Review by John Dickens

You might be wondering why you’re reading a review about a football book in the pages of Schools Week. Good question.

The subject might be alien to some readers, but its author probably isn’t. Daisy Christodoulou’s critique of education orthodoxy in Seven Myths About Education (2013) was instrumental in the ‘knowledge revolution’ in schools.

More recent books on assessment and edtech have cemented her reputation as one of the sector’s sharpest minds, particularly at delving into devilishly difficult problems (she’s one of only a handful of people who properly understand how Ofqual awards grades).

With I can’t stop thinking about VAR, she turns her attention to solving a new puzzle. And while this is unashamedly a book about football, Christodoulou brings her considerable knowledge of education to bear on finding its solutions.

Video assistant referee (VAR) technology was introduced to the Premier League in 2019-20 to help referees make tricky decisions, such as off-side and handball. But, to put it plainly, it’s not working well.

The book starts with a damning, blow-by-blow account of VAR’s failings. A short summary would go: VAR leads to a howler of a decision, fans and pundits are outraged, authorities tinker with rules to correct the problem, more complicated rules lead to a whole new host of howlers. And repeat.

As a result, a handball rule that was 20 words long pre-VAR is 11 times longer today. Not only has the technology that was supposed to cut out errors and inconsistency introduced more, it’s made fundamental rules that underpin the world’s most popular sport unintelligible.

The book really excels in helping readers understand what the problems are, and the possibilities and trade-offs required to fix them.

The question the book considers is ‘how do we best make high-stakes decisions with imperfect information?’.

Football is starting to see the same unintended consequences as education

Ofqual has been dealing with this problem for years. And Christodoulou references this a few times in the 200-page book, most notably when explaining the trade-offs between tech-assisted consistency and referee autonomy. For Ofqual, too much leeway leads to marking inconsistencies, but a too-prescriptive marking system leads to ‘tick-box’ essays.

The same principle, she points out, is evident in primary writing tests. Few in the sector would deny that the requirement for fronted adverbials has distorted not just children’s writing, but teaching itself.

Football is starting to see the same unintended consequences, but education isn’t the only place Christodoulou draws illuminating comparisons from.

She references the evolution of the printing press and its impact on Christianity, the deliberations of murder trials and the warning they carry about slow-motion replays, and looks to liberal and conservative values for insights and potential answers.

There’s even a few paragraphs on the freedom of information act and its impact on decision-making in politics.

You don’t strictly have to be a football fan to enjoy the book, but unless you have a penchant for measurement theory then it probably is required.

Christodoulou is a West Ham season ticket-holder. But she has enough separation from the sport to provide some refreshing objectivity and outside expertise.

Lots of sports reporting is swayed by journalists’ need to maintain relationships with those they are writing about. I find the best sports reporting isn’t in the back pages of newspapers. It’s when an investigative journalist wades into the patch and exposes one of sport’s dirty secrets (FIFA corruption, doping in cycling or migrant deaths before the Qatar world cup).

Christodolou’s clear-eyed critique of VAR does exactly that, covering new ground on an issue dominating headlines every week.

But, most importantly, the book’s focus throughout is on delivering a system that works for her fellow football-goers. Potential solutions include creating a ‘foul probability index’ and ‘law labs’, both of which would require substantial input from fans.

As a fellow sports fan, I just hope Christodoulou can kickstart a new knowledge-rich revolution in football.