How to improve VAR with one easy fix
The inevitable scourge of re-refereeing is ruining the game
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That's the boring stuff out of the way. Let's talk about VAR.
Oh.
Don’t miss this week’s Beefy Bites!
How to improve VAR with one easy fix
There’s a lie baked into the branding of VAR. The very fact it’s a brand in the first place is problematic in a number of ways but the brand itself is constructed upon a falsehood.
Only the people involved in the decision at Sony and Hawk-Eye will know the extent to which the aggressive embrace of the VAR acronym is simply for convenience and how much it’s designed to minimise the three words that provide its component initials. The effect is the same irrespective of the intent.
Football now refers to VAR as Var like Michael Knight pondering the likely outcome of a red card review being undertaken by his car. There’s no issue with that, not on the surface – language evolves and acronyms in particular are absorbed into speech double quick.
But the consequence of the VAR brand inevitably taking on a life of its own is that the importance of the words behind is diminished.
VAR stands for – stood for – Video Assistant Referee. Nothing about VAR’s implementation fulfils or even hints at the Assistant part of the brief. If that sounds like semantics, seven years of VAR in the wild have proven just how pervasive, how damaging, the erosion of the notion of assistance in VAR has been.
The idea of video review in football is ridiculous by definition and it was never going to be any different. Football is an imperfect sport necessarily riddled with subjective decisions and grey areas. Its flaws matter – even now, with the universality of the game long since torn asunder, its flaws matter.
When football opened the door to VAR, it gave itself over to a quest for refereeing perfection that cannot be achieved and isn’t desirable anyway.
It would be overly generous to pretend that most football supporters had expectations rather lower than perfection before, but now VAR is in place at the elite level the ability to accept mistakes – whether they’re actually mistakes or just good decisions they can’t stomach – is a thing of the past.
The bar has been raised to an impossible height. VAR has put it there but doesn’t actually equip referees to get any closer to it. VAR is an enemy where they need a friend. When the current crop starts to hit retirement age, their honest feelings on the matter might make for interesting reading.
Football has allowed the VAR processes, applied slightly differently in different leagues and competitions, too much influence on individual refereeing decisions and, consequently, on football matches and the football experience as a whole.
There’s only one real solution to that. While the game searches for tweaks to VAR’s implementation and mangles its laws around the preposterous hunt for the black and white of right and wrong amid the grey, the single answer to the challenges of VAR is to pull the plug entirely.
That’s not going to happen. Instead, the game’s big cheeses busy themselves trying to best decorate the hole they’ve dug for themselves and one of the most effective solutions might just be one that’s seldom mentioned but could help make the referee’s decision final again.
Forget trying to make the handball law an objective matter of fact. Never mind moving the magical mystery offside line a centimetre either way. Let’s deal with the fundamentals – football owes that to itself.
Even VAR’s most vocal advocates in the years immediately before its introduction agreed that its purpose was to act as a safety net to prevent major errors of a game-changing nature. That’s a line that can’t actually be drawn in football but it does at least represent some sort of consensus.
It hinged on supporters, players and managers being able to trust that referees’ on-field decisions would only be overturned in the case of clear and obvious errors. Re-refereeing is explicitly unwanted. That trust has been broken week in and week out for seven years.
That threshold is impossible to maintain as long as the pitchside review continues to be a step in the VAR process. Referees are human and there’s no way a ref is going to turn down the opportunity to change their mind when they see an incident differently on the screen, no matter the criteria for the decision to be overturned.
Unhooking the screen and condemning it to the scrapheap is football’s only hope of killing the scourge of re-refereeing. Shorten the chain by removing that link and maybe, just maybe, VAR can be used to correct only what needs correcting and the ultimate outcome of 999 out of every 1,000 decisions can be placed back into the hands of the referee and their on-field calls.
Without widespread agreement that the referee’s decision is final, and that the referee’s decision is their first decision, any push to uproot pitchside screens is moot.
But its benefit could be huge. If the result is that the clear and obvious threshold is better maintained, football would be able to enjoy a big reduction in the undue influence of VAR where it’s not wanted. The high bar might make things a little faster too.
None of the people reviewing a decision would be the one who made it. It might seem counter-intuitive but with the right guardrails in place a VAR might be less likely to interfere on review than the referee themselves. Overruling a colleague and re-refereeing one’s own perceived error are wholly different things.
The referee should always be involved in the process, relaying what they saw, how they saw it and why they came to their decision. These are the vital contextual details that can help the VAR better understand the referee’s decision without imposing the walk of shame that has such a dismally outsized effect on how VAR reviews play out.
For all the basic positives it offers as a fix, removing the review screen from pitchside does create a loose connection in the system. If the referee and VAR disagree on a decision after a discussion, who then makes the final decision?
That should be where the intended role of the video assistant referee puts it back in its place. It wouldn’t really work that way, so the most unfortunate consequence of trying to put authority back in the hands of the referee might be that it’s actually taken away.
Making the threshold for overturning a decision extremely high would resolve part of that conundrum but it has to be asked whether the finality of a referee’s decision can co-exist with a clampdown on re-refereeing in a VAR-infested sport.
It’s clear and obvious that removing the screen doesn’t fix all of the many ways in which VAR is unavoidably broken.
It doesn’t address any of the challenges with offside, though it could be argued offside is subjective too. It doesn’t make the laws of the game better, nor does it return them to their more adequate subjective state.
Crucially, it doesn’t stop the fallible folk involved in the VAR process from getting involved in decisions they should be leaving alone. It’s that line that needs drawing in the sands of football.
Sadly for lovers of football at the top level, the days of the referee having the final say – at least without a second look – are over.
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Salty beef extracts
The night when Tony Morley’s magic and Aston Villa faced the very best (The Guardian)
‘Prison didn’t touch the sides’: Tony Adams on addiction, losing the man who saved him and helping others (The Guardian)
The oldest team in English football are also its biggest overachievers (i)
One of Britain’s oldest football clubs is fighting for its life (i)
Ghost game and radical tactics - the redemption of Racing Santander (i)
“The torn ACL was revealed in an MRI performed this morning. [Riqui] Puig sustained the injury in the second half of the match, continuing to play over thirty minutes despite his injury, and providing the game-winning assist on Dejan Joveljić’s 85th minute goal.”
LA Galaxy will play New York Red Bulls in the showpiece MLS Cup on Saturday without their star player, Riqui Puig. Puig is a remarkable, unusual footballer. Major League Soccer’s championship game will miss him badly. He’s also a hard little bastard, it turns out.
Dessert
Adidas Originals. Roma. Trefoil. Bosh.
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Have a week.