The VAR Paradox
The VAR Paradox
The game is not played on screens - so why do we trap it there?
This is Editor’s Take, an informal blog wherein the SCOUTED editorial team discuss whatever in football is occupying their minds. This week, Tom Curren goes insane.
VAR this, VAR that. The story of this Premier League season has been defined by the cold and the calculated: a petrostate front has rampaged its way to another easy title, and four men in a room draw have drawn some lines on a two-dimensional screen.
Almost everyone agrees that it’s feckin’ boring. Not that VAR is boring, exclusively - although those long moments of waiting are torturous, particularly for supporters in the ground, who are offered no communication save some static words on a purple screen - but that the ‘discourse’ has become boring, that talking about football by talking around football, has become deeply boring.
And now we’re here: wondering, again, whether we really need VAR at all. This was meant to be a fairer, cleaner new age. It feels somehow dirtier, less modern than ever. The forensic nature of the process stands in harsh juxtaposition to the discourse it creates.
PGMOL began the season by seeking to extend the amount of time the ball would be in play. They failed to reel back the growing importance of those long moments when it’s not. Those moments the lines are drawn and the process is good and those four men roll replayed footage backwards and forwards, over and over.
Football is just storytelling, and those replays have, this season the most, wielded inordinate power over which stories we tell. Our discourse is not shaped by football as it’s played in real time, by frantic, bloodied moments of energy and athletic speed. They’re shaped by replays: by footage we put under a microscope, slow down, run backwards, view from angle one, angle two, from a bird’s eye. You see, at this speed, at this angle, he clips him. It’s a penalty.
In a stadium, amongst the feeling of a crowd, nobody knows what the fuck is going on. I’ve been there, singing expletives about a referee’s incompetence, only to get home and realise the veteran official within five metres of the action has somehow used his decades of experience and training to make an informed decision and I, an emotional idiot who must squint to follow the ball, was in fact wrong.
And here comes my hot take on VAR: this system was introduced under false pretences. This was not an attempt to make referees better, to make the game fairer or cleaner or whatever they said. VAR was an attempt to level the playing field between referees and the forensic level of detail the vast, vast majority of football fans use to consume the game.
It was an attempt to satiate the viewer, the consumer, the Now TV customer - because if the viewer gets perfect replays from every angle on every incident, they will always have far more information than the person on the field who, even at the apex of their profession, will likely only get around 85% of decisions correct. It is a tool in an arms race between officials and social media.
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This is not an article about the quality of refereeing, as I honestly see it as almost incidental to the issue. PGMOL has never been truly transparent, and the accuracy figures it trots out are smoke and mirrors. There’s lots I could say about the struggle to improve the standard: about how the abhorrent treatment of officials is creating a talent vacuum; about how opaque and obscure the bodies that ‘independently’ judge these systems are; about how the majority of decisions we judge to be calamitous on Twitter are merely the borderline few that go against our team, and we haven’t read the rules back to front, but we’re angry anyway. Things can get better, things should get better, but they will never be perfect.
For a sport as frantic and fast and deeply subjective as football, officiating at a unanimously agreed 100% accuracy is fool’s gold. It will never, ever be achieved, not even when mutant humans evolve with third eyeballs and x-ray vision. Even then the subjective, the bias, the emotion will remain. (Unless nobody does anything about Manchester City). In their (characteristically opaque) end-of-season review, The Premier League judged VAR to have made just one factually incorrect intervention all year (Luis Diaz at Tottenham Hotspur). The rest were either subjective (the panel felt VAR intervened when they should not have) or classified as ‘failure to intervene’. The Premier League say the level of accuracy has risen from 82% pre-VAR to 96% this season.
Account for some seriously fudged numbers here, but I feel the following conclusion is still fair: the level of accuracy is high and, in this writer’s opinion, within an acceptable range considering officials are human beings making subjective decisions over a sport that moves at a million miles per hour, and especially considering fans will never agree on what constitutes a ‘correct’ decision anyway. And still, we hate everything about it.
So the solution, of course, is to scrap it and return to the golden age, which people seem to have miraculously forgotten they hated, too. And we’ll be back where we started: wishing we could somehow raise a superhuman generation of officials who not only are willing to do a job that might result in your family being assaulted in an airport, but able to do it while making 245 micro-decisions in 90 minutes to a perfect degree of accuracy every week.
So, if officials will never reach perfect accuracy and fans will likely never be satiated even if they do, what else is left in this angry equation? What is the element everyone is seeing, but nobody wants to look at? The coverage. It’s the fact all this discourse stems from the armchair fans who pore over the 49 angles fed to them by TNT Sports and send barrages of furious tweets in response.
If VAR goes, the coverage must change with it. Viewers must see the game as officials do: at one million miles per hour.
This is akin to asking a mountain to move because it’s blocking the sun. Power in football is held in many high places, but television holds an inordinate share. And no amount of goodwill or ‘this would be best for the game’ is going to make them relinquish it. It’s impossible.
So the following is not something I have to worry about, but I’ll cover it all the same. I realise my argument here could be misconstrued as a journalist suggesting a body like the PGMOL should be less scrutinised by independent media and the public, which I would be deeply ashamed to do in any other walk of life. And I must be clear: if coverage changes to protect referees and dampen this exhausting discourse, it should only be done alongside the formation of an entirely independent and truly transparent third party to hold the standard to account.
I don’t know how this would look in actuality. But I feel, intuitively, that football coverage without forensic analysis of every decision, that flows as football is meant to flow, would just feel better. If the game simply moved from each decision to the resulting action, safe in the knowledge that mistakes would be caught by an independent third party after the fact, might we all enjoy the game a little more?
Even as I write and try to visualise such a future, reality seeps in. Who’s going to stop Jamie Carragher doing whatever the fuck he wants, really? Imagine watching a penalty in the Champions League final without a million replays of the apparent contact. It sounds absurd. And, of course, this is the digital age: footage would be recorded and slowed and zoomed anyway by internet sleuths with a grudge. One side of this arms race will always engage, but I honestly believe this is a war that simply cannot be won - so peace relies on the other to not respond. And if they do, and this continues to escalate, the only natural conclusion is a form of the sport that is so deeply mechanical that it barely resembles the thing we fell in love with at all. What kind of victory is that?
Perhaps it seems absurd only because we’ve become so conditioned to replays we cannot imagine a world without them. Perhaps a better game awaits beyond a bold, radical and seemingly ridiculous reform that works in opposition to the reality capital has built around it. Is this worth pondering, or is it the ramblings of a madman driven insane by Twitter? Considering Stephen uses this newsletter to routinely have one-sided arguments with his timeline, I feel like I’ve likely been infected, too. Ah, well. It gets us all in the end.
Look, all I know is that if we want football back, I feel we must settle for 85% - or at least for incremental improvements on it. But these firestorms we create around the 15% are untenable - the merry-go-round will keep spinning and we’ll be perpetually caught in this technological arms race, this sanitisation of the sport. The pressure it creates will only lead us back here, to the cold and the plastic and the two-dimensional screens. So oxygen must be removed from the equation; the coverage must change.
Hah, good luck with that. I’ll see you back here in twelve months for the exact same conversation. I’ll keep wistfully wishing we could enjoy football as it is played - in the glorious now.
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