The plan is to arrive at sunset

*Ok, so this is a short fiction piece I wrote during the 2019 World Cup as a response to some of the VAR discourse, imagining a world where modern society is gone, but soccer at its core remains. The feedback I got originally was that this was 'too depressing' (this version is punched up a bit) and whole concept eventually was dropped, but as we inch ever closer to a strange new world, it seemed worth posting here. Enjoy!*

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The plan is to arrive at sunset.

Well, that’s dramatic. A more accurate statement, as outlined in your brochure, is that the plan is never anything other than to arrive at sunset. It’s not like we’ve been left with much of a choice in the matter, but you should note that the switch to the Evening Cool Standard has been one of the many marked improvements we’ve come up with for the playing of soccer and other leisure activities since we’ve returned to outdoor spaces. 

As general spokesperson for the Personhood Committee of Soccer and other Leisure Activities (PerCoSoLA), I’m actually very proud of the updates we’ve rolled out in recent months. Developed through several long and arduous board meetings, our new Personhood system for the re-integration of Clear and Obvious Errors (COE) is absolutely the best the public could ask for. We know this with absolute certainty, as the public did make a very specific list of demands (turn to page 187 for the redacted list of demands). The secret of COE, if one looks at it closely, is that the new officiating system is actually rather similar to the original, but we’ve all agreed that since it was very perceptive of us to make the switch back we should be the ones to come up with a new name.

Another piece of wonderful news is that even with temperatures in the middle months being a minor concern, the Blue Summer Period leaves us with a perfectly concise 120 minute window of evening calm, with the glare of daylight giving way to more of a luminescent glow. Perfect time to get a game in.

This setup is much better for the athletes involved, who through several public statements we've established that we care very much about, and it allows observers to enjoy athletics without being concerned about their UV intake for the day. These players who we used to refer to as “Professional Athletes,” are now mostly known as “Evening Champions,” or sometimes “Running Artists”, and we take their contributions very seriously.

Now I know this isn’t how it used to be, this new way we occupy our free time, and it’s natural to be skeptical. But I assure you, the playing of games used to be a much more stressful endeavor. It included the construction of large metal structures requiring immense amounts of power and many thousands of people showing up to yell and spit and buy drinks in plastic cups. When a particular group played well, they obtained a greater ability to continue, which turned into larger metal structures and more plastic cups, so for a while it was crucial to arrive at the correct result. We knew we could never achieve technical perfection when left to our own devices, so we clearly needed the help.

I just don’t think anyone anticipated everyone being quite so upset. 

Machine-assisted officiating certainly seemed like a good idea, even if now I have a hard time remembering exactly what we had hoped to achieve. Winners and losers, probably. But we should have realized we were in a bit of trouble when every call after the 2019 Women’s World Cup went so oddly. The officiating was incredibly correct, but all of the feelings attached to them were so unsavory. 

We watched penalties get saved and goals get scored with our own eyes, but the machines almost seem to enjoy taking those away. We had to argue about what constitutes a hand, and subsequently a handball. And unfortunately, the level of correctness did actually seem to coincide with an equal and opposite reaction from the public, though the most correct winner was rewarded in the end. But after a lengthy review, we took the experiment to be a great success.

But nothing ever really stays in one place, and the most efficient rates are exponential, so the eventual unveiling of VAR as a government-sponsored pilot project for a new assisted court judging system didn’t really surprise anybody, and most of the general public reluctantly got on board. It seemed efficient enough. No one was exactly thrilled about the implementation of our algorithmic overlords, but progress isn’t a one-way street, people! Adjustments must be made!

In retrospect, it’s hard to remember the exact point where everything got all jumbled after that. Life for the greater population mostly continued on as usual, but eventually it all started to feel incredibly unfair. The new machines kept dragging up old laws we’d all but forgotten, and brand new legislation was upheld in precedent decisions that sent ripples through the whole system. 

The remaining human judges didn’t particularly enjoy them very much either, as the robotics highlighted the flaws in the system that the previous arbiters had intentionally overlooked. Even early on, it became clear that the machines could understand the boundaries of legality, but not so much the nuances of the language. 

This led to a series of contentious debates that grew in intensity over time. It was at this point that the larger concept of personhood became very important, and that was always going to be bad news for the robots. After all the discourse, they were still spitting out a requisite punishment system at a 92% conviction rate. We did eventually code in a scrolling text apologizing for the inconvenience of both the process and the outcome, but that succeeded in only making people all the more angry.

There was significant unrest after that, but those memories are unsettling and I plan to avoid them.

So eventually, it all had to go. But that’s a different story, and I am not the caretaker of the Personhood and Judging Committee, I merely report on subjects pertaining to Leisure Activities. We decided, eventually, to fix the games. It wasn’t easy, starting over, but when the emotions that we have trouble ignoring are the quite big ones, something has to be done. 

I’m getting side-tracked, back to the playing of soccer! Many leisure activities didn’t survive the Great Upset, as it was inevitably followed by the Great Forgetting. Sports were not the only things that faded in the months after the crisis; housing equity, for example, had a very difficult time sticking around, along with credit card debt and electric scooters. But we at the Leisure Activities Office were not to be dissuaded! Some things were easier to let go of than others anyway, as many sports had become far too complicated, and we’d all unfortunately forgotten how they were supposed to be played.

The clearing of our free time was also aided along by the eventual necessity of outdoor activities being relegated to specific deep-evening scheduling, due to the newly-implemented Emergency Sun Laws. All games with built-in stoppages in play were eventually phased out.  With soccer, I don’t remember whose idea it was in the beginning, but eventually small groups of like-minded individuals made it out to Greater Former Indianapolis (GFI) for quick games. We couldn’t come up with a great way to broadcast the idea out to the larger public, so I can’t speak outside of the Green Midwest Area (GMA), but we do alright mostly coordinating the next event through the orderly bumping of elbows.

And despite the initial process being a bit uncomfortable, it’s hard not to consider ourselves rather lucky. It’s amazing what can grow back when given a moment to breathe. We were delighted to find out, through sheer dumb luck, that we’d really nailed it with soccer. Quite fortunately (and through no foresight of our own) it turns out the joy of this particular sport can simply be obtained through the act of playing it. Many rules still apply as we remember them, but some were dutifully forgotten. Run with your legs, kick with your feet, don’t use your hands inside the lines and respect the buddy system on the backline. Make up some songs on the sideline and cheer loudly in favor of something beautiful.

There was another side effect to the resurgence of COE that no one really expected, which was the sudden outpouring of scholarly discussion on the subject of intent. The thought process behind an arm extending outward, or of a foot placed just a little too high, all turned into new webs of historical fiction being formed in real time. These conversations continued on long after the natural light had disappeared, with the actual details of the events frequently getting lost in the emotion of it all. Sometimes we’d have issues of attendees getting upset by a decision, but the re-implementation of a Friendly Non-Participator has worked rather well. It’s not like there’s much to win out here anyway; everyone is mostly just happy for a little bit more time on the grass.

I will admit, off-record, that we do occasionally miss what we’d created, the grand spectacle and institutional history of what came before. We’ve given something up in going back; we realize that. But that’s why I’m here, a humble servant to guide you through the changes. I’ve certainly never been much of a Running Artist, but I’ve always been pretty good at talking to them. The results don’t matter so much, but I feel very strongly that some things are too beautiful to forget. 

Did I mention that we’re all very proud? We’re very proud of what we created, and then recreated. Meet us at sunset, there’s a game tonight.