are the lines that jump up, reminiscent of EKG curves, that can be seen on TV images, for example, in the case of hand fouls.

It’s about two thousandths of a second, i.e. a very precise moment. At that moment, the players are stopped, and a horizontal line drawn by artificial intelligence is created at the lowest point of the defender’s body. If the attacker’s body part is behind that line, as in Andersen’s case, it is offside.

The advantage of the system is its near-perfect objectivity. The moment of input is very precise, and thus the decisions are as fair as possible.

The rule changes would not improve the situation. If the offside rule were to be changed so that there would be, say, ten cents of “room to play”, i.e. the attacker could be ten cents offside, still drawing the line would lead to arguments about whether the 11th cent was on the offside side at that very moment? The decision would still depend on a cent.

Arsene Wenger recently made a well-known offside reform proposal, where the attacker would only be offside if there was air between him and the defender. That is, the attacker could run ahead of the defender, as long as the back heel was still at the height of the defender.

I think this rule change would be a disaster. Football would become more and more of a race, because defenders in particular should be top sprinters. The spirit of the sport as a game where you can get by with different features would suffer badly.

In addition, the defensive lines would drop very low, as the offside would be almost non-existent, and the game would become a handball-like suffocation. And yet the offside decisions would still depend on the centimeter.

Large the problem with some’s heated offside discussions is that the grassroots level is usually forgotten. If the offside penalty were to be reformed, the new rule should also work where there is no VAR.

How could a border guard – or a referee who referees junior games alone – recognize whether the attacker was ten or eleven centimeters ahead? Or was there “air” between the defender and the attacker at the time of the pass? The work of referees everywhere except in VAR leagues would become almost impossible and lead to constant disputes. Even now, referees get a lot of abuse.

This is also why the current rule is the best.