Bad vibes and VAR: waiting game leaves fans frustrated over marginal calls | Video assistant referees (VARs)

OPremier League clubs will vote on Wolves’ bid on Thursday to remove video assistant referees. The proposal will almost certainly not receive majority support, let alone secure the 14 votes out of 20 needed to pass. But what it can do is shift the Overton window and lead to a serious review of VAR, an assessment of where it works and where it doesn’t. And this is something that is long overdue.

Counseling is not fashionable in the modern world. Politicians of all stripes too often operate within the law, and this is as true in football as in anything else. VAR was imposed for the 2018 World Cup with minimal research or conversation and was adopted almost universally without anyone really investigating the consequences.

While the general feeling was that VAR was working in Russia, two hugely significant errors stand out, the apparent lack of fanfare, perhaps because neither incident harmed a country with a huge following here. Cristiano Ronaldo should have been sent off for clean elbow against Iranand the penalty from which France equalized in the final against Croatia was a dud handball decision against Ivan Perisic.

This immediately highlighted two major problems. First, that the people running the system are still human and still prone to human foibles: in Ronaldo’s case, an understandable reluctance to fire one of the most famous players on the planet.

It also generated one of the first pundit fogs that compounded the issue as both Alan Shearer and Didier Drogba suggested that the referee was only right to show a yellow card (and maybe even that) because he should have been watching from many angles, such as considerable time. How then, they asked, could the error be sufficiently obvious to overturn the original decision?

But that’s nonsense: the whole point of VAR is that you i can look from multiple angles: “clear and obvious” does not mean that a decision can be made from the first shot chosen by the director. That’s why the idea that if the VAR officials take more than a minute, the on-field decision should stand is so wrong: what if the referee fails to pick the angle that shows the elbow clearly by the 61st second? After stopping the game, you can also make the right decision; giving employees under pressure the added anxiety of working against the clock doesn’t help anyone.

Second, VAR has turned matches into a dead end serviced by an overzealous neighborhood watch. VAR officials have become like the priests of a fundamentalist sect, relentlessly pursuing sin so they can punish it. Regardless of whether the ball was traveling at high speed and took an unseemly deflection six inches in front of you before hitting your hand in front of your body, the error should be compensated by a penalty. Don’t ask why the gods require it, just make the necessary sacrifice.

Fortunately, there has been some liberalization in this regard, but especially with handball, the ethos is certainly less: “Is there anything here I can punish?” than: “Has anyone really tried to cheat?”

But before the details, there is something much more fundamental that serves as a useful indicator of the direction football is heading in the increasing preference of television viewers over fans in the stadium. For the latter, VAR is terrible. It’s not just about the loss of spontaneity, that it’s harder to indulge in a goal celebration without knowing if some distant curtain-raiser might turn it off; it’s about the long minutes spent waiting with nothing to look at, but players also waiting, before a decision that’s never properly communicated.

VAR is a television phenomenon. On the field, fans may rage against decisions, but they rarely know for sure that they are wrong. Those who watched multiple replays in the immediate aftermath want the injustice to be righted.

The VAR experience for those watching on screen is good; they see different angles, the ambush lines drawn, they have at least a common understanding of the process. It’s easy for those who rarely attend the games – even journalists who have monitors at their side – to forget how bad the experience is for fans, many of whom have often paid exorbitant sums for tickets.

The stadium experience can clearly be improved to some extent, even if the nature of football, the multitude of options, means that VAR checks can never become as big a part of the fan experience as the decision review system is in cricket. But still, VAR seems like a TV fan problem, or at the very least a product of analysis that endlessly evaluates borderline subjective calls as if there’s an objective truth somewhere.

It turns out that many people don’t even like the objective truth. It is true that the level of accuracy that VAR claims for offsides is absurd given that players can move up to 15cm between the frames and lines in Premier League are applied by VAR officials who want to be moved from one side to the other, like someone flattening a picture on a wall – “a little left … a little right”, but the way the complaint is phrased is that the offside law is not invented for such marginal conversations.

This is true but also the line has to be somewhere unless the decision is to be based on vibration and VAR even in the slightly trimmed form used in the Premier League so far is still more accurate than a 40 year old game official, in motion, at 50 yards. Semi-automated ambushes should make the process even more accurate and, crucially, faster.

Line decisions are one thing, but the majority of decisions in football are subjective. And it remains unclear whether the greater accuracy brought by VAR – although paradoxically, as the expectation is for perfection, they feel less accurate, leading to a slew of conspiracy theories – is worth the sacrifice of spontaneity, the loss of momentum, the endless waiting in stadiums.

It seems odd given how the game is packaged as an entertainment product these days, but no one seems to have ever asked what VAR would do to sensation. But then, perhaps the feel of the stadium is no longer of much concern to football administrators.