Will football fans ever be happy, or are they addicted to outrage? In April, Coventry City played Manchester United in the semi-final of the FA Cup. Coventry was denied a dramatic winner in the last few minutes of extra time by the decision of the video assistant referee (VAR). It was a wildly controversial moment that focussed yet more attention on VAR, football’s attempt to provide referees with some technological support.
For some, it proved that VAR is a disaster. The decision to disallow the goal for offside took away a moment of joyful spontaneity in favour of lengthy scrutiny of a TV replay that may not have had enough frames per second to be accurate.
Paradoxically, by improving refereeing standards you increase the outrage against remaining errors
For others, the controversy was hard to understand and only showed that football fans are impossible to please. Offside is extremely difficult for humans to judge in real time, so it will always be better to use a TV replay. Perhaps the replay was out by a centimetre or so, but humans can be out by half a yard or so.
I’m a season-ticket holder at West Ham, and I’ve just written a book about how to improve VAR. One thing I get told a lot is that I may as well not bother. You can improve refereeing decisions all you like, but you will still have back pages full of indignation, ribald songs about the referee’s parentage, and dark intimations of conspiracy and corruption.
You can call this the quantity theory of outrage – the idea that there is a fixed amount of outrage which will distribute itself across however many, or few, refereeing errors there are. Let’s say you have a baseline of 100 refereeing errors a season, and each one attracts one unit of outrage: 100 refereeing errors, 100 outrage units. Let’s further say that through various improvements you can reduce the errors down to just ten per season.
You might think that you will therefore reduce the outrage down to just ten outrage units. The quantity theory says no. You will have the same fixed quantity of 100 units of outrage, but they will now attach themselves to the remaining ten errors. Each error now has ten outrage units associated with it.
Paradoxically, by improving refereeing standards you will increase the outrage that accompanies the remaining errors. You haven’t reduced outrage by 90 per cent. You’ve multiplied the outrage associated with each error by ten.
This paradox goes to the heart of life in modern capitalist democracies. These societies provide their citizens with unprecedentedly high levels of freedom and prosperity. But many of them are also currently grappling with unprecedentedly high levels of depression and mental health problems. What if human misery is a bit like the outrage of football fans: there is a fixed amount of it that will assert itself regardless of material conditions or improvements in refereeing standards? If that is the case, then the minor inconvenience of one era will become the life-destroying obstacle of the next. Fractional offsides will attract opprobrium once reserved for blatant handballs.
An even gloomier response is to say that human misery isn’t a fixed quantity. It can be reduced and increased, but the improvements of modern society may end up increasing it. That’s because improvements are often generated by people becoming more aware of problems that may have existed for decades, and by a belief that those problems can be solved by human agency.
This attitude makes it more likely we will eventually solve the problem. But it may also make us more anxious and unhappy, as we search endlessly for solutions rather than finding accommodations with aspects of reality that are hard to change. As John Cleese said in the film Clockwise, we can often stand despair. It’s the hope that kills.
In his book Extravagant Expectations, the American sociologist Paul Hollander applies this analysis to romantic relationships and gloomily concludes that most people cannot find the balance between high expectations and the inevitable limitations of human nature. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has a more optimistic take. In one of his annual letters to shareholders, he explicitly acknowledges all of the above problems with progress: that humans seem to be innately dissatisfied, and the more they get the more they want. But he views their discontent not as a sign of debasement, but of divinity.
One thing I love about customers is that they are divinely discontent. Their expectations are never static – they go up. It’s human nature. We didn’t ascend from our hunter-gatherer days by being satisfied. People have a voracious appetite for a better way, and yesterday’s ‘wow’ quickly becomes today’s ‘ordinary’.
Discontent sounds negative, but if we reframe it as striving for perfection then it does sound noble, even divine. My caveat would be that striving for perfection is not the only divine impulse. Coping gracefully with imperfection is equally important.
These competing impulses are central to more idealistic conceptions of sport, where you are taught to give your all and try your best, but also to accept defeat with grace when your best isn’t good enough. It is easy to mock these values, but they probably provide us with the only way of achieving progress without succumbing to despair. Even if perfection or perfect happiness isn’t possible, it’s still worth trying to improve – and it’s still worth trying to improve VAR.
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