The beautiful game just keeps getting uglier

For years, football’s governing body, Fifa, has declined to use video replays to help referees on the grounds that it would disrupt the flow of the beautiful game. Fans and professional commentators around the world saw it as a lame excuse, and that was underscored two days ago in the United States, where a major football tournament has been taking place. Brazil, among the favourites, were knocked out of Copa America 2016 by a clearly illegitimate goal, but, for lack of simple technology, the referee could not confirm its legality.

Most other major sports allow teams or individual athletes the rights to challenge referees. In tennis, badminton and volleyball they can demand that the referees look at the video evidence to see whether the balls land within bounds or out or, in volleyball, whether the ball touches opponents before continuing out of bounds. And this is just naming a few key examples. Simply put, in other sports, it is increasingly difficult for players to cheat or make false claims.

Not in football, though. Brazil, five-time world champions, were knocked out of Copa America in the cruellest of manners when Peru’s Raul Ruidiaz handled the ball into the net for their game’s only goal. Until then, Brazil had looked set to progress from the group stage, and deservedly so judging from their earlier thrashing of Haiti. Instead, they were dumped out of the tournament thanks to one illegal moment that would have been clearly seen by the referee and linesmen in a video review.

Rubbing salt in the Brazilians’ wounds was the fact that it took the referee and his linesmen about two minutes to make the absolutely wrong decision that it was a fair goal. The time spent, following Brazil’s vehement protests, shattered Fifa’s already weak excuse that using video replays to help referees would take too long and interrupt the flow of the game. On TV, a global audience watched in disbelief the super-slow motion of the handball goal. The replays from three angles together lasted about 20 seconds. One of the views was so clear that the most untrained eye could see it wasn’t a legitimate goal.

“Goal-line technology” has only been introduced in football recently, to help determine whether the ball has crossed the line. It’s inexplicable how Fifa chose to embrace technology that least concerns player honesty and integrity and yet always balks at helping the referees when it comes to more crucial issues involving ethics and morality.

Having always punished cheaters – sometimes harshly and retroactively – Fifa has been hypocritical regarding footballers’ behaviour on the pitch. The man who scored the handball goal against Brazil could have been pilloried but, in the grand scheme of things, it didn’t matter. His team progressed and his teammates and compatriots see him as a hero.

Punishing cheaters but failing to ensure fair results means little. Injustice, the kind that befell Brazil two days ago, can never be corrected that way. But the worst part is that Peru’s undeserved victory only serves to encourage others to cheat when they have the chance.

Peru progressed and a team that plays beautiful football tumbled out, and many youngsters will thus be tempted to try applying the “Hand of God” that Diego Maradona absurdly invoked to describe his controversial World Cup goal against England in 1986. It’s an immense irony that, in its declared efforts to maintain the “beauty” of the game, football’s governing body is in fact making the sport uglier and uglier.