To VAR or not to VAR? That is the question.
As The Athletic revealed on Wednesday, the Premier League’s clubs will hold a vote at their annual general meeting next month over a proposal to abolish the video assistant referee (VAR) system from the start of the 2024-25 season.
VAR was introduced in the Premier League at the start of the 2019-20 season. There have been plenty of controversial decisions since. Wolverhampton Wanderers, one of the teams who have been heavily impacted by bad calls, have now brought forward the proposal.
But should VAR be scrapped? Or will that not fix the Premier League’s officiating problem? Here, The Athletic’s Steve Madeley and Amitai Winehouse have put forward the case for and against the system.
Video refereeing and its impact on the Premier League this season…
- What VAR denies match-going fans far outweighs what it gives them back
- If video refs can’t decide quickly, on-pitch officials should review their own decisions
- Don’t use it as an excuse, Nottingham Forest — use it as inspiration
The case against VAR
Credit where it’s due, Molineux has finally witnessed an example of the VAR system working as it should.
Wolves’ 3-1 defeat to Crystal Palace on Saturday saw two textbook examples of officials’ errors being corrected at Stockley Park — Matheus Cunha’s goal being awarded after it was ruled out wrongly for offside and Cunha’s penalty being correctly turned into a free kick just outside the box.
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Two perfect examples of the technology helping out the officials on the field.
Yet that really isn’t the point — and we should never have been hoodwinked into believing it was. In the lengthy debate that preceded VAR’s introduction, its proponents told us repeatedly that getting a higher proportion of decisions correct was “the most important thing”.
It never was. And it never will be.
It is important, of course. Nobody with an interest in football could argue seriously that improving the accuracy of decision-making is a bad thing — but the most important thing? Not a chance.
The most important thing for football’s administrators should always have been the matchday experience for supporters inside stadiums and viewers watching on television. The joy of celebrating a goal with thousands of strangers united in a common love of a football team is the reason people pay to watch a game, whether at the turnstile or via a TV subscription.
Nobody ever threatened to boycott a game unless the decision to award a penalty midway through the second half was analysed for five minutes by an official hundreds of miles away while the fans in the ground sat in the cold with no information. The endless delays and lack of communication could easily drive fans away. VAR sucks the spontaneity and joy out of the spectator experience.
It replaces hot drama with cold forensics and chills the excitement that keeps supporters coming back. It is, to quote match-going Wolves fans, “boring” — but it is not an issue exclusive to Wolves. In the last 18 months, Wolves have suffered more than most from baffling VAR interventions but next season, it might be someone else.
And understandably, those with a vested interest in Wolves — fans, coaches, players and even us journalists — have been guilty of getting some of the injustices out of proportion. There is not a shred of evidence to support the conspiracy theories (‘they don’t want Wolves to win’) of some fans. Not every decision that goes against the club is a howler.
Some calls — such as Andre Onana’s unpunished assault on Sasa Kalajdzic in Manchester United and Wolves’ August opener, or Nick Pope’s cynical barge on Raul Jimenez at St James’ Park last season, which was reviewed and waved away — are inexplicable ‘stinkers’.
Others — such as the penalty awarded against Rayan Ait-Nouri at Manchester City this month — are entirely subjective. Some — such as Tawanda Chirewa being penalised for offside in the dying moments of the defeat to West Ham United — are entirely justifiable decisions.
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But that is not the point. If VAR is persisted with, it will probably get better. Practice makes perfect and as officials become more used to the VAR process, the proportion of shocking decisions should be reduced.
But there is no refined, fine-tuned version of VAR that will ever restore the moments of emotion that this unsatisfactory version has taken away.
And those moments are worth a thousand times more than a few mistakes being corrected.
Steve Madeley
The case for VAR
People increasingly talk about ‘pretty privilege’. This is the idea that if you’re attractive, you are seen as being smarter and funnier — and have a major advantage when it comes to employment. And the biggest issue is that the person involved isn’t even aware of the benefit they have.
Well, let me put it to you that people who think you should get rid of video assistant referees are taking advantage of their own form of privilege. Like pretty privilege, the person involved is unaware of just how fortunate they are.
This form of privilege? Premier League privilege.
There’s this belief that if you do away with the VAR system, you will make Premier League football better. It’s easy enough to imagine that scenario in a world in which Howard Webb, Martin Atkinson and Michael Oliver were dashing about the turf, giving penalties where penalties are due and not missing the obvious.
But let me tell you about life in the trenches of the English Football League (EFL). Down in the EFL, you can see a defender make clear contact with the shin of a striker in the box, missing the ball entirely, and have the referee wave two arms to say, “Nope, nothing for me.”
You can watch a clearly offside player latch onto a pass, put the ball in the net and then look to the assistant, waiting for the flag to be raised, only for him to do that weird sideways walk back to halfway without a care in the world.
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You can, as a Blackburn fan pointed out to me, watch a goal scored with a hand, denying you a place in the play-offs, and realise how futile shouting at the sun about it is.
And you can enjoy all of these moments while watching back replays that show just how bad the decision is, knowing that a simple conversation could change a season-defining moment, and yet knowing that, actually, we’re stuck with it. Sorry. It’s just how it works down here.
Sure, with VAR, you have to wait an onerous two minutes for lines to be drawn. Or, sometimes, an on-field decision isn’t overturned because it’s 50/50, and yes, that’s how it works. Very rarely, an unbelievable error is made — like Liverpool against Tottenham Hotspur this season.
But that speaks for the people at the controls being bad, not the system itself. Why, at the end of the day, are people who are very good at running around a pitch and spotting fouls being tasked with doing the same from an office, on a screen?
The trick is really to employ VAR-specific officials. We’re talking Laws of the Game nerds who are good with a mouse and who are happy to be sat in a box at Stockley Park, away from the shouting and the screaming.
Because the truth, which you might have all realised, is Premier League officiating privilege is dying. We in the EFL have known this for years — the stock of referees is terrible. Premier League-only watchers have been complaining about the latest crop, but, buddy, we’ve been dealing with them for years. Every time someone is added to the top rank of referees, visions of terrible decisions flash through my brain.
If you think ditching VAR is going to fix things, you have another thing coming — it’s the only thing that will save you and your privilege from really confronting the referees arriving in the top flight soon.
Amitai Winehouse
(Top photo: Getty Images)