Modern football is sh*t and VAR (and Arsenal) at the heart of every single reason

We’ve been compiling a big old list of all the great many things that are sh*t about modern football, because it is now entirely agreed upon that sh*t is indeed what it now is.

And it’s occurred to us that sitting right at the heart of sh*t modern football is a cancer that, while it might not be the direct cause of all the things wrong with how the game is now played and experienced, is at the very least a contributory and exaggerating factor in every single one.

Run through all the things that are wrong with the game right now, and you soon reach two key conclusions. The first is that nobody really knows what it is they do want, other than it’s not really this but nor is it tiki-taka, and really it’s all a bit nostalgia-grift in its longing to bring back a hazy half-forgotten past that also never really existed.

But what people want is so often inherently contradictory. They want consistency until they want common sense. They want a contact sport, but not really at corners very much. They want perfect correct decisions but don’t want to wait, or even to accept it’s an idle fantasy to imagine it has or could ever be the case. They want old-stadium atmosphere with new-build facilities. They want to believe their club is the biggest and bestest but also a tiny little thing fighting the good fight against those big evil clubs as well as the grand conspiracy of referees and the league and the FA and football f*cking 365 who are all so obviously biased against them.

The second is that absolutely all of this stuff is fed and sustained and insidiously grown by one thing; a great deal of this existed before VAR came along but all of it has now been made worse by a plague mis-sold as a cure.

At that point you also realise that almost all the problems – from Mikel Arteta playing the most provocatively offensive set-piece wrestleball to Arsene Wenger having the most provocatively stupid VAR ideas to the fanbase still most prone to swift descent into tinfoil territory at the first sight of a minor setback – can be linked decisively back to Arsenal.

Is one clear solution for the greater good and long-term health of the game really to simply liquidate Arsenal Football Club? Answer, sadly, must be yes.

But it does feel like it’s worth a serious grown-up conversation about what we do with VAR given how it infests and infects everything else.

Because even now the movement is in the other direction, the wrong direction. The current response to VAR’s failings is to expand rather than reduce or expunge its scope. Check corners, check yellow cards. Throw the whole game (or at least some poor bastards in Canada) open to the unintended consequences of performing major surgery on an offside law that worked really quite well before VAR and is now on the road to being replaced by a genuinely stupid alternative littered with incredibly obvious flaws that will be entirely impossible for officials to rule on at any game without VAR while having potential for untold damage to the whole flow and rhythm of the sport.

And all this while – this is the real clincher – also doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WHATSOEVER to even address the specific problem it’s meant to address. Wenger’s plan is to eradicate pixel-peering toenail offsides that boil everyone’s piss, but all he’s now doing is replacing them with pixel-peering toenail onsides that will look even more absurd and ultimately reduce the entire sport to low blocks, long balls and set-pieces once and for all as the idea of a high-line becomes so risky and its benefit so diluted that not even Ange Postecoglou would consider it.

VAR is also for sure a big factor in why the atmosphere isn’t what it was at games. When stoppages kill momentum on the pitch they also disrupt the rhythm of that audible involvement and contribution to the story of a game from the stands. People absolutely definitely don’t celebrate goals like they used to in the initial moment, despite VAR-apologists continuing to bafflingly insist they do.

VAR is very obviously a provider of constant grist to the conspiracy mill. It all comes back to the false premise on which VAR was first built and sold – that perfect unanimously agreed-upon correct decisions are possible in a sport like football where the devil lies in the infinite greys. We know that cannot happen, of course, because we all still see decisions every week where no consensus exists among players, supporters, managers or pundits.

But with VAR, you can see the moving parts far more clearly and everything takes much longer. One of the many unintended consequences ushered in by the shift to a VAR-ruled game has been that when a ‘mistake’ occurs it is more rather than less irritating.

We know it was frustrating – we’ve all felt it – but we really do think everyone would be much better off if we could go back but now understand that a set of officials making a real-time decision based on one full-speed look at an incident will lead to mistakes but that these will be more explicable and bearable than what we have now. It’s the deliberateness and deliberation of VAR that make ‘mistakes’ so much harder to accept. Which makes all those shades-of-grey decisions that happen to go against you harder to accept.

Which makes it far easier to imagine a nefarious guiding hand behind it all, even when all that’s really happening is the same thing that always did: officials trying to do the best they can to deliver outcomes as close as they can to an impossible flawless ideal. Except now it’s via a method we’ve all been told can and will take us to that impossible dreamland.

So now when one goal is disallowed for a push and another is allowed despite a push or one player is deemed to be interfering from an offside position and another is not, it is far less easily accepted for what it is. VAR has created zero tolerance for the Seen Them Given or It’s One Of Those, Isn’t It? decisions while having no way of removing them.

Which again bleeds into another familiar old officiating trope for which VAR has worked as a potent irritation-multiplier.

Yes, it’s the old consistency-common sense dichotomy. The greatest paradox in the game. All we want from officials is consistency – so either Randal Kolo Muani and Raul Jimenez both committed fouls or neither of them did, for instance – until all we want from officials is common sense – so that Erling Haaland can score a goal despite very obviously fouling Dominik Szoboszlai because it feels right.

You cannot have everything. You absolutely cannot argue for VAR continuing to exist and also argue for a common-sense approach when you get the feels over a specific incident as Gary Neville did in the immediate aftermath of that Man City goal at Liverpool.

VAR very obviously exacerbates the toxicity of modern fandom for all the above reasons. And it definitely plays its part – or doesn’t – in the way your modern wrestling-based corners are governed. Or not governed.

Is it all really this simple? Is the solution to making football not sh*t any more simply to get rid of VAR?

It certainly feels like it couldn’t hurt. It’s either that or get rid of Arsenal. Or both, if you want.