There’s a scene in the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy where a delegation from the Amalgamated Union of Philosophers, Sages and Luminaries confront Deep Thought, the universe’s greatest super computer. Deep Thought has been tasked with answering the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything but the Philosophers insist that task is their job and theirs alone.
Deep Thought wins them over by explaining it’ll take him millions of years to compute the question and in the meantime, philosophers can milk the publicity and enjoy the circus created around his deliberations.
“Yes,” declaimed Deep Thought, “running a programme like this is bound to create an enormous amount of popular publicity for the whole area of philosophy. Everyone’s going to have their own theories, and who better to capitalize on that market than you yourself? So long as you can keep disagreeing violently enough and slagging each other off in the popular press, you can keep yourself on the gravy train for life.”
Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Disagreeing violently? Slagging off in the press? Gravy train for life?
I am reminded of this when I hear the debates among football pundits, commentators, managers and others around VAR – the video assistant referee. VAR is actually a team of three people who work together to review certain decisions made by the main on-pitch referee.
A kind of consensus seems to be emerging around VAR, best expressed in The Guardian on 1st December 2023:
“Having off-pitch officials who could replay match incidents was supposed to help referees. But technology is changing the sport, critics say, for the worse. In football, the video assistant referee (VAR) was brought in to reduce the number of controversial decisions. Many fans, with good reason, think the opposite has happened”
Guardian Opinion 1st Dec 23
In November, Jonathan Lieu wrote:
“Too much controversy, too much pointless squabbling, too much bad blood and bad faith.”
Guardian 7th November 2023
He is arguing that it’s VAR that is responsible for this (a bit disingenuous since he’s one of those doing the squabbling) but these are exactly the disputes we previously had about bad refereeing decisions. Come to think about it, bad refereeing decisions have taken up the biggest chunk of football chat for about ten years. Now we’re having those disputes about VAR. Plus ca change. I rest my case.
But there’s more. Much more.
The case against VAR firstly rests on the contention that its offsite deliberations hold up the game, sometimes for several minutes, while decisions are reviewed. This spoils the spectacle, especially for fans in the ground, who may not know what is happening. It is further argued that many decisions in football refereeing are subjective so getting them all “right” is an impossible goal. In any case, even if we do agree on a “right” decision, VAR sometimes gets it wrong. Above all, football is a tribal game. The cut and thrust and post-match debate is an integral part of the experience. If that includes disputes and blame games over refereeing decisions, that’s part of it too.
I could not disagree more.
Let’s take the time delays first. I do agree that reviews sometimes take too long and that we need to speed them up. But painting football as high speed non-stop entertainment is unrealistic, verging on fanciful. It has never been like that. For a start the ball isn’t even in play for about a third of the time. The typical 90 minute match has active play with the ball on the pitch, for somewhere between fifty five and seventy minutes, even in the modern format where stoppages are supposedly recorded and time is added on. Football is riddled with stoppages. Always has been. Moreover, for the vast bulk of football fans who are not at the ground but watching on TV, the game is edited anyway, so it’s up to “us” how much we leave in or exclude. Editors often cut away from the action to feature stuff that’s not football action – a celebrity or ex-manager in the crowd, a goal celebration or a bit of juicy pushing and shoving between players. If you have ever tried watching football without all this “punctuation” it’s a hugely disorientating experience.
There’s another observation about the supposed sanctity of non-stop football action. Some of the greatest and most celebrated players have made their names by slowing the game down, preventing the other team from playing and by generally employing the spoiling tactics we now rather beautifully describe as shithousery. Ironically, killing the game has always been one of the most celebrated dark arts of the ‘beautiful game’.
There was an argument that VAR prevents these cynical spoiling tactics and that this would favour bigger clubs thus adding to the inequality in the Premiership. It assumes “big clubs” are less cynical and more likely to be playing some kind of pure, beautiful, flowing football. I’m afraid I simply don’t buy this. When Eddie Howe managed Bournemouth (a small team in the Premiership context– I think we can all agree), he made sure they punched above their weight by all kinds of chicanery and spoiling tactics. Now he manages Newcastle (a big team, one of the richest in the world, owned by the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund) he employs similar tactics. The most successful teams dominating the Premiership have mostly had, in their ranks, high calibre stoppers and spoilers. In Chelsea’s Golden Age, Captain, John Terry was famous for the “dark arts”. Ngolo Kante, Roy Keane, Patrick Vieira etc…. The central stopper hall of fame is populated by some of football’s biggest names from its biggest clubs.
Let’s address the next argument – that there is often no “right” decision in many cases because football is subjective. Unfortunately, if we accept this then there really is no hope at all and we’re descending into the alternative football world of tribal fanaticism. Just like everyone else, I have sat watching football and howled with derision as a decision goes against my team, only to express the exact opposite when the same decision goes for us. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a correct application of the rules in 99% of cases. And it seems very obvious to me that in those cases where it is close, subjective, obscured or too quick to see, that is exactly when you need a video review. The alternative seems to be to say ‘whatever’ and accept that it will often be wrong.
Where VAR itself gets a decision demonstrably wrong, the case is slightly different. Here we have a genuine injustice. But it’s not VAR that’s wrong. An individual (or here team of 3 individuals) has made an analysis, in this case from video showing multiple angles, which we later see to be wrong – just like the case where a referee gets it wrong in the old fashioned way. We should make this as rare as possible – that’s exactly why we have VAR, to make it less likely. Duh.
This is probably the place to mention some more positive arguments for VAR. Take the offside law. Since we started being shown the video replays that the analysts use, it has become plain that it’s patently impossible for a human being running the line to get these decisions consistently correct. The margins are too small and the act of watching the ball and the player simultaneously is not realistic. We now know that many of these decisions before VAR were wrong and that results probably hinged on this. If you think about this for a moment you soon realise that dozens of results every season are determined pretty much by chance.
My biggest disagreement is with the argument that the cut and thrust and the debated decisions are just “part of the game”. This is effectively to say it’s more important to create hot entertainment than to ensure the right team wins. I do get the tribal bit and I understand where this comes from. I have written elsewhere that one purpose of football in modern society is to give us a safe place to vent our anger and frustration. It’s the best place – the most harmless place – to scream and swear and to hurl vitriol. The referee is a key player in this. Blaming “The Wanker in the Black” for your team’s defeat has an honourable tradition going back generations.
But if we accept this argument – that the circus is more important than the sport – two other things follow.
First, you may remember the furore around Anders Frisk – he was the referee who famously denied Chelsea several penalty appeals in their Champions League match with Barcelona in 2005. Chelsea lost and went out of the competition, but in the ensuing blame game Frisk was targeted with a horrendous hate campaign and death threats. He retired from refereeing as a result. This kind of thing is more common than we imagine. Even Wayne Barnes, the highly regarded international rugby referee, describes, in his autobiography, how his family received death threats after some controversial decisions he made at the Rugby world Cup. And that’s rugby. a nice gentlemanly game compared with football. The Frisk saga was nearly twenty years ago now – the online hate industry was in its infancy. Imagine the implications of leaving football referees hung out to dry nowadays without VAR to at least share some of the responsibility.
And it could get worse. If we do allow that the correct result isn’t the most important outcome then how long before we discover that results are being bought. It has already happened in Italy. Ahh but that’s Italy, not the same. Ask Bruce Grobelaar. Couldn’t happen here. Not in the Premier League, where a huge slug of the multi billion pound sponsorship comes from…..checks notes ….. the betting industry.
Dun dun derrrr.
The Aspidistra 