And so we reach Issue 50. I’ll leave the self-congratulatory guff for another couple of weeks, at which point we’ll have hit a full beefy year of weekly newsletters, but I have decided to celebrate today’s landmark by touching on a favourite topic.
I decided to write this article about VAR before the protest by Wolverhampton Wanderers supporters, before Aston Villa beat Arsenal and Mikel Arteta lost his damn mind, before Match of the Day.
Don’t ask me how I knew it would be topical today. You already know the answer.
Let’s ’ave it.
Where we are with VAR
VAR. According to a large section of Wolverhampton Wanderers supporters who demonstrated their disgruntlement at the Premier League fixture against Nottingham Forest, it's good for absolutely nothing. On the same day Match of the Day host Gary Lineker revoked his advocacy for VAR, denounced it as spoiling football and asked why the game’s lawmakers are trying to stop goals, an important question that’s at the very heart of the issue.
The Video Assistant Referee was voted into the Premier League more than five years before the protest at Wolves and debuted in August 2019. Since then, it's wreaked all the havoc predicted by sceptics and much more besides.
Its impact on top-level football in England has been wholly detrimental, not to mention disruptive to the matchday experience, and it hasn't even guaranteed that the big decisions are correct. It was never going to achieve that because it can't. That's not hindsight.
Football's powers that be have suggested a number of corrective measures in the last half a decade, most of them dead on arrival. None has been stupider than the idea that what's needed is more VAR.
The state of play is horrific. Everything VAR should theoretically improve – and I'm talking here about in the media and supporters discourse, not officiating – has in fact worsened, albeit as a result of social media and the disintegration of sensible society rather than technology in football.
What we've been left with is a broken game, a barrage of myths and a cycle of conversation in which reflection and rumination are at once constant and entirely absent. In short, football is so in thrall to VAR that it knows the handbrake is on but keeps its pedal to the metal anyway, paralysed by its own great misstep.
If there is a truth at all it is that VAR is spoiling the game and there is no excuse for it. Football has had Full Kit Referees holed away in hideouts for five years and there are more controversies every weekend than ever before.
Sometimes it’s the on-field officials who bear the brunt, sometimes it's the video assistant, but it always grows from the very seed that spawned all this in the first place: that every decision has a right and wrong, and only right will do. The trouble is that this quest for perfection was folly from the start.
VAR is not new. VAR is here (VARs are here; whatever) and it's fully formed and operating at its maximum potential, unless you happen to be involved in a league where the astounding decision has been made to bring in the system with fewer cameras.
It's past testing. Then again, if it was being tested on competitive football matches then it wasn't really testing. It's past trials. Then again, if the decision had already been made then they weren't really trials but a farce carried out in broad daylight.
It's past teething problems. Then again, if the issues with VAR are fundamental to its use and impossible to iron out then they weren't really teething problems or growing pains but the actual future laid out for all to see.
For more than five years football supporters who'd already been manipulated into believing in the sanctity of decisions have been duped and misled. The result is plain to see. Step back from the controversies of the weekend, any weekend, and consider where we are.
In the cold light of a weekday morning think of the hesitation you feel when a goal is scored, the central feeling of the football experience kneecapped. Think of the obsessive rummaging through footage to find a reason to disallow a goal when no single reason has been identified prior to the check.
Think of the long delays, of nonsense offsides openly disregarding the stated inaccuracy of the technology. Think of the fracture between two codes of what's supposed to be a beautifully simple sport, of the fact that all of this is happening in order to improve a decision rate that was already in the high nineties by percentage and will not, cannot, reach infallibility.
It's insane. Supporters are divided. The rank stupidity is obvious to those of us who didn't and don't want VAR. That's how bias works and it would be disingenuous to deny that. But what about people who are in favour or on the fence? Five years in, are minds beginning to change?
What is perhaps most surprising is that those who demand flawless refereeing decisions either because of VAR or because they just do seem to be the least willing to rail against VAR's disruption to the game. It is the promise to them that it breaks, after all, and it's strange that their tolerance of its failure is so steadfast.
In a sense it's immaterial. For all the talk of right calls and wrong, they're actually what matters least.
The ecstasy of goals trumps officiousness. The flow of football outranks millimetre offsides. This is a game of jeopardy and chance and skill and speed, not a television show. Our clock does not stop. Our plays roll into one. There is no icing. There is no measured yardage. Decisions that are deemed subjectively wrong after the fact are a minuscule price to pay.
VAR now dominates match coverage, highlights and Premier League discussion to an extraordinary degree, arguably more even than refereeing did before.
Its effect on matches is enormous. Greater still is its outsized impact on the football conversation and on the experience of going to football, watching football on television and just being a football supporter.
It's too much. VAR is doing huge damage to the intangibles of the game while having little to no positive effect. It doesn't and can't do what it's there for and it's past time the game acknowledged the outright failure of this shambolic experiment and cast it out once and for all.
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“I spent a good amount of time growing up in Handsworth, an area of Birmingham with a history of racial tensions that was once visited by Malcolm X, and visits to his local library on Soho Road were common - and newcomers would get pushed onto Zephaniah works by eager community workers there. They lived by the words of their local legend and wanted to share it with a world larger than the one passing by each day.”
James Rushton on the late Benjamin Zephaniah. Rest in peace.
Salty beef extracts
The Premier League is giving up on match-going fans – the TV deal proves it (i)
Ode to Goodison Park and the places of football (Morning Star)
Women’s football must be wary of following men’s game into financial cesspit (The Guardian)
Aston Villa's path to glory is all that matters now (House of V)
Dessert
I do love a silver football boot and man, is the New Balance Furon V7 Special Edition for Pro:Direct Soccer’s 25th anniversary silver! Holy moly.
By the way…
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Have a week.
Couldn’t agree more, but I’d differ on one point. VAR is also largely a TV construct, pushed for by TV companies to provide more content for endless analysis and debate. What effect it has on the spectacle is given as little consideration as the effect of moving kickoffs on matchgoing fans, who as we know, don’t matter apart from when someone on TV decides it looks good for them to roll out the old ‘fans are the lifeblood of the game’ blarney. The game’s willingness to sell itself so completely and cede so much control to TV has been a massive mistake.