Ok fine, let's talk about VAR
VAR was always doomed to fail because you can't bring objectivity to a subjective measure
I almost never talk about referees in my writing because I consider it a waste of time.
Referees are a talking point because they’re an easy target. When everyone is shoving microphones into the managers face demanding to know why he just lost the manager’s got three choices: he could blame the players or he could blame himself - but neither of those seem like a good thing to do within the club - so that leaves blaming a third party. The referee.
Good teams make their own breaks. They get a lot of decisions because they put themselves in spots to get good decisions. Decisions also go against them but no one tend to remember them because they so often put it behind them and go on to win anyway.
I still have no idea why Scott McTominay’s opening goal against Fulham was ruled out. It’s a horrific decision for me. But a good team would have shaken that off, realized they had 80 minutes left to play, and still went on to beat Fulham two or three nil. Manchester United shouldn’t have needed a 90th minute winner in that game. They didn’t need that winner because of the ref - they needed it because they didn’t get a shot until the 27th minute, and they only created 12 shots for 0.7 xG.
The argument that grabbing an early 1-0 lead would have given them confidence and completely changed the game doesn’t hold any weight. Only twice this season have United held a two goal lead at any point of a game1 while the amount of times they’ve conceded immediately after scoring dwarfs that. Based on this season it’s far more likely to have gone the other way.
Premier League referees are scored by a panel after every game and that panel has found that they get about 98-99 percent of their decisions correct. Over a 90 minute match referees make hundreds of decisions, so by definition they’re going to get 3-4 wrong per game. You just have to hope those three or four mistakes are minor - awarding the wrong team a throw in, not giving a foul in the middle of the park when you should have etc.
Occasionally they make a big mistake, and when that big mistake happens at the end of a match it’s easy to say the ref cost one team the game - while ignoring everything else that happened in the match before that moment.
Referees are humans, they’re going to make mistakes. It could happen for a variety of reasons. Something catches the corner of their eye and takes their focus off the ball for a split second, a player runs in front of them and their view is blocked, or just, they’re human and they get it wrong.
Most of these mistakes are subjective. You got to the studio at halftime and pundits debate whether the decision was right or wrong. You get a lot of “for me, that’s not a penalty” but then person sitting right next to him says “no the ref got this one right.” Obviously the fans’ opinion will be determined by which side of the decision they’re on.
Every so often the referee makes a decision that is so obviously wrong. We all saw it live and immediately knew the referee was wrong. Then we see a replay and can’t even believe how someone could possibly get this wrong. Since we have the ability to immediately watch the video and see this was such a clear and obvious error we should fix it. We have the ability, do it!
Congratulations, you just opened a huge pandoras box.
It was inevitable that we’d get to this point because we have always gotten to this point.
Video replay may have began with the NHL in the early 90s but the system as we know it didn’t begin until the NFL introduced Instant Replay in 1999. They created a whole slew of rules to govern the system. Team would get two challenges, there had to be “indisputable evidence” on the field to overturn a call, the referee had 90 seconds to make a decision, and there as a list of what type of plays were could be overturned.
Of course what happened next was inevitable. The system corrected a few mistakes but eventually a ref would make a mistake on a play that “wasn’t reviewable.” That caused everyone to stand up and scream “how are we not allowed to review these things?” and more changes would come. There was one season where the NFL allowed coaches to challenge for pass interference penalties! As video quality became better with the advent of HDTV we were able to see more, which wasn’t a good thing. Now everything is micro analyzed to such a degree that the running joke in the NFL is no one knows what a catch is anymore.
It’s not just the NFL. Try watching the last few minutes of a basketball game. Every time the whistle blows in the final few minutes the refs go straight to the monitor, sometimes without even making a call! It’s not about correcting mistakes anymore, it’s become about seeing exactly what happened even in situations where no one asked for that.
Video replay was always going to come to football eventually. When it did, they said all the right things. We’re not here to re-referee the game, we’re looking only for “clear and obvious” measure.
VAR was supposed to provide a measure of objectivity in making decisions. There’s just one problem with that, everything about football is subjective! There’s only one objective measure in football, “did the ball go in the goal or not?” and we have very good technology that gives us the answer to that.2
There’s no other objective measure. Offsides seems objective. You’re either over the line or you’re not - but what about if you’re involved in the play or not? That’s a subjective question. Handball seems pretty simple, the ball either touches your hand or it doesn’t. But what if your hand is by your side? What about the difference between ball to hand or hand to ball? All of it is subjective.
The Premier League added VAR for the 2019-20 season and it was a disaster. After every goal VAR would check for offside, if there was a foul in the buildup, or if there was a handball in the buildup. It was beyond stupid. Football is about scoring goals yet every time one was scored we had to wait an extra minute as some blokes in Stockley Park looked for reasons not to give the goal.3
To their credit the Premier League adapted. They realized no one wanted this. They relaxed the rules on fouls in the buildup and handballs in the buildup. They widened the margin for error on offside. They understand there’s more nuance to handballs so they’ve changed their rules to accommodate that.
That’s where things get dicy. The more room you add for subjectivity, the less consistency you’re going to have. The referee may see the play clearly and decide that’s not a handball, while someone watching on the screen says it is.
Herein lies the problem. Whats a “clear and obvious” error to me may not be a “clear and obvious” error to you. But what if you’re the referee and I’m the VAR? As Dale Johnson wrote on Thursday, the monitor isn’t there for the referee to have a second look, the monitor is there to present evidence for why the referee has made a clear and obvious error. The VAR believing a “clear and obvious” error was made is all it takes.
Consistency
Let’s be clear on something. No matter what you will never get consistency from game to game. Different humans will interpret the rules differently. Ask anyone who’s ever played any level of sport in their life, sometimes the ref lets you play, sometimes any bit of contact is a foul. The only thing you can ask for is that there’s consistency throughout that particular game. As long as he’s calling all the high ones strikes for both teams it’s fine. Then tomorrow we’ll adapt when the new umpire calls the low ones strikes.
Anytime you have a subjective measure, you run the risk of having two people look at something and see different things. A ref might deem something a booking one week while the next week a different referee lets something even worse go. The context of the match matters too, perhaps the first match is a derby where tensions are high and the referee is making sure he doesn’t lose control.
Where football faces an even bigger problem is that it’s such a global game. There are so many different governing bodies running various competitions that each one gets to determine how they are going to interpret the various rules of the game.
For example, the 2022 World Cup featured a lot more added time to increase the amount of time the ball was in play. Ahead of the 2023-24 season the Premier League and English Football League adopted these timekeeping practices. Leagues like the Bundesliga and the Champions League did not.
All these governing bodies have their own freedom to decide how they are going to implement VAR for each and every rule. The World Cup and Champions League use semi-automated offside, the Premier League voted against it.4
It all comes down to how objective you want VAR to be. The more objective you want it, the more nuance and context you have to strip out. This is the fundamental difference of the handball rule. The Premier League makes it a much more subjective decision, whereas in order for VAR to make a hardline decision, UEFA strips out all the context. The UEFA interpretation of the rule is essentially if the ball hits your arm, it’s a handball. In the many cases where one asks “well what is the defender supposed to do there?” UEFA’s answer is essentially, defenders shouldn’t have arms.
This hardline interpretation of handball has allowed UEFA to be very consistent about this ever since VAR has been implemented. If it weren’t for UEFA’s dumb interpretation of the rule, United never would have gotten past PSG in 2019.
Here’s where it’s going to become maddening for fans though. For arguments sake, let’s say every entity was entirely consistent with their decisions every week. It would still never appear that way to players and fans due to the fact that you’re playing by one set of rules on Saturday followed by a different set of rules on Wednesday.
That’s why you get klout chasing accounts shouting “make it make sense” or “AGENDA” on twitter while showing a handball that wasn’t given in the Premier League compared to a softer one given against United in the Champions League. In the Premier League, neither the handball Harry Maguire gave away nor the one he won against Copenhagen - or Christian Eriksen’s handball against Bayern Munich, would have been given. In the Champions League Alejandro Garnacho’s shot striking Christian Romero’s arm would have. It’s actually quite simple to make sense of.
The objectivity doesn’t eliminate all the mistakes either. A day after Marcus Rashford was sent off for a challenge that UEFA has been pretty consistent on, a similar situation happened in Liverpool’s Europa League match and only a yellow card was brandished. Now just because they were wrong in the Liverpool match, doesn’t mean they were wrong to send Rashford off5. Just because referees mistakenly allowed Nathan Ake’s goal against Fulham to stand despite Manuel Akanji being very offside6 doesn’t mean they should be allowing it whenever someone else does it or that there’s a conspiracy whenever they correctly rule a goal out for the same offense.
Now here’s the kicker. It’s always been like this!
Even in the days before VAR it was known that European matches are going to be refereed differently than domestic ones. Furthermore that European match is going to be refereed differently if the ref is from Germany than it would be if he was from Italy or Spain or Sweden. Playing a match by one set of rules one day and by another set of rules three days later isn’t anything new.
VAR is never going to go away, but it should. Not because it’s adding more problems because truthfully it isn’t. We used to have one person making a decision about a subjective matter and now we have two people making subjective decisions. Since both of those decision makers are human adding a second only increases the chance of someone making a mistake or letting emotion sneak in and having someone feel like they “didn’t want to embarrass their mate because he was already having a tough game.”
As long as there are different people and different VARs for every match you’re going to have the same lack of consistency you always had.
What you do have now, is fans feeling like they can’t celebrate a goal until a minute later when it’s gone through a series of checks. Four minute delays as we review a foul the ref saw and no one even appealed.
All these things take away from the fans enjoyment of the game and what we gain from it is negligible. It’s not worth it and I wish they’d do away with it but that wouldn’t suddenly make referees better or end any arguments. It would just move the needle back to where it used to be.
The idea that VAR would offer any sort of objectivity or consistency was always a fantasy. As long as football is filled with subjective moments mistakes are going to be made and full consistency will never be had.
Neither of which were in the Premier League
And that technology makes mistakes too! Goal line technology has made ONE mistake out of god only knows how many decisions - only that mistake was a biggie as it swung the relegation battle for two clubs
And the whole the referees didn’t even use the monitor thing
Which makes no sense
I don’t agree with Rashford’s red card but by UEFA’s rules, it’s a red and they’ve been consistent about that
City won this match 5-1 but please, keep telling me how the league handed them this match
Big fan of your writing. This article nails it - the nature of football is the problem, not refs. Subjective calls, consistency is impossible. Scary how many people don't seem to get that.