VAR has never worked and never will, it’s time to scrap it for the good of football

This was another weekend on which refereeing and VAR came under fire after controversial decisions that affected results at St James’ Park, Stamford Bridge, Old Trafford and elsewhere.

VAR, wrongly held up by some as a solution, is creaking. But that was always inevitable.

Here are six reasons why the implementation of VAR is struggling now, and why it always will.

It has created even more outrage

VAR was ostensibly introduced as a response to outrage from football managers, supporters and media, both at matches and, increasingly, online. That was never likely to be a viable platform for its implementation because that outrage was never going to be sated.

Managers and supporters had always, would always, disagree with decisions and would blame those decisions more than the failings of managers and players for the result of a match. Their anger about, and their inability to forgive or accept, refereeing mistakes had also grown exponentially during football’s rapid commercialisation. More money in the game meant more at stake. More at stake meant less acceptance of mistakes. Somewhere along the line, errors from officials (but not managers and players, crucially), became football culture’s bête noire.

Could VAR have ever fixed that culture? No. Rather than cause less outrage – the “it will end pub debate” argument – it simply added an extra layer to it. Now we don’t just all get angry about the decisions of an official on the field. We analyse those decisions in real time via television replays, double down on our opinions that are usually based on bias (we are all fans, after all) and then are able to get angry all over again if the decision doesn’t go our way.

It can’t just correct ‘howlers’

VAR was initially introduced – or at least sold this way to the audience – as a way of correcting howlers – if Luis Suarez’s handball on the line in the 2010 World Cup had not been spotted, say. And it may well have had more success if that aim had persevered.

But then that probably wouldn’t have worked either. Take Arsenal’s disallowed goal against Manchester United, for example. It probably was a foul by Martin Odegaard. It could feasibly not have been given. Funnily enough, Manchester United fans would say it is a foul and Arsenal fans would say it wasn’t. Flip the teams and the opposite arguments would have inevitably been made.

Had it not been overturned because, as is reasonable, it is not a “howler”, would Manchester United supporters have concluded that “Yeah, fair enough, no howler so no reason for VAR to intervene”? Clearly not. If you introduce technology you are aiming, implicitly or otherwise, to re-referee. The argument would be obvious: what’s the point in using the technology if you’re not actually going to make the correct calls by the law?

And that’s one of the cruxes of VAR’s problems. By introducing it, you are presenting what is a tool of officiating (a way of improving decisions which, whether you choose to accept it or not, has happened) as a solution.

It has made the refereeing crisis worse

The refereeing profession, both at elite and grassroots level, did not need extra pressure or scrutiny. There is a crisis of numbers in the grassroots game dwindling due to a rampant abuse culture – verbal and physical. If that has not already caused a knock-on effect at the highest level, it will. There is a necessary bottom-to-top drip feed for the progression of referees from grassroots to professional level and that conveyor belt will grind to halt if there are fewer grassroots referees. And if the abuse culture continues at its current pace, we really will run out.

Every decision a referee makes will be controversial to some extent. At least one set of supporters watching in the stadium or at home will disagree with everything. That is fuelled in part by broadcast media and the coverage of live football, which gives undue prominence to analysing refereeing decisions above incidents within normal play – misses, lapses in concentration, misplaced passes, defensive mistakes.

Introducing VAR merely gave that analysis a natural home. Now that over-analysis comes as standard because elite football has created a natural environment for it. Not only do we have the use of slow-motion replays to analyse a fast-paced sport, allowing broadcasters to run through the same replays for pundits and co-commentators to offer their opinions, it also creates an extra reason to criticise officials.

I’m acutely aware nobody wants to hear this, but: officiating football is incredibly difficult. You must train for eight to 10 years to get from grassroots to professional level. The financial rewards are low. The abuse culture is rife. All the way along the journey you have players and managers trying to influence your decisions and effectively cheat their way to decisions. VAR could have laid bare that cheating. Instead, it has merely exposed referees’ mistakes and created an extra environment for those mistakes to be accurately decried as the greatest threat to modern football.

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It is still reliant on error-prone humans

VAR’s introduction came with an unfortunate misconception on the part of the audience: we were about to have technology making decisions. That is emphatically untrue and was deeply unhelpful. VAR isn’t about technological officiating. It is about human beings using additional evidence to make decisions.

And the thing about human beings is that they are… human. They will make calls based on opinion. They will make mistakes, whether they are on the pitch or at Stockley Park. They will interpret decisions differently from one another and certainly differently from a proportion of people in the crowd, in a TV studio or at home. They are flawed.

One official would see the Jarrod Bowen incident and believe he deliberately left a leg trailing to make contact with Edouard Mendy. Another might think the same but not believe that it constituted a foul. Another might not buy Mendy making the most of the contact, rolling around injured. Another might view the incident merely as incidental contact in the passage of normal play.

“The problem isn’t with the technology but the people using it,” someone will say every week. Well… yes. But then that was always going to be the case, and plays back into the point about presenting this as a solution rather than a tool. Strikers miss chances; defenders play short passes back to their goalkeeper; midfielders overhit passes; officials get decisions wrong. Nobody involved is a robot.

It ruins football’s flow

VAR delays are taking up to five minutes. Is all this really worth it? (Photo: Getty)

In 2016, when Ifab initially announced the trialling of VAR officiating, they issued a promise: “The initial testing will deliberately have a limited focus to minimise the impact of the flow and emotions which are crucial to football.”

But that was always going to be impossible. Football has far fewer natural breaks in play than other sports where technology is used extensively – cricket, American football, rugby. Football also gets the ball back into play quicker than those three sports, meaning that any stoppage is more obvious and inevitably alters the sport as a spectator pursuit.

On Sunday, it took four-and-half minutes to identify that Alexis Mac Allister’s goal for Brighton could not stand because of an offside in the build-up. That is roughly equivalent to 10 per cent of the time that the ball was in play during the match. Even if VAR had worked smoothly, and eliminated all errors (which was an impossibility, but go with the hypothesis), you will not convince me that changing the fabric of the game to that extent was worth it.

It can’t overcome football’s unique subjectivity

Take 12.1 of Ifab’s Laws of the Game: “A direct free kick is awarded if a player commits any of the following offences against an opponent in a manner considered by the referee to be careless, reckless or using excessive force:… charges. If an offence involves contact, it is penalised by a direct free kick.”

Count the subjective calls within it: What is careless? What is reckless? What is excessive force? What is a charge? Does “contact” include any contact or merely deliberate? By “commit” does that include mere intention to commit”? And when you have work through all of those aspects – which a referee must do in a second or two – the whole thing is predicated on what “the referee considers”. And this is merely one element (charging) of one subset of one law.

Football’s laws are more subjective than any other sport. In cricket, you can work out whether a ball pitched outside leg or not (with a margin for umpire error). In rugby, you can tell if a pass is forward or not. And neither of these sports generates anywhere near the lasting outrage surrounding decisions as football does.

The use of technology works for objective decisions: Did the ball cross the line? Was the foul inside or outside the box? Was the player in his own half when the pass was played (and therefore onside)? As soon as you extend it to subjective calls, consistency becomes impossible because the very point of subjectivity is that it allows for a spectrum of opinion.

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