Premier League needs to vaccinate against VAR

It was all going to be so smooth, wasn’t it? There was no talk of VAR being hard to introduce, nor hard to make it work. It would be quick, almost instant and transparent. It would make wrongs right. Easy. Talk was only of the benefits and naysayers were Luddites.

Didn’t we want decisions to be right? What was wrong with us? There’s so much money in the game these days, we must get things right at all costs…Blah blah bleurgh…you remember how it all went.

Now VAR is into its second season and earlier this month, a BBC poll revealed a majority of fans think it’s made football worse. Only a third of fans across the UK said they believe VAR has made football better. The poll of 2,100 fans, carried out by Savanta ComRes, shows that while 30% of fans think it has improved the game, 44% of fans actually think it has made football worse. Almost half of fans said they believe the introduction of VAR has made football less exciting.

The poll also shows: 36% of supporters aged 18-34 believe VAR has made football better, compared with 29% of fans aged 55 and over. Pro-VAR attitudes are a minority across all age groups.

This doesn’t give those of us who wrote thousands of words of opposition to it any pleasure. To see the game at this level being chewed up, perverted and assaulted in this way is depressing. So much that was the beating heart and the very essence of football has been lost, but the system is surely unsustainable against this backdrop of discontent.

Those still hoping VAR will stop being a bully and become a caring and gentle lover, have been reduced to pointing out every time VAR ‘works’ and saying how this is an example of how it should be and how great it is that a mistake was corrected. But has making a few wrongs right improved our enjoyment of the game? No, it hasn’t. Its duck feather does not counterbalance VAR’s lead weight for the majority.

The excuses proffered for VAR by those still clinging to its wreckage have become ever-more desperate. The wait for a goal to be allowed provides two moments of ecstasy not one, some have said. One when the ball goes in and one when it passes scrutiny. Who do they think they’re fooling? For many it has muted the first and, as the seconds tick away, the players go back to the halfway line and stand around as a cold easterly blows, as they wait for the goal to be checked, reducing the second quite profoundly. VAR has provided a footballing coitus interruptus at the very moment of ecstasy, as it runs the rule over the validity of a goal. In a game of few goals, if you’re stealing football’s orgasm, you’re not just removing its sublime seconds of bliss, you’re also devaluing the foreplay.

Some have spent a lot of time thinking up often quite tortuous tweaks, such as all decisions have to be made within 30 seconds, or sides get three challenges per game. There’s no shortage of VAR adaptations on offer to try and make a bad thing better, proof itself of how flawed VAR is.

Then some moved onto an even more tortured position to excuse VAR’s continuing presence by advocating the rules of football be changed to accommodate the intrusive eye of Stockley Park, with offside in particular. This took us to the frankly remarkable situation where the game’s rules are potentially being changed, not to make the game more entertaining (as was true for the removal of the old back pass rule), but rather so the technology used to officiate it can operate without making everyone angry. That’s desperate.

To err is to be human, to forgive is divine, but to draw lines on a screen is a waste of time, as Alexander Pope almost said.

Other excuses VAR’s dwindling band of supporters are still putting forward are that it’ll get better once everyone gets used to it. There is no evidence of this. If anything the opposite is true. Some protest it is just not being implemented properly, not willing to admit that it actually is, but what it is implementing is a badly flawed concept.

Then there was the “why don’t they just use the monitor?” phase. If only they’d use the monitors, everything would be much better, was the claim. Now they have, and it isn’t. This is because the problem isn’t with using or not using monitors, the failure of the technology, or referees or even the fetid Stockley Park Tactics Truck inhabitants, the problem is the nature of VAR.

It was driven into existence by the intolerance of managers and fans of refereeing mistakes and fuelled by increasingly hysterical TV coverage. They have ruined so much by insisting an analogue game be ruled by this digital dictat.

Dean Smith has said “VAR frustrates everyone but there’s nothing we can do about it”. Patrick Bamford said VAR is “ruining football”. Last year James Milner said “the atmosphere is being ruined (by VAR)”.

Jurgen Klopp: “I’m not sure we all thought it through properly and how long will it take to get the right decision, how much will it take away from a game we all loved before. We stop celebrating goals, we wait constantly, we have less than millimetre offside decisions. A lot of things are not like they were before, that’s the truth.”

Many were slow or reluctant to abandon their support for the system, fearing it made them look like a Proper Football Man railing against technology and change, stuck in the past and old-fashioned. The sort who think a white board and a laptop is hi-tech. It was understandable.

But there’s only so much anyone can take and the number of people leaping like rats off the sinking VAR ship over the last year has been remarkable. Many use the excuse for their volte face that they thought it would be implemented better, or that it works in Europe (a contentious generalisation) so it’s somehow the fault of the English officials, players, managers, fans or media. Some still think it is a great idea but is being badly applied. No. The truth is it’s a fatally flawed bad idea that cannot be well-applied and need not be applied. Football was hugely popular without it, after all. We bloody loved football. Some love it less now.

And yet despite a majority being opposed to it, we’re still regularly told by all and sundry from players to manager and media that VAR is going nowhere. And that we’re stuck with it.

This seems very odd. If the majority of watchers of the Premier League think it’s a crock of sh*te – and they do – then it needs to stop.

Let’s not forget, pre-pandemic, fans were chanting “f*ck VAR” in stadiums. The lack of fans has got VAR off the hook for now, but when we return you can be sure it’ll be placed firmly back on it.

These are your paying customers, Premier League. You remember them don’t you? They’re the ones you fellate for your riches. The ones you endless talk about respecting, about how they’re so knowledgeable and appreciative of your earth-shatteringly wonderful product.

Imagine introducing something that diminishes your customers’ pleasure, that they feel makes the game you’re charging them to watch, worse? Then imagine sticking with that despite their protestations. You wouldn’t do that with anything else.

The vast majority of those who watch lower-league football are relieved it doesn’t exist for their football, so toxic has VAR’s reputation become. So what are you going to do about it? Plough on regardless of what your punters want? That’s bad business and bad PR and we know you care more about business and PR than anything else, certainly more than about football. We also know you think of football as a product, well your product is being debased, devalued and undermined by VAR. It is making it less valuable. Got the message yet?

Why not end it at the conclusion of this season? Say you’re doing it for the people, you’re doing what the fans want. You’re returning the game to its great tradition of trusting referees on the pitch. I’ll even write the bullshit press release for you. Don’t be weak. Do it. You will be praised by those in the game, by players, by managers, by fans. You can sell it as a populist move.

Just persisting with something that was sold on a false prospectus, that the people were misinformed about, that clearly makes things worse, that benefits no-one and to do so out of a toxic mixture of ego, misinformation, ignorance, bigotry, dogma and fear of admitting a mistake, is the ultimate stupidity.

John Nicholson