On Thursday, Premier League clubs will vote on Wolves’ proposal to scrap video assistant referees. The motion will almost certainly not achieve majority support, never mind secure the 14 votes out of 20 needed for it to pass. But what it may do is to shift the Overton window and lead to a serious review of VAR, an assessment of where it works and where it doesn’t. And that is something that is long overdue.
Consultation is unfashionable in the modern world. Politicians of all stripes act too often in effect by fiat, and that is as true in football as anything else. VAR was imposed for the 2018 World Cup with minimal research or conversation and accepted almost everywhere without anybody really investigating the consequences.
While the general sense was that VAR worked in Russia, two highly significant errors stand out, the apparent lack of fuss perhaps because neither incident damaged a side with vast numbers of fans here. Cristiano Ronaldo should have been sent off for a clear elbow against Iran, and the penalty from which France equalised in the final against Croatia was for a nonsensical handball decision against Ivan Perisic.
That immediately highlighted two major problems. First, that the people operating the system are still human and still prone to human foibles: in Ronaldo’s case, an understandable reluctance to dismiss one of the most famous players in the planet.
It also generated one of the first punditry fogs that have complicated the issue as both Alan Shearer and Didier Drogba suggested the referee was right to show only a yellow card (and perhaps not even that) because he had had to look at multiple angles, taking significant time. How then, they asked, could the error be obvious enough to overturn the original decision?
But this is nonsense: the whole point of VAR is that you can view multiple angles: “clear and obvious” doesn’t mean that a decision can be made from the first shot chosen by the director. That’s why the idea that if the VAR officials take more than a minute the on-field decision should stand is so misguided: what if the director fails to select the angle that shows the elbow obviously until the 61st second? Once you’ve stopped the game, you may as well get the decision right; giving under-pressure officials the additional anxiety of working against the clock helps nobody.
Second, VAR has turned matches into a cul-de-sac served by an over-zealous neighbourhood watch. VAR officials became like the priests of a fundamentalist sect, ruthlessly hunting out sin so they could punish it. No matter if the ball was travelling at high velocity and took an outrageous deflection six inches in front of you before striking your hand in front of your body, the fault must be expiated with a penalty. Ask not why the gods demand it, merely offer the requisite sacrifice.
Thankfully, there has been some liberalisation in that regard but, with handballs especially, the ethos most surely be less: “Is there anything here I can penalise?” than: “Has anybody actually tried to cheat?”
But before the detail, there is something far more fundamental that serves as a useful indicator of football’s direction of travel in increasingly favouring television viewers over fans in the stadium. For the latter, VAR is dreadful. It’s not just about the loss of spontaneity, that it’s harder to commit to a goal celebration not quite knowing whether some distant curtain-twitcher might rule it out; it’s about the long minutes spent waiting, with nothing to watch but the players also waiting, before a decision that is never properly communicated.
VAR is a television phenomenon. In the ground, fans may rage against decisions but they rarely know for certain they are wrong. It’s those who have seen multiple replays in the immediate aftermath who demand the injustice be righted.
The experience of VAR for those watching on a screen is fine; they see various angles, the offside lines drawn, they have at least a general understanding of the process. For those who rarely attend games – even for journalists who have monitors alongside them – it’s easy to forget how bad the experience is for fans, many of whom will have often paid extraordinary sums for tickets.
The in-stadium experience can clearly be improved to an extent, even if the nature of football, the multiplicity of possibilities, means that VAR checks can never become quite so much part of the fan experience as the decision review system is in cricket. But still, VAR feels like a television fans’ issue, or at the very least a product of analysis that endlessly assesses borderline subjective calls as though some objective truth is out there.
It turns out a lot of people don’t even like objective(-ish) truth. It’s true that the level of accuracy VAR claims for itself with offsides is ludicrous given players can move up to 15cm between frames and the lines in the Premier League are applied by VAR officials asking for them to be moved from one side to the other, like somebody levelling a picture on a wall – “left a bit… right a bit”, but the way the complaint is articulated tends to be that the offside law wasn’t invented for such marginal calls.
That’s true, but equally the line has to be somewhere unless the decision is to be based on vibes and VAR, even in the slightly bodged form used up till now in the Premier League, is still more accurate than a 40-year-old game official, on the move, 50 yards away. Semi-automated offsides should make the process even more accurate and, crucially, quicker.
Line decisions are one thing, but the vast majority of decisions in football are subjective. And it remains unclear whether the greater accuracy VAR has brought – although paradoxically, because the expectation is of perfection, they feel less accurate, leading to the slew of conspiracy theories – is worth the sacrifice of spontaneity, the loss of momentum, the interminable waits in stadiums.
It seems odd given how the game these days is packaged as an entertainment product, but nobody seems ever to have asked what VAR would do for its feel. But then, perhaps the feel in the stadium isn’t really of much concern to football’s administrators any more.
