ohOn Thursday, Premier League clubs will vote on Wolves’ proposal to scrap the video assistant referee. The motion is unlikely to get a majority, let alone the 14 of the 20 votes needed to pass. But it could change the Overton Window and lead to a serious review of VAR, an assessment of what works and what doesn’t. And that’s long past due.
Consultation is out of fashion in the modern world. Too often, politicians of all stripes act virtually on their own, as they do in football and beyond. VAR was introduced at the 2018 World Cup with minimal scrutiny or discussion, and was accepted almost universally with no one really studying its results.
The general consensus in Russia was that VAR worked, but two very serious mistakes stood out. The lack of uproar was likely due to the fact that neither incident caused any damage to Russia’s huge fanbase: Cristiano Ronaldo should have been sent off for a clear elbow against Iran, and France’s equalising penalty in the final against Croatia was a meaningless handball call against Ivan Perisic.
This immediately highlighted two big problems: First, the people running the system are human, with human frailties, and in Ronaldo’s case, there would be understandable hesitation to fire one of the most famous players on the planet.
The issue was also compounded by initial commentator confusion, with both Alan Shearer and Didier Drogba suggesting that the referee had taken a significant amount of time to look at it from multiple angles and therefore was right to show only a yellow card (or even that), so how, they questioned, was the error so obvious that it should have been overturned.
But this is nonsense. The essence of VAR is can Look from multiple angles: “clear and obvious” does not mean it can be determined from the manager’s initial choice of shot. The idea that the on-field decision is correct if the VAR referee takes more than a minute is completely misguided. What if the manager doesn’t choose an angle where the elbow is clearly visible until the 61st second? If you stop play, you better make the right decision. Giving a high-pressure referee the added anxiety of racing against the clock doesn’t help anyone.
Second, VAR has turned the game into a cul-de-sac run by overzealous neighborhood watchers. VAR officials have become like fundamentalist priests, relentlessly searching for and punishing sin. Even if the ball is flying at high speed and takes a ridiculous turn six inches in front of you before hitting your hand in front of your body, the mistake must be paid for with a penalty. Don’t ask why God demands it, just make the necessary sacrifice.
Thankfully, there has been some liberalisation in that regard, but particularly with handball, there is definitely a mentality of ‘Has anyone actually tried to cheat?’ rather than ‘Is there anything we can punish?’
But before we get to the details, there’s something more fundamental: a useful indicator of how football is moving in a direction that increasingly privileges television audiences over fans in stadiums. For the latter, VAR is terrifying. Not only does it take away spontaneity, it makes it harder to concentrate on goal celebrations because you don’t know whether a curtain-chitter in the distance will annul the goal; it means long waits with nothing to see but the players themselves, and without the decision being properly communicated.
VAR is a hot topic on TV. In the stadium, fans may be infuriated by a decision, but they are rarely convinced it was wrong; it’s those who have watched the replay multiple times immediately after the game who demand it be righted.
For those watching on a screen, the VAR experience is fine — you can see the angles, the offside lines, and at least roughly understand the procedure. People who rarely go to matches, even journalists with monitors nearby, tend to forget just how bad the VAR experience is for fans paying exorbitant amounts for tickets.
The in-stadium experience could obviously be improved to some extent – football’s nature and variety of possibilities mean that VAR checks will never be as much a part of the fan experience as cricket’s decision review system is – but VAR still feels like a TV fan problem, or at the very least, the product of endlessly evaluating borderline subjective decisions as if there’s some objective truth to it.
After newsletter promotion
After all, many people don’t even seem to like the objective(ish) truth. While it’s true that VAR’s claimed level of accuracy in offside decisions is absurd given that players can move up to 15cm between frames, and that the Premier League line is applied by VAR officials telling the line to move “a little left…a little right”, like aligning a picture on a wall, the way in which dissatisfaction is expressed is that the offside rule was never designed for such nuances.
That’s true, but by the same token, unless a decision is based on feel, there’s got to be a dividing line somewhere. And even the somewhat imperfect form of VAR used so far in the Premier League is more accurate than a 40-year-old official roaming around 50 yards away. Semi-automatic offside should make the process even more accurate and, above all, quicker.
Line decisions aside, most decisions in football are subjective, and it’s unclear whether the increased precision brought about by VAR is worth the sacrifice of spontaneity, lost momentum and endless waits at the stadium. Paradoxically, the expectation of perfection has led to a perceived lack of precision and conspiracy theories abound.
It seems odd given how football is nowadays packaged as an entertainment product, but no one seems to have asked what effect VAR will have on the atmosphere at football games, but perhaps the atmosphere in the stadium is no longer of much importance to football administrators.
