Premier League chief executive Richard Masters has confirmed that recordings of audio between Video Assistant Referee (VAR) officials and referees will be made available to fans after matches.
There has been a call for more transparency in the way decisions are made, even before the introduction of VAR, among fans, with some calls for the referees to be mic'd up in order for fans to hear the conversations. Football’s lawmakers don’t allow live broadcasts of the audio, but it has confirmed that recordings could be released after the full-time whistle.
VAR has had a patchy start to life in the Premier League after being introduced at the start of the 2019/20 season. A number of decisions throughout the league since then have been questioned.
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Nottingham Forest will get their first taste of VAR in a league game when they take on Newcastle United at St James' Park in just a few days time. They did though play with the system in the play-off final at Wembley Stadium back in May.
Masters has now revealed that the idea of the audio helping to explain the process behind the decisions will help the system to run more smoothly. It’s a practice that already takes place in America’s Major League Soccer.
“There is a general view that [releasing the audio] is a good thing,” Masters said ahead of the start of the new season, via LiverpoolEcho . “There is a desire to be more open with fans about referees’ decision-making and how we do that precisely we need to work out.”
The Premier League CEO also gave an update on the status of the League Cup amid pressure for it to be scrapped.
“I think the biggest impact of the Uefa reforms are on the League Cup because of the loss of midweeks, so we need to find a solution to that,” he added.
"If you talk to Premier League clubs, they want the League Cup to remain, they want it to remain part of the competition, the Wembley slot, the European place. That's one of the things we've got to discuss and that's got to happen now.”
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