AOB: Fifa bright idea #7687321532

Football can get very boring sometimes, especially at this time of year.

It looks like it we are going to be faced with another summer of Cristiano Ronaldo-related speculation, after the winger was characteristically vague about his future in the wake of the Champions League final. We he go to Real Madrid? Will he stay at Man U? By the time he's decided will anybody care? Who knows, but whatever the outcome it's sure to keep the Sky Sports News ticker turning for the next couple of months.

I'm picking on Ronaldo because he's a thoroughly dislikeable little man, but of course he's far from the only boring thing about the beautiful game. One of my particular bug bears is the continual debate about the use of technology in football, which crops up every time a refereeing error is made in a big game such as the FA Cup final.

Personally I don't understand the obsession with getting all decisions right - while refereeing errors going against you are a pain in the proverbial, football would be pretty dull if we didn't have incompetent officials to rant about. But if the rules are to be changed to help the refs, I think it should be for non-subjective decisions such as whether the ball has crossed the line. Surely it would be fairly simple to install some kind of sensor which would indicate whether a goal has been scored or not? That way there would be no gray areas and nobody could complain of unfair treatment.

But no, the bright sparks at FIFA have decided that the best way to improve referees is to, er, add more referees, with extra officials stationed on the touchlines to monitor penalty areas. They will do so in next years Europa League (the rebranded UEFA cup), a move which is bound to do wonders(!) for the competitions already nominal credibility.

I entirely fail to see the logic behind this scheme. You can add as many extra officials as you like, but there is still the possibility of a decision being called incorrectly due to simple human error. And if errors can still be made, then what's the point of changing things in the first place? All it will do is slow the action down while the referee confers with his extra colleagues, and we'll end up with a fragmented sport akin to Rugby or American Football.

We'll see how the project works out in the coming months, but I suspect that, much like Kick-In's and The Respect Campaign, these extra officials will turn out to be one-season wonders.