VAR chat turns existential, but will anything change?
Well, that came out of the blue, didn't it? The Wolves proposal to abolish VAR is an opportunity for Premier League clubs to dig themselves out of a huge hole, but will they take it?
The announcement that the possibility of getting rid of VAR is a reality feels like it has the potential to be the greatest bait and switch in the history of the Premier League. The matter has been raised by Wolverhampton Wanderers and will be discussed and voted upon by the League at its AGM next month, but it does feel as though we're all about to get a harsh lesson in the realities of how football clubs in the 21st century view the game.
For those who oppose VAR it all seems so obvious. The reasons for chucking it in the bin range from the purely practical to the solely existential. On the one hand, it's almost a matter of principle. Before it developed an unhealthy obsession with getting everything ‘right’, football thrived on the fact that yes, sometimes the decision-making processes employed by referees were less than perfect.
It's possible to build a case that this was a big part of the reason for the game's explosion in popularity from the end of the 19th century. Football was different from other sports, and remains so today. While other sports are processions of absolute brilliance which are decided by a handful of moments at which someone does make a fatal error, football often felt like the opposite; a game of mistakes and misjudgements punctuated by short passages during which everything might just click into place.
This inversion of what we'd normally expect at the highest level of a sport watched by billions of people, it might well be reflected, is a closer approximation of the human experience and condition than almost any other sport. We're not perfect. We're flawed, and that's fine. And it's noticeable at all levels of the game. The jankiest Sunday league match in the world could produce the very best goal scored all weekend on the entire planet, and unless someone happened to have a mobile phone camera upon it at the time, none of us would ever be any the wiser.
But at some point in the indeterminate past it was decided that football couldn't afford to get things “wrong” any more. There was no no significant discussion of what “wrong” actually means, still less of the extent to which almost all decision-making is subjective to some extent of another. But once that initial decision had been taken, there was no stopping it.
The canary in the coal mine was Goal Line Technology. Relatively straightforward to implement and dealing with a question with an entirely binary answer—did the ball go over the line? Yes or no?—and with a result that few could reasonably argue with, it was an easy way for those with the extremely vested interested of wanting to get a foot in the door to make a point about the potential efficacy of cameras on getting decisions “right”.
At the same time, trust in match officials was already starting to break down. As media coverage of the game continued to grow and became less shamelessly partisan, so managers ramped up their ultimate deflector shields by starting to focus almost entirely entirely on decisions that hadn't gone their way.
It didn't take long for the media to catch up. Interviewers started to realise that they could turn up the controversy by focusing on these matters when asking questions. Within a few short years, the decisions being made by the referees were being treated as the single most important factor in whether matches were won or lost.
It certainly helped that the game had sped up to a point that it was becoming almost impossible to officiate in the forensic way that many of those within the game were demanding. It was proved for example, that calling offside while running the line was effectively impossible for a human being with a flag to achieve without some degree of guesswork.
And at the same time, the ways in which the laws of the game were being refined were changing. There was a time when laws were tinkered with to make it more entertaining for those watching it, but this started to change. Interpretations of offside had been amended for years, and they mostly tended to benefit more attacking football, but this started to reverse and suddenly it became about tiny margins, hair's breadths. It became the sort of rule that you needed cameras to definitively decide. What a coincidence!
After five years, it's clear that the implementation of VAR has been pretty catastrophic. Matches are frequently held up for minutes at a time, with little indication given to those inside grounds of what on earth is even going on. And while the technology does help officials to get decisions right, the fact that they're now treated with even greater contempt than ever has also demonstrated the extent to which decisions are often judgement calls, whether fans like it or not. Fans and even players don't even feel like they can celebrate scoring goals any more, lest the all-seeing eye interject and chalk it off.
It turned out that all that talk about ‘just wanting consistency’ all along was just so much bunkum. What most involved seemed to have actually wanted was for VAR to confirm their own biases and give everything their way. The strangest aspect of this is that there's little to suggest that any of this was in bad faith. Players, managers and fans genuinely seemed to believe referees favoured everyone bar their team, and that this would restore some balance. Reader, it did not. In 2024, there doesn't seem to be a Premier League fan base that doesn't believe that they're uniquely and always on the wrong end of it all.
That's the fundamental problem with all of this. Football is too emotionally immature to deal with VAR. It's also too emotionally immature to deal with referees getting the occasional call wrong, but that's another matter. VAR just adds a layer of extra bureaucracy to every game, bureaucracy that hasn't even had the presumably desired effect of shutting up the constant din of caterwauling about unfair treatment that has so comprehensively poisoned the well of discourse surrounding the game.
Does anyone seriously believe that Premier League clubs voting on this rule change will be making their final decision based on the overall wellbeing of the game? It would be nice to know that they were taking a fully rounded view about the good of the game and taking into account the best interests of the fans. Or do you think they're just trying to work out whether keeping VAR would benefit their club and their club alone more and will vote entirely predicated on that basis?
It would be nice to get our hopes up about all of this, but it doesn't seem likely that there's going to be a sudden outburst of principled love for the good of the game going on at the Premier League's AGM next month.