As the men’s World Cup was winding down last summer in Russia, FIFA’s president, Gianni Infantino, used his final news conference to heap praise on the video assistant referee system, which had been used for the first time at the tournament. It had become, Infantino declared, “difficult to think about the World Cup without VAR”. It remains to be seen whether Infantino was referring only to the men’s game when he essentially called the technology indispensable.
To the dismay of some top players and coaches in the women’s game, FIFA, the governing body of international soccer, has not confirmed whether VAR will be used at the Women’s World Cup next summer in France. For some, the organization’s failure to take advantage of the technology - already widely used in men’s domestic leagues and coming soon to the UEFA Champions League, club soccer’s highest-profile competition - is yet another sign that the organization sees female players as second-class citizens. “The men had it at their World Cup,” said Becky Sauerbrunn, a veteran defender for the United States women’s team. “The women should have it at theirs”. Still, six months before the opening game of the World Cup, and days before the draw to set the field, the fact that FIFA had not revealed a decision on VAR for the tournament left some players rolling their eyes. The American coach Jill Ellis said she had been at a coaching seminar in Zurich in October when a FIFA official explained that the organization was focusing on March as a deadline to make a decision on whether it would implement the video technology at the women’s tournament.
In an email, a FIFA spokesman said, “We are still in an evaluation phase,” but declined to comment further on the process. The organization may, however, be quietly working on a solution. This week, FIFA named the 27 referees and 48 assistant referees - all of them women - slated to work at the World Cup next summer. This month in Abu Dhabi, those referees will take part in the first of several training seminars leading to the World Cup. The current program for the first seminar includes sessions focused on video review, according to a person familiar with the schedule. That suggests that FIFA will make an effort to begin training the referees to use the VAR system, though it offers no guarantee that it will be implemented next summer. FIFA’s video review system employs a video assistant referee — working either on site or in a video room at a remote location — in addition to the traditional crew of four officials on the field. The video assistant role requires the most specialized training, according to several referees experienced with the system, while the on-field referees would primarily need practice communicating with the system in live settings. That has led some to envision a hypothetical situation (among many hypothetical situations) in which a group of male assistant video referees - the great majority of international officials trained in the technology, at the moment, are men - could be added to the previously announced all-female refereeing roster. The move would be controversial - the Women’s World Cup has long been overseen only by female officials - but Ellis supports it. “Hire the men in the booth, then”, Ellis said about the idea that there might not be enough time to train the female officials. “I don’t care about gender. I want equality”.
