Celta Vigo are having a pretty bad season. They’ve won 3 of 19 league games, half of the squad is either injured or woefully out of form, and they’re out of the relegation zone thanks only to the incompetence of the teams below them. But none of this is the worst thing to happen in the season so far. That was on Wednesday night: an 8 minute VAR check that ended up disallowing an already disallowed goal, a wait that inside the stadium felt more like 80 minutes. Now unlike half of the online football community, I’m old enough to remember when VAR was introduced, and the promises that were made: the new sunlit uplands of Brexit1 much better refereeing that would transform the game as we knew it.
It’s worthwhile to first consider what we’d like in a perfect world, and then consider the compromises we might choose to make in order to fit reality. In an ideal system, every decision would be correct and not impact the flow of the game by being made immediately. So, in terms of compromise, we can choose to either A) have less perfect decision making, or B) interrupt and slow down the game. In our current situation, we seem to have landed on a situation where decision-making is somewhat improved but many things are still missed or overlooked, all at at the cost of huge delays to the game
What your preference might be is most likely to be decided by where you watch football. If you watch it on TV, then delays, replays, slow-motion, etc. is all part and parcel of your viewing experience. Watching a VAR decision is not much different to watching the 7th repetition of a shot, or pass. The TV viewing experience is defined by breaks, cuts to earlier parts of the game – by its very nature it is broken up in to tiny, easily digestible chunks.
If you watch in a stadium, then the experience is one continuous flow. There are no replays, no zooming in. When the ball goes out for a throw-in, or a corner, you don’t see a slow-motion re-enaction of how it came to be given, you watch the taker collect the ball, and the centre-backs wearily trot up field more in hope than expectation. When your team score, you don’t get to see the ball crossing the line 12 times from seven different angles. You see it exactly once, and you live that moment, a single, crystalline second of pure bliss. If it’s disallowed for offside, you can see the flag in that moment.
VAR takes all of this and smashes it to pieces in the supposed search for objective truth. If your team scores, every celebration is tarnished with the thought that after three minutes of the referee staring at a TV screen (that you can’t see, unlike the viewers at home), the goal could be taken away. Arguably even worse is the opposite, a goal that is disallowed and then shown to have happened not by the ball hitting the back of the net, but by the whistle of a referee from in front of a screen. It makes any true celebration of the goal impossible. The moment is gone. And to rub it all in, you have no idea why what happened happened. In the stadium, you’re completely blind and deaf to the discussions and the replays.
All of this might be worth it, but VAR hasn’t even improved decision making that much – maybe we’ve gone from 80% of calls being correct to 85%. But the referee watching the screen can still make the same bad decisions as always, the VAR referees can (seemingly arbitrarily, hiding behind the “clear and obvious error” rule) choose when to intervene and when to let a wrong decision stand. Or sometimes, they’ll just make a bad decision anyway, seemingly for the fun of it. VAR improves the standard of refereeing very little, and at a great cost to those who actually bother to attend games in person. It isn’t worth it, and it never will be.
It’s impossible to understand any of this if you haven’t experienced it. Online football discourse is dominated by people whose interest in football never extends outside of their living room (the same phenomenon can be observed in the endless arguments against the 3pm blackout, without ever showing any understanding of what it’s there to protect). Football isn’t a TV show, or a video game. It’s a living, breathing moment shared by thousands of people in the same space, united by nothing except their love of their team. And it shouldn’t be diluted for the benefit of the home viewer, ever.
- VAR shares many similarities with Brexit, an idea that could have made its own article if I had been less overworked. Both came about due to promises that couldn’t be kept, both are now seemingly here to stay based on the fact that they’re here, rather than any actual positive impacts, and most importantly, the people who like them are … wonderful ↩︎
Goalposts For Goalposts 