Opaque communication. Lengthy deliberation. A bewildering outcome.
Tennis, welcome to VAR: the source of existential angst, frustration, and rage across the English Premier League.
This may sound hyperbolic, but since the introduction of Video Assistant Referees (VAR) to the top flight of English football five years ago, there has been no topic as hotly debated in the sport. It’s become football’s equivalent to Brexit — sharpening divides and becoming the reference point for pretty much every point of contention, just as the United Kingdom’s protracted secession from the European Union has done in politics.
Tennis, by contrast, has been slow to use video review, but its ghost has haunted the sport in recent months. Jack Draper won a match point against Felix Auger-Aliassime at the ATP Masters 1000 Cincinnati Open in August with a shot that was shown to be illegal by video replays. Umpire Greg Allensworth awarded Draper the point, and did not have access to video review to correct it.
The ghost reared its head again Tuesday in Basel, Switzerland, at an ATP 500-level tournament that uses electronic line calling (ELC) but not video review. World No. 36 Tomas Martin Etcheverry was on the wrong end of an error from umpire Arnaud Gabas in his match against world No. 23 Ben Shelton after Gabas adjudged that a return of serve hit by Shelton had struck Etcheverry on the leg before bouncing. If a player is hit by the ball before it has bounced, then the point is awarded to their opponent.
The ball had in fact bounced before it struck hit, which was clearly visible on the television replays that everyone except the umpire could use to ascertain what had actually happened. Shelton was awarded the point instead.
Clips of the incident from Tennis TV, the ATP-owned streaming service, circulated on social media immediately after it happened. They were soon “disabled in response to a report from the copyright owner,” and the incident was not included in the Tennis TV highlights package uploaded to YouTube.
“These things cannot continue happening,” Etcheverry said on Instagram after the match.
At the top of the sport, video review is currently limited to the U.S. Open, but it will be in use at the end-of-season ATP Finals in Turin, Italy, from November 10 to November 17. The ATP Tour is exploring the possibility of using the system at its higher-category events from 2025; the WTA Tour is yet to make a decision.
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Despite improving a number of decisions, at this year’s tournament in New York, the video review system fell straight into all of the traps that have encircled football. Umpire Miriam Bley made an incorrect decision with its benefit during a third-round match between Russia’s Anna Kalinskaya and Brazil’s Beatriz Haddad Maia on Saturday, August 31.
In the third game of the match, Haddad Maia tried to chase down a drop shot. She got to the ball and won the point, but Kalinskaya thought it had been an illegal shot and challenged the umpire’s call using the video review system.
Its replays appeared to support Kalinskaya. Even though Haddad Maia got to the ball before it bounced twice, she appeared to hit it down into the ground before it went over to her opponent’s side of the net. (Draper did the same thing against Auger-Aliassime.)
Bley felt differently and stuck with her original call. This only added to the disbelief of not just Kalinskaya, but almost everyone watching because it’s one thing an official getting a close call wrong in the moment, it’s quite another to get it wrong even with the benefit of replays. This is a dynamic that has played out again and again in English football since the introduction of VAR.
On the following Sunday, the U.S. Tennis Association (USTA) confirmed that the call had been wrong. The organization said that an additional, conclusive angle only became available after Bley had reviewed the incident and made her decision. Football fans are also only too familiar with this scenario, in which an explanation arrives but only serves to foster the sense of too little, too late. Kalinskaya ended up losing the match 6-3, 6-1 and never really recovered from the injustice.
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Tennis is far more suited to having video reviews than football. It is naturally stop-start and has a much more granular scoring system. Football, one of the most low-scoring sports there is, often has the few moments in which goals are scored compromised by lengthy officiating scrutiny under VAR.
Most importantly, the majority of decisions in football are subjective, determined by an individual referee’s interpretation of a rule, or set of rules, in a given moment. This has been one of the biggest issues with VAR’s introduction because fans in favor of the technology thought they were going to have debatable calls settled by all-knowing decision-makers who could quickly say whether something was legal or not. Instead, the video review system has shown that many calls in football are still debatable and subjective, even when being pored over by officials in their dedicated area miles away from the action.
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Tennis, by contrast, is a sport of largely objective calls. A ball is in or out, however close it is; a ball has bounced once or twice, however close it is. This is why Hawk-Eye technology for reviewing line calls, introduced in the mid-2000s, has been such a success; cricket is similar and video reviews have been similarly successful.
2024 was the second year that the U.S. Open had used video reviews, through which players can challenge specific judgement calls made by the chair umpire in their match. According to the USTA, these calls include but are not limited to: “If a ball bounced twice; if a player was hindered in playing a point; and ‘touches’: if a ball touched a player’s racquet or clothing before landing out. Players (and doubles teams) will receive three challenges per set and one more in a tiebreak.” Video reviews were available on Courts 5, 7, 11 and 12, as well as the main show courts.
The U.S. Open uses electronic line calling to determine whether shots land in or out (Robert Deutsch / USA Today Images)
In Etcheverry’s case, video review would have immediately corrected the umpire’s decision and awarded him the point. With the score at the time 2-3, 15-30 in the first set, losing a point he should have won put Etcheverry two break points down in a set and match that he eventually lost. Auger-Aliassime should have had a reprieve from match point down.
In the case of Haddad Maia vs. Kalinskaya, some people agreed with Bley’s view that Haddad Maia had hit a legal shot. The objective briefly became subjective, until the USTA belatedly intervened with the more conclusive angle that was unavailable to the umpire. As football has found out, as much as the officials are helped by the technology, it is still people who are making the ultimate decision.
People are fallible; these are not suddenly decisions being made by omniscient ref-bots who are immune from subjectivities and mistakes. Most importantly for tennis, in its current iteration, the video review operators are not arbiters of the final decision. They are essentially playing the role of tech support, with the umpire reviewing the call. This carries a sense of marking one’s own homework, prompting concerns that officials will be less likely to reverse their own decisions.
As tennis develops its use of video review, it is likely to run into another lesson from football: the need to at least try to anticipate the unintended and unforeseen consequences of its wider introduction. In football, disparities in the interpretation of laws from league to league and competition to competition — particularly between the English Premier League and the UEFA Champions League — have led to further fan confusion. Tennis won’t have this issue, but its highly fragmented infrastructure is likely to create disparities in how and when video review is used from tournament to tournament.
Even now, the four Grand Slams take different approaches to umpiring and the use of Hawk-Eye, from fully electronic line calling at the U.S. Open to the inspection of ball marks and zero technology at the French Open. Wimbledon only this year decided to use ELC in favor of line judges after 147 years.
Even if video reviews should be far more effective than they have been in football, there is still a lesson to be learned from its five years of VAR: if you think video technology will be a panacea for controversial officiating calls, you’re likely to end up disappointed.
(Top photo: Matthew Stockman / Getty Images)
