VAR is killing football. Making it palatable is likely beyond the powers that be

The evidence of the past four years shows that the great promise of Video Assistant Referees as a panacea to controversy was a false prophecy. VAR, as implemented by these officials and under the current guidelines, is deeply flawed and the soul of the game suffering for it

The admission by the Premier League’s Chief Football Officer, Tony Scholes, that Video Assistant Refereeing, as currently implemented, is “nowhere near good enough” is at least a start towards trying to improve something that has become a clear detraction and distraction from the Beautiful Game.

No system like this can never be perfect but there is no getting away from the sense that, in the Premier League in particular, VAR is a mess, with more and more of the focus in the aftermath of matches being placed on contentious decisions made during the match from a bunker often hundreds of miles away from the action than on the game itself.

VAR in the Premier League is plagued by rampant inconsistency in the application of the rules – that’s without even mentioning how muddy some of those rules have become thanks to the continual meddling of the International FA Board (Ifab) – occasionally farcical decisions, well-founded accusations of over-officiating, a “mates club” culture where referees are afraid to over-rule each other, and a building sense among supporters of clubs outside of the “Big Six” cartel of unchecked bias – unconscious or otherwise.

We know how we got the point in 2019 where VAR was introduced in the Premier League. The growth in popularity of England’s top flight, the ever-increasing focus on and coverage of football in general, and the advent of super slo-mo analysis from in-studio pundits ushered in an era of forensic examination of all aspects of the game.

Chief among them, of course, were controversial decisions made by referees and a desire to somehow eradicate the possibility that human error could ever influence or decide a match, sometimes with enormous ramifications in a sport where key results are worth more and more with each passing decade. Titles and relegation can come down to slender margins; likewise European qualification so the impetus grew to introduce a system of secondary checks that would, we were assured, ensure big refereeing mistakes couldn’t happen.

The reality, as we have seen, has been very different to the vision. Evertonians, in particular, know all too well how the process has become warped by inconsistency and unpredictability, incompetence, and, yes, the inescapable feeling that VAR has become yet another tool that favours the big boys. “Organised match fixing!” they cry.

Ask a fan of any team that has played in the Premier League over the past four seasons and they would probably be able to reel off a number of VAR cock-ups and incendiary incidents that are seared into their memory. For we Evertonians, the penalty awarded to Brighton when Michael Keane accidentally trod on Aaron Connolly’s foot and Lee Mason sitting in Stockley Park decided it should be a penalty (a decision that swung the impetus of the game back in the favour of the Seagulls who went on to win 3-2 and Marco Silva was denied a victory that might, at the very least, given him a stay of execution that season) comes readily to mind, as does the incredible Rodri handball farce of February 2022 and the red card awarded to Allan against Newcastle only the following month. There are, of course, many others without even mentioning instances like the two “double-yellow” controversies in the Anfield derby this season that couldn’t be reviewed by VAR because of the current rules.

Scholes asserted this week that, this season, VAR officials are running at 96% accuracy in terms of getting to the right outcome but that flies in the face of the impression among fans that the process has reached a low-point in terms of its impact on the game. Perception is reality, which is to say nothing for the dubiousness of the notion that 100% accuracy by the letter of the law should be the goal.

One of the more saddening aspects of top-level football’s devolvement into petty obsession with the minutiae of every passage of play and that meddling with many of the rules has been the elimination of the ability of referees to apply common sense and to officiate according to the spirit of the game.

One gripe repeated often in this column around VAR and hairline offside decisions is that by implementing such a precise measuring process, football has completely forgotten the intent of the rule in the first place – namely, to prevent strikers hanging around in the opposition goal waiting for the ball to be played up to them.

Similarly, the growing impulse by VAR officials to pore over passages of play leading to goals, sometimes frame by frame, to find a reason to rule out a goal or to give a penalty, violates the spirit of the laws and the notion, accepted for the first 150-odd years of the professional game, that human error is part of the sport, in every facet.

Finally, as if all that weren’t bad enough, we’ve been seeing a growing tendency by the on-field referees to avoid making big calls and relying on VAR to make them instead, not helped by a grading system that penalises refs for going against the advice of the VAR. This is, quite obviously, problematic when the onus on the VAR is supposed to be to intervene when a “clear and obvious” mistake has been made; so an official can’t overturn a poor decision that was never made and it gives the person sat in Stockley Park too much opportunity to “find” a reason to make a game-changing decision either way.

It all contributes to the unforgivable tragedy of VAR and that is the extent to which it has destroyed the great foundational thrill of football and that is the spontaneous celebration of your team scoring a goal. That supporters have to check the out-pouring of emotion from a last-gasp equaliser in the manner described by Matt Jones in a recent column for the Liverpool Echo is deeply saddening.

Fans of clubs who have come up to the Premier League from the Championship talk of the joy of supporting their side without the fear of VAR killing the joy in the game. In a nutshell, that is the greatest argument for scrapping VAR in all its forms tomorrow. Allowing for communication of decisions to the crowd won’t resolve the underling problems if the decisions being made are wrong to begin with.

All of these processes, approaches and assumptions can be changed, of course, and they would significantly improve what has become an untenable situation if done so in the right way. After all, it’s not so much the technology that is the problem, it’s the way it’s implemented by a generation of highly-criticised English referees.

Restoring the hegemony of the on-field referee and significantly raising the threshold for an intervention by VAR would help enormously, as would eradicating slow-motion replays on the pitch-side monitor and forcing the official to make a determination based on another look at what he saw (or missed) in real time.

Bringing back a greater respect for the spirit of football, where the rules are there to prevent egregious contraventions and to prevent very clear and very obvious errors, would be another step towards improving what has become a distressingly poor situation that has led to accusations of bias and eroded faith in the officials themselves.

Semi-automated offside, resisted by the Premier League to this point, could add another layer of legitimacy but only if much thicker lines are used to provide some latitude whereby any “daylight” between them would designate offside and would move us further away from the forensic drawing of lines, provide a greater margin for error by the technology itself, cut down on the number of goals wiped out by such fine margins, and remove some of that sense that fans can no longer celebrate for fear that a goal won’t stand.

Again, football wasn’t close to perfect before. Referees made mistakes, and the belief was that by introducing more technology leveraging the benefits of replays, the number of errors and poor decisions could be reduced and, perhaps, eliminated.

The evidence of the past four years shows that this was a false prophecy. VAR, as implemented by these officials and under the current guidelines, is deeply flawed and top-flight football is suffering for it. There is scope to vastly improve it but nothing the FA and PGMOL have done to date gives you any faith that all the measures needed would be taken and to the degree that would be required to bring back both faith in the process and that raw, spontaneous joy of celebrating a goal. If anything, under Howard Webb, matters have got demonstrably worse.

For those reasons, VAR should be scrapped but the debates over refereeing and how best to limit the impact of poor and erroneous decisions will never go away. And as long as technology exists – with further advancements involving AI no doubt just around the corner – there will always be a tendency from the most powerful influences in the game to use it in the pursuit of some vague notion of perfection that can never exist.

In the meantime, the powers that be will bumble on. Lip service will be paid for the need to speed up decision-making. Moves may well be made to open up the communication of decisions by officials to supporters inside the grounds so that they know as much as those watching on TV but, again, that won’t matter much if the decisions themselves are wrong.

All the while, the fans, top-level football and the very soul of the game will suffer and, and many of us will continue to curse the day that Video Assistant Referees were ever introduced.