Mikel Arteta was vociferous, righteous and right; VAR is anti-football and anti-humanity
Mikel Arteta’s outburst at the VAR decision which saw Arsenal lose against Newcastle was spectacular. Maybe he should stop dying his hair black like an ageing heavy metaller and go grey to prove how VAR is making him old before our eyes.
His criticism of the decision was vociferous, righteous and right. Yes, it’s the same old same old. How many times this has to be said beggars belief. But apparently it’s not been said enough yet.
“Embarrassing, it’s an absolute disgrace, that’s what it is: a disgrace. There’s so much at stake, we’ve put in so many hours to compete at the highest level and you cannot imagine the amount of messages we’ve had saying this cannot continue.
“It’s embarrassing. It’s not acceptable, there’s too much at stake. I don’t want to be in the hands of these people. I don’t know how to feel. I’m wasting my time, we are wasting our time.”
It surely needs all the top managers to echo these words to try and get the appalling system suspended. Of course, Arteta would have been equally discontent if a non-VAR refereed game had been refereed similarly, which is not that unlikely. The difference is he wouldn’t have been promised a new error-free system which would solve contentious decisions. But he has, it hasn’t, and he’s rightly furious about the introduction of a system that doesn’t do what it says on the tin and has made referees worse.
As it is, he’s been promised things will be correctly called only to see them incorrectly called. That is much, much worse. The anger, I think, burning inside Arteta, is that VAR is not only repeating the errors of the non-VAR world after being brought in to prevent that happening but also created an added layer of mistakes.
If nothing else, the whole process is a constantly interesting lesson in the human psyche. Promise football something which it is not within its power to deliver and football gets very angry. Failing to deliver the promise to outlaw the things that have annoyed them in the past, is a far worse situation than not trying at all and just telling them all to accept mistakes will be made.
You can argue that is logically inconsistent, but who said football was ever based on logic and not emotion?
I’m sure the VAR experiment will continue for a while yet, if only to cover exposed backsides. But surely at some point, there has to be, at the very least, a break to reconsider the value of this ‘technology’. I put that in inverted commas because it often feels anything but technological; it more often feels like a drunk, pulling on a fag, squinting at a TV and making a call.
I do understand that many supporters of VAR flinch at this criticism, feeling that for all its faults, it is still getting more decisions right and they may have the stats to prove it. However, what those people need to understand is that football is an organic whole. Trying to hive off a specific section of decision-making to the line-drawing software and thinking it won’t affect the whole of the football body, fails to understand the interconnectedness of everything. You mess with one thing and you affect something else.
And anyway, is it fair to rule in or out goals but not rule in or out everything else? When everything is quite obviously connected to everything else, where is the fairness in that? I’ll tell you where: it’s nowhere.
If you promise to iron out mistakes and make calls that are impossible for the referee to give in real time and in trying to do that, you make glaring errors, errors that go against your stated desire to be a light touch and to only overturn glaring mistakes, you can expect everyone to be alienated to one degree or another. The great achievement is to alienate everyone in the football food chain, with the exception of people who don’t actually like football.
Football continues, it is very adaptable and very, very tolerant but when you are losing some of the fundamental attractions of the game, that in itself is a risk to the primacy of this level of the sport. What those responsible for its introduction, or indeed its very existence, fail to understand is that much of football’s attractions lie in its humanity, in its randomness and its appeal to humans on a visceral level. The four-minute ‘review’ just lets the air out and turns the big light on. It shines bright light into darkness in search of self-justification of its own existence. It becomes not about the game but about the technology.
In other words, the making of mistakes was one of its attractions of football and that is a perfect reflection of humanity. I don’t want football to be perfect. I know it can’t be. The lesson here is this: just do your best. That’s all we can ask for ourselves, all we can ask of anyone.
Honestly, you mess with imperfection at your peril because that is at the core of the attractions of football. In other words, no matter who says otherwise or how vociferously they say so, we don’t really want everything to be 100% right all of the time. We like ambiguity, we like inconsistency, it reflects our broad lived experience. Life goes wrong. Mistakes are made. Stupidity is rife. Just ask anyone who is alive. You can’t iron that out. Nor should you want to.
Without our flaws we are nothing but soulless robots. The flaws in the fabric of existence are what separates us from the machines. We are fallible. Sport is about overcoming these things by human endeavour or by luck.
VAR should never have promised it would make football life better but it had to otherwise we would have all said, ‘well what’s the point then?’ They just put their heads down and put their faith in it on little more than whim and delusion. It is fundamentally simple-minded to want a referee team to get the extra few percent of decisions correct. It fails to understand that all you’re doing is farming out the fallibility to an extra layer of admin. I mean, isn’t that really obvious?
I don’t believe that it has increased correct decisions, though it is said to have done so by a staggering two to five percent. But even if it has, what have we lost in achieving that and is that which we have lost worth losing for that slight ‘improvement’?
Football isn’t about getting every call right, it’s about trying to get every call right. That is what every player is doing. No-one means to volley it wide of the goal when trying to score, but we can accept that. So quite why we can’t accept that occasionally a marginal decision will be made wrongly and would want a system installed to iron that out, is a puzzle.
Well I say it’s a puzzle, but it isn’t really, because the vast majority of fans don’t like and don’t want VAR and can accept mistakes are made. Why? We have personally made mistakes. It’s in our DNA. The authorities’ mistake was to listen to the moaning voices from the dressing room to the terraces and take them seriously.
VAR, whether making correct or incorrect decisions, is anti-humanity in its existence and I think this is what is motivating those who complain long and loud about it, even if they don’t know it is. Basically, it doesn’t feel right. It’s no more precise than that. We all have to hang around and wait until an analogue human looks at a digital image and all they can do is cast another subjective analogue decision based on analogue rules which were never meant to be used digitally. There is a logical inconsistency to it all.
There are at least as many VAR complaints as they ever were without it. We are no further forward, rather we have gone backwards. When the paying punter has to wait anything up to five minutes to know whether they can celebrate or commiserate a goal, you know something has gone badly wrong. That isn’t in doubt. Also not in doubt is that sinking feeling when a goal goes in and all the energy falls out of the atmosphere as ‘VAR check’ is flashed up on the big screen.
The PGMOL has had a lot of time to prove they can operate the system correctly consistently. If you only watch Premier League football, maybe you’re just getting used to putting up with it, but watch any other football down the pyramid and it is not a worse, more unfair, form of the game. That in itself is the argument winner. That alone proves how irrelevant VAR is, proves it is trying to solve an unsolvable problem that doesn’t need solving. It’s sport; everyone and everything is fallible. That’s okay, our fallibility is what makes us human and that’s something we should hang onto, not try and erase.
The thing we value about football isn’t and never has been the correctness of 100% of decisions. It is bigger than that. Stop searching for perfection. It just makes things worse. Yes I’m an analogue person in a digital world, but so is football. And if you try to fit it into a world that it simply doesn’t fit into, there will always be grief. Is that what you or anyone wants really?
This ludicrous experiment which no-one seems prepared for conceptually, even now, has to stop. We told you it was a bad idea. Try listening. We are right. You are wrong. It’s OK.
