A Technology to Fix Football, and Beyond? Issue Mapping "VAR" on Twitter during the WC2018

• In Event: Science, Technology and Sport - I: Sporting Technologies and Narratives

Abstract

This study aims to map how the implementation of the "video assistant referee" (VAR) technology was 'issuefied' on Twitter during the FIFA World Cup 2018.

Announced by FIFA as an 'innovation' regulated by a rigid protocol, in this study the VAR is considered as a contingent artefact. Thus, its mediatized performance potentially enacts, among football supporters and other social media users, different claims about technological objectivity, fairness in sports and other topics.

Following the digital methods approach, the empirical study is based on a dataset of 285.772 tweets published by Portuguese-speakers users about the tournament. The analysis is inspired by the issue mapping perspective (Marres, 2015), which aims “to detect emerging issue formations” considering not only the specificities of the topic (VAR during the WC2018) but also its entanglement with the intense use of Twitter during sports media events.

The analysis centered on days with more unique tweets than RTs aims to make visible the diversity of interpretations about VAR. Network visualizations of the co-occurrences of terms used in the tweets revealed different meanings attributed to VAR. Beyond factual perceptions of the use of the artefact during specific matches, were also identified, for instance, clusters of tweets relating VAR to wishes to fix past events related to football and/or politics, or to undo bad daily-life choices.

The discussion of the findings allows broader theoretical and methodological considerations on the relations between mediatized football cultures, public perception of technologies and the use of Twitter as a social media platform.

Authors

• Carlos Frederico de Brito dAndréa, Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG)

• Leonardo José de Lima Melgaço, Federal University of Minas Gerais