VAR controversy is nothing new: debate over decisions has raged ever since its introduction to the Premier League in 2019, just as it did for the decades prior, when referees were making calls without assistance from Stockley Park.
This season, though, frustration has reached a new high, the perception that far from having ironed out its early wrinkles, VAR is getting worse, amid a spate of high-profile blunders.
VAR will never be perfect, since it ultimately relies on subjective interpretation of the game’s laws and is prone to human error. It is surely, though, here to stay, so here is our six-point plan to produce more consistent and reliable decisions, eradicate outright clangers, speed up the process and improve fans’ experience.
The no-brainer
Semi-automated offside technology is available, working well in other competitions, and would speed up the one (mostly) objective aspect of VAR’s remit, while avoiding some of its most embarrassing gaffes, most notably Luis Diaz’s disallowed goal for Liverpool at Tottenham.
The release of VAR audio in the Premier League’s Mic’d Up programme has also highlighted how much other decisions, like for penalties and red cards, could be sped up if officials did not also have to check manually for offsides elsewhere in the play.
Clear and obvious what?
Has a tin ever been less descriptive of its contents? Nothing has muddied the VAR picture quite so much as the question of how clear ‘clear’ must be, while one man’s ‘obvious’ has time and again proven to be another man’s absurd.
VAR chose not to intervene, for instance, over Joelinton’s push on Gabriel in the build-up to Newcastle’s controversial winner against Arsenal this month, but has done so with less clear-cut fouls in the past.
Managers have called for a review into what exactly is constituted by the phrase, but quite how a ‘clear and obvious error’ can be further defined is unclear, and wherever the bar is set, a degree of inconsistency is inevitable.
Removing that wording entirely would at least give VAR licence to advise a review without having to also worry about whether a possible mistake meets a flimsy threshold. Currently, they are tasked with making both decisions at once, the pitfalls of which were laid out in referees’ chief Howard Webb’s assessment of the penalty Wolves were wrongly denied at Old Trafford in August.
“[The VAR] starts to go down the road towards recommending a review, but then he starts to over-think it,” Webb said. “Sometimes VARs can do that, [because] they’re trying to identify what the game would expect in terms of what is and isn’t an obvious error.”
Stop the still
Perhaps the chief bugbear among players, current and former, is the use of still images for ruling on potential red-card challenges and handballs.
“The issue is the way they slow down some situations,” West Ham goalkeeper Lukasz Fabianski says. “It looks very bad compared to real-life situations — it always looks worse.” Curtis Jones saw a yellow card upgraded to red against Tottenham earlier this season, a decision argued both ways in the aftermath, but the writing was on the wall for the Liverpool midfielder when referee Simon Hooper was shown a still of the tackle’s impact before any moving pictures.
This is a grievance referees are clearly aware of: when reviewing Cristian Romero’s potential red card (eventually realised) against Chelsea this month, referee Michael Oliver explicitly asked to first see the Tottenham man’s tackle in real-time.
Keep final authority with on-field refs
Theoretically, this is already the case, but VAR audio has confirmed suspicions that, often, when referees are called to the pitchside monitor, they are not really being asked to reconsider a decision, they are being told why they have got it wrong. This power balance must change. The VAR’s role should be to provide the referee with evidence to empower his or her decision-making, not to undermine it from afar.
Better practice was showcased in Scott McTominay’s disallowed goal for Manchester United against Fulham on Mic’d Up on Tuesday night, when the objective element — Harry Maguire’s offside position — was confirmed by VAR, but the subjective — whether he had interfered with play — left to the on-field referee to review.
Learn from other sports
The idea that technology has been seamlessly integrated in other sports is a myth. All have had teething problems and still suffer controversy, despite many ruling on more binary incidents and none living with the same scrutiny as football.
Still, there are practices from elsewhere that ought to have been adopted by now. Following the Diaz debacle, there has been a push to formalise communications between officials, moving towards the kind of scripted process that means cricket fans, for instance, are well-versed in DRS routine.
The next step should be making video and audio available to fans in grounds. It is unfathomable now that a cricket crowd (not to mention the players) might be left in the dark for several minutes during a third-umpire review.
This is less about justifying decisions (partisan groups in stadium atmospheres are unlikely to be appeased anyway) and more about improving spectator experience. Only last week, Gareth Southgate said he found Chelsea’s 4-1 win over Spurs boring because of the amount of time spent in VAR’s vacuum. Those watching on TV called the game one of the League’s most exciting in years.
Train more VARs and create regular teams
The latter measure makes obvious sense as far as improving communication and consistency, but relies upon the former, with a shortage of VARs part of the reason why existing ones regularly work with different groups of on-field officials.
Webb has already committed to training more specialists, but at present VARs have to be either current or former referees, which limits the pool.
There are broader, non-legislative issues to overcome, too. Consider the age-old question of ‘Who’d be a referee?’ Well, who would like to be one sat in front of a screen in west London, either? Finding incentive to attract talent long-term will not be easy.
