Video Assistant Referee in a Small-Nation Context: Intensified Mediatization

Abstract

Using the Danish Superliga as a case, this article explores how football’s implementation of a video assistant referee (VAR) instigates complex processes of change which imply not only a further decrease in football’s institutional autonomy, but also intensifies inequality. It is argued that the implementation has to be seen from the perspective of professional football’s historical relationship with broadcast television; however, implementation of VAR represents a qualitative shift in the digital age, in which football’s dependence on media reaches a new functional level. André Jansson’s critical conceptualization of mediatization as transactional, ritual, and functional dependence is used as a framework for exploring how values, roles, and practices are under transformation among players, coach/managers, and referees. The analysis illustrates how the small-nation context, existing national and international hegemonic structures, and inequalities in combination with media logic and economics play a significant role and influence ongoing renegotiations of values and practices among these key actors. It also shows how refereeing is becoming much more complex with VAR, moving the pressure to the new role as video assistant referee, creating dilemmas in the team of referees and changing the authority of the referee from an individual into a more collective matter.

Sports Organizations and Their Defensive Mediatization Strategies: The Sports Journalist’s Perspective

“…For example, Skey et al's (2018) 'bottom-up' study of the mediatization of football demonstrates how digital networked communications technologies have significantly transformed the ways in which sport is accessed, enjoyed, and participated in-for example, through the use of streaming services, social media, and online gaming. These and other studies make clear that mediatization is an uneven, nonlinear, and multidimensional process (Birkner and Nölleke 2016), and that it does not occur in a uniform way across all social domains and cultural contexts (Frandsen and Landgrebe 2022;Ličen et al 2022).…”

“…Mediatization is consequential for all actors, from individuals to largescale organizations, and its effects are sometimes ambivalent or double-edged. For example, Frandsen and Landgrebe's (2022) study of the introduction of the Video Assistant Referee (VAR) to the Danish Superliga draws on the concept of mediatization to reflect on how football 'is becoming ever more closely tied to the technological and institutional logics of media ' (p. 816). These authors argue that the introduction of VAR instigated complex processes of change that not only decreased football's institutional autonomy but also created inequalities between larger and smaller leagues within Europe's football structure.…”