Bad vibes and VAR: Waiting game leaves fans frustrated by marginal calls | Video Assistant Referees (VAR)

ohOn Thursday, Premier League clubs will vote on Wolves' proposal. remove video assistant referees. The motion will almost certainly not achieve majority support, much less secure the 14 votes of the 20 needed for its approval. But what it can do is change the Overton window and lead to a serious review of VAR, an assessment of where it works and where it doesn't. And that's something that should have been done a long time ago.

Consultation is not fashionable in the modern world. Politicians of all stripes too often act by decree, and that is as true in football as anything else. VAR was imposed for the 2018 World Cup with minimal research or conversation and was accepted almost everywhere without anyone really investigating the consequences.

While the general feeling was that VAR worked in Russia, two very significant errors stand out, the apparent lack of fuss perhaps because neither incident harmed a team with a large number of fans here. Cristiano Ronaldo should have been sent off for a clear nudge against Iranand the penalty with which France tied in the final against Croatia was due to a nonsense Handball decision against Ivan Perisic.

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

It also created one of the first pundit fogs to complicate the issue, with both Alan Shearer and Didier Drogba suggesting that the referee was right to show only one yellow card (and perhaps not even that) because he had had to watch from multiple angles, taking significant time. How then, they asked, could the error be obvious enough to overturn the original decision?

But this is nonsense: the objective of VAR is that can see multiple angles: “clear and obvious” does not mean that a decision can be made from the close-up chosen by the director. That's why the idea that if VAR officials take more than a minute the on-field decision should stand is so wrong: what happens if the director doesn't select the angle that clearly shows the elbow until the 61st second? Once you have stopped the game, you can also make the right decision; Giving under-pressure officials the added anxiety of working against the clock helps no one.

Secondly, VAR has turned games into a dead end served by overzealous neighborhood watch. VAR officials became like the priests of a fundamentalist sect, ruthlessly hunting down sin so they could punish it. It doesn't matter if the ball was traveling at high speed and took an outrageous deflection six inches in front of you before hitting your hand in front of your body, the foul must be atoned for with a penalty. Do not ask why the gods demand it, simply offer the required sacrifice.

Fortunately, there has been some liberalization in that sense, but, especially in the case of handball, the spirit will surely be less: “Is there something here that I can penalize?” than: “Has anyone really tried to cheat?”

But before we get into the details, there is something much more fundamental that serves as a useful indicator of the direction in which football is moving, which increasingly favors television viewers over fans in the stadium. For the latter the VAR is terrible. It's not just a loss of spontaneity, that it's harder to commit to celebrating a goal without knowing whether some distant movement of the curtain could rule it out; It's about the long minutes of waiting, with nothing to see but the players also waiting, faced with a decision that is never adequately communicated.

VAR is a television phenomenon. On the field, fans may rage against decisions, but they rarely know for sure that they are wrong. It is those who have seen multiple replays immediately afterward who demand that the injustice be corrected.

The VAR experience for those watching on a screen is fine; they see various angles, the offside lines drawn, they have at least a general understanding of the process. For those who rarely attend matches – even journalists who have monitors next to them – it is easy to forget how bad the experience is for fans, many of whom will often have paid extraordinary sums for tickets.

The in-stadium experience can clearly be improved to some extent, even if the nature of football, the multiplicity of possibilities, means that VAR checks can never become as much a part of the fan experience as it is. the decision review system in cricket. But still, VAR feels like a TV fan problem, or at least a product of an analysis that endlessly evaluates borderline subjective decisions as if some objective truth exists.

It turns out that many people don't even like objective truth (sort of). It is true that the level of precision that VAR claims in offsides is ridiculous, given that players can move up to 15cm between the frames and the field lines. first division They are applied by VAR officials by asking them to move them from one side to the other, as if someone were leveling a painting on a wall: “a little to the left… a little to the right”, but the way the movement is articulated complaint tends to be that the offside law was not invented for such marginal calls.

True, but the line also has to be somewhere, unless the decision is to be based on vibrations and VAR, even in the slightly artificial form used so far in the Premier League, is still more accurate than a game of 40 years ago. Officer, moving, 50 meters away. Semi-automated offsides should make the process even more precise and, above all, faster.

Line decisions are one thing, but the vast majority of decisions in football are subjective. And it's still unclear whether the greater precision that VAR has brought (although, paradoxically, because the expectation is of perfection, they feel less precise, leading to a host of conspiracy theories) is worth the sacrifice of spontaneity, the loss of momentum, the endless waits. in stadiums.

It seems strange considering how the game is presented as an entertainment product today, but no one seems to have asked what VAR would do for its feel. But perhaps the feeling in the stadium is no longer a big concern for football administrators.