Hey, I’ve been watching the Women’s World Cup and how about that VAR eh? Anyone having reservations yet?
I’ve watched VAR in place for an entire year now. From the Men’s World Cup last summer to the Serie A all season and on to this Women’s World Cup, I’ve seen VAR used to make almost all of the calls “right” and yet it left me with a feeling that getting everything right isn’t right.
This isn’t a rant about the referees – VAR typically corrects referee errors and besides which most calls in the laws of the game are open for interpretation. The difference between a yellow card tackle, a red card tackle, and a no card tackle is up to the discretion of the referee. Even what constitutes a foul is open for interpretation and two referees will see the same action in two different ways.
There was a moment in the match yesterday between Cameroon and England where one of the Cameroonian players fouled an English player in the box. The referee went to the VAR, watched the video, saw the player step on the foot of the English player, in the box, and decided not to award a penalty.
There might have been mitigating factors in that decision: Cameroon felt that two big VAR decisions had gone against them, emotions were running high, the referee was under pressure, the score was already 3-0, and the referee decided not to award a penalty which would have surely made things worse.
But the referee was entirely in her right not to award that as a foul. I thought it was a foul. I thought she should have given England a penalty, but the ref could have seen it as incidental contact, I guess. Not all contact is a foul.
I don’t think VAR is going to stop this. However, it does make it harder to justify not giving a penalty when there is contact because everyone sees the replay, everyone sees the referee sees the replay, and if he walks away and acts like there’s no reason to give a penalty, especially in big games, it will mean “big criticism.”
VAR has also been used to clean up some of the little ways that teams cheated in the past. Fouls in the buildup to a goal have been used several times in the Serie A and in this World Cup to chalk off goals. Cheeky elbows are punished (more often) and vicious tackles are reviewed (more or less) and cards handed out for those types of actions.
Cameroon played like Stoke, West Brom, Joey Barton, Allardyce, Mourinho, Dyche, Manchester United, and others have been playing Arsenal for years. And Cameroon were punished for it.
Sean Dyche complained last season that the rules meant he had to cut the grass a certain length and that all the little ways his teams used to be able to find an advantage over their opponents have been systematically removed from the game. He’s right. And VAR is going to strip that down even further. Or at least it should. That is if you trust the officials in England to apply the laws of the game.
But here’s the weird thing: I don’t like Sean Dyche and those cheaters but I’m not sure I like the rules to be 100% applied correctly. In this summer’s World Cup that seems to be benefitting just the big teams.
If the laws of the game are applied 100% of the time the exact same way, doesn’t that just mean that the big teams, the teams with the technically adept players just have another advantage? Doesn’t it reduce the chances that a smaller team will upset a bigger team? On the evidence of this World Cup, I think it does. Keepers will no longer be allowed to come off their line, teams will no longer be allowed to score an offside goal (by millimeters), sometimes a foul in the buildup to a goal will mean that the goal is disallowed, and starting next season, any contact with the hand will mean a goal is disallowed or a penalty given.
VAR didn’t award more penalties in the Serie A last season (122 v. 126 the previous season). It also didn’t seem to benefit the big teams over the smaller teams; penalty distribution was actually more equal last season than the season before. So, there’s a chance that VAR will be a force for evening things out, making the game more fair.
But I keep getting this feeling that VAR is just another part of the drive toward technocracy. Rigid training methods, analysis, big data, infrastructure, diet science, coaching, VAR, etc. are all designed to make the game more predictable, more efficient, more likely for big clubs to win. And this is mostly going to benefit the clubs which can afford the best players, the best coaches, and the best scientists.
Maybe that’s your jam. Maybe you like the fact that a millimeter is the difference between offside and on. I am not so sure I like the direction football is going – I think, maybe, I like things to be less predictable.
I was listening to an interview with Arsene Wenger yesterday and he was asked about his philosophy with players and how he tried to get them to express themselves and he replied: “what makes us happy to play is that fact that when you were a kid you wanted to go home from school and play. And the part that makes you creative is the happiness. So, you have to always to find a good mixture between concentration and the freedom to express your talent.”
The kid in Wenger’s scenario was happy because she was out of school. She was away from the boring rigours of study and was just playing football with friends. Maybe we will see more freedom of expression with VAR. Maybe putting the neanderthals out of the League will make it a better game. For now, I’m unsure. I feel like we are losing something. Some of that unpredictable fun. I feel like we are in for decades and decades of the biggest, best, and most expensive teams just winning everything.
Lol, aren’t you supposed to be on blog vacation, Tim? I don’t think VAR if were such that all decisions made would be 100% is a bad thing. If it made the bigger teams likelier to win, then so be it. That’s how it’s always been.
However I do agree that the unpredictability and multiple points of view and even the cheating and overcoming it are all part and parcel of why the game is so awesome. If we’re moving towards a situation where winning football matches became like playing Football Manager (even this game purposely incorporates chaos because they know that’s part of the fun), we might as well all stay home and look out for the scores after matches.
Arsenal isn’t one of those big teams. Just thought you should know.
Goalkeepers have never been allowed to leave their line before the ball is struck, so nothing new there just that VAR is sharper.
LOL… ok.
Ha! They are so cute with their cock-eyed optimism, right?
I totally get what you mean. I don’t trust English refs to use VAR fairly. It will suck and infuriate. I even believe they will try to sabotage it as the media will cry foul about this new thing ruining our game. I still want it. If refs are going to make arbitrary calls, it needs to be known that they at least saw it. If they make the game too slow, eventually there will be a course correction. Eventually refs will have to improve. Decisions will become more standardised.
The other part of the article, about the creativity, concerns me more. This may sound odd, but I blame Pep. That fantastic Barcelona team became a winning machine. The art gradually reduced to a science. Everybody else seems to have followed suit. Along with it, the concentration of wealth at a few clubs has left even less room for a ‘magician’ to emerge. Wenger made the point about training too much too early in Europe vs South American forwards. Would a Bergkamp emerge if he were in a professional academy instead of hitting the football against a wall? I hope it’s a cyclical thing, but I suspect football will need some structural changes to bring some of the fun back.
Not odd at all. Players under Pep burn out extremely quickly. His system is anti-football in a way: he demands players play exactly how he sets them up to play, fill holes exactly, and so on.
Thierry Henry described it as Pep insists on you doing it his way for 2/3 of the field, but in the final 1/3 of the field you have the freedom to do what you want. He said this after describing how he set up and scored a goal in the first half of a game for Barca but was yanked at half-time because he wasn’t participating in the build up the way Pep wanted.
Yeah, in the Marti Perarnau book, Pep confidential, there are some similar stories. That said, I think Pep has actually become more rigid and demanding – even in the final third. One obvious example of that is how he gets the team organized to perform the final attacks. They have a way that they build that’s much much deeper than his time at Barcelona and Bayern and they make certain types of passes in that final third over and over. In a funny way, we make fun of Emery’s “cutback kings” but that’s really a Pep thing. His teams do this ALL the time. It’s kind of annoying to watch after a while because they do it over and over.
I’m disliking VAR fairly intensely, and I think the cause is the extra focus it puts on rules that might have always been crap, but were at least easier to ignore without it.
Handball controversies are nothing new, and no version of the ruling has ever been unambiguous, but they used to be blink and you’ll miss it, with some replays later if you’re watching on the telly. Yes, Shearer might bleat on at half-time, but Alan Shearer is what the mute button was invented for Now we have a two minute break to agonise over angle, positioning and movement of an arm from the angles. Now we cannot avoid pontificating on what the hell constitutes a ‘natural’ silhouette. Seriously, what does ‘natural’ even mean in this context? Unless the rule is to preempt cyber-athletes? Or something..? I dunno.
And worse, I think it raises questions as to awarding penalties in the first place. They are a huge, game-changing swing, but the old claim ‘if it’s a foul in the centre circle it’s a foul in the box’ has never been true. Refs used discretion and let a variety of niggles go, and while I’m sure we’ve all moaned about this sometime or other, if everything now gets awarded it’s going to be a lot of penalties, potentially enough that cynical teams will change their approach to games to encourage penalty-maximisation.
All of which is to say, be careful what you wish for. We have fundamentally changed the game to get laws enforced, but it turns out the law is quite often an ass anyway. Oops.
Natural position = where you would expect the arm to be without making oneself bigger. Obviously there is visual interpretation to be applied on a situation by situation basis. This is where I have an issue. A reasonably experienced and football survy ref should spot these easily with the quality of footage at his disposal.
OK,but that’s still subjective – how much arm swing is natural for a player running? How much for one jumping? What about turning quickly after they’ve been unexpectedly nutmegged and are off balance? Or recovering from a slide-tackle attempt? There are countless things happen on a pitch, and for me ‘natural silhouette’ is an extremely vague catch-all. With that said, every version of the hand-ball rule barring ‘strict-liability’ (any contact = foul) will be open to disagreement. (I am not advocating for strict liability, btw!)
VAR is trying to give a precise answer to imprecise questions and it cant. It does slow the game down, though, and has us all discussing video-tech rather than the games themselves (mea culpa, mea culpa).
Is that this already feels like a replay of your recent and profuse complaints about VAR here intended as meta?
And NOW the big clubs are going to have advantages and do all the winning? I mean, you might want to pace yourself.
Eh?
I am anti VAR. 1. It makes world football more like American football with its interruptions in play. 2. Ambiguity / uncertainty / luck is part of the run of play and allows focus to be in the play instead of the rules. 3. It removes “chances” for underdogs to compete more evenly. 4. It involves false precision, not taking into account an unfilmed angle or a portion of a second when the offside line is drawn.
The only gripe I have with VAR is when the refs don’t use ‘football common sense’ to decipher what is actually going on in the replays.
In the CL final Sissoko looked over his shoulder at his penalty area, raised his arm shoulder height pointing to the space behind him that his team mates must cover in case Mane plays the ball into it or dribbles at the space. Mane instead just plays the ball at Sissoko chest height and it hits his arm from a reasonably short distance. If the ref had used ‘football common sense’ he would have seen that the arm was up because he was simply fulfilling a key part of defending (ie communication) and he wasn’t making his silhouette bigger.
Refs must be aware of forwards simply playing the ball at defenders’ arms from a short distance to get easy pens as this will ruin the game and make.
Another instance is the ‘Vardy dive’ where the attacker kicks out his leg to force contact with the defender. Refs should be wise to this but I don’t have faith in the English refs to spot these.
I love your comment.
Ok, so now you want refs to determine why players might raise their arms in the area before they award pens?
I think your analysis of Mane/ Sissoko pen is wrong too.
Mane is closed down by two defenders , Sissoko being one , so he decided a pass was a better option.
Out of the three players involved Sissoko is the only one still moving his feet while Mane puts his head down ( as he should) to strike the ball.
Mane doesn’t know Sissoko’ arm will be up for the ball to hit it.
It takes longer for Mane to complete the process of looking up for players arriving in the box, putting his head down to strike the ball and actually making the pass, than for Sissoko to simply lower his arm ,which he never did.
The vast, vast majority of crosses and cut backs by attackers happen at speed
( Mane/ Sissoko play being exception)
Attacking players will not go against what had been ingrained in them from the earliest days – to pass the ball to open teammates- for the sake of hopeful pen via accidental handball.
I have absolutely no problem with the Sissoko pen.
Who cares why his arm is up and for the longest time too?
*make the game about getting an edge via VAR.
I wonder how the current coach of Nice would have fared under VAR in his playing days. He’ll always be one of my favourites of all time but he stretched the line on a lot of the stuff he did.
VAR, like many great concepts is totally f&%ked up in execution. Which of course Vieria definitely was not.
Hey Tim,
Two questions if I may. Agree with your reply to Shard – Pep stifles creativity outside the parameters of ‘his’ system. My poser to you is will we in five years time look back fondly on his style or view him more as the master of anti-football?
Second poser – would you replace Emery immediately with Benitez? Personally I would have never give credence to the idea, but recently (scratches chin)…
Benitez has signed a £25m to manage in China
I too am re-assessing VAR. After seeing some of its implementation in the WWC, I have to admit it isn’t being applied in ways that really help the game. I thought the whole point of it was to correct cases where there has been an egregious error by the officials, that everyone can see is wrong. And yes, I agree that there are large gray areas where something that seems egregious to a ManU fan seems quite acceptable to a Gooner, and vice versa. At the risk of copying American Football (or more reasonably, cricket), would it be more effective to have a challenge system, where each side has one or two opportunities to challenge a call, and the benefit of the doubt always goes to the call made by the ref. I actually hate it when a goal is disallowed because someone’s eyebrow was offside or a penalty awarded because the ball ricocheted into a defender’s arm off the ground, the post and the goalie’s left knee… At least with challenges you would only have to stop the game a couple of times, and the really bad calls would get eliminated while the close calls could be left alone…
var even destroys the spontaneity of a goal celebration and it can totally kill a game. remember the end of the champions league semifinal between man city and tottenham? what an anticlimactic ending to a game. you can’t even celebrate a goal in real time; gotta wait to see if var overturns it. goal celebrations are part of football culture and are likely to be eliminated from the game.
I love VAR. I guess it appeals to my sense of law and order. The hand of God/Maradona or the Henry handball against Ireland, such moments make me sick. This is drama I don’t need. I want fairness and justice and I feel VAR brings me a bit closer to that. I don’t need spontaneity. I don’t like unpredictability. I like that rules are respected. I don’t like cheating. Reading my own words, I feel a bit rigid, a bit anal. Can’t help it though.
VAR is only needed because the referees suck and refuse to acknowledge their mistakes, instead behaving like infallible beings working in mysterious ways (It all evens out in the end you know)
VAR will not work while this incompetence continues, is excused and blamed on VAR instead. Blame the tools not the tool.. It’s an overcorrection right now. There will be a middle ground though.
VAR is also money. Millions of dollars worth of money. It’s not going away now. Whether the fans, or even the refs like Riley, like it or not.
Thanks for the post Tim. Before the multiangle ultraslow motion TV replays and off sides lines drawn of TV we had no idea just how many calls in football are incorrect. The incorrect calls and missed offsides have been part of football forever but in the distant past we just did not know it. The TV replays and analyzing every play from 10 different angles has lead to a whole cottage industry of conspiracy theorist who focus on every missed call that goes against their team and conveniently ignore or forget about the ones which go in their favor. Now that we know about the mistakes and missed offsides and we have to the technology to correct those mistakes its seems hard for me to accept that anyone would be against it. Not using the technology gives the conspiracy theorists more ammunition and they will say the only reason we don’t use VAR is so the cheating can continue. A website like like untold Arsenal’s ref reviews feed those conspiracy theories and that really damages the credibility of the game as a whole.
I can’t quite figure out if you think VAR is a benefit or a detriment.
Every time a game is decided by an incorrect offsides call or some other mistake the credibility and believability of the game as a whole suffers.
I don’t agree. There is no way appeasing a certain kind of self-serving helps the game in any way, they’ll never be satisfied. There’s always a new conspiracy, there’s always a bias against their own team.
Football was doing fine without VAR. Refereeing was good and bad in some instances but fundamentally it’s an impossible job. The rules are not clear cut and I’m not sure they can be, there’s little decisions that can be made on in black and white terms, most of the decisions are decisions by a degree of offence. Add to that the speed of the game and the limited view and there you have a task that is barely possible. I’m always amazed how much refs actually get right. Try for yourself sometime and try to be linesman, it’s really, really hard. Now imagine being the ref who’s in charge of everything else. The truth is refs are the easiest targets of wrath from all sides. Always questioned and without any allies.
*fans
Football was not doing fine before VAR. Our sport has become a sport where cheating was institutionalized. It is seen as smart. It is taught at the youth level. Every player learns to cheat, to claim he didn’t put the ball out, to raise his hands with an air of complete surprised after having clearly broken rule. We speak about rotational fouling, enforcers. Shirt holding is the norm. Being nutmegged calls for revenge. This because referees couldn’t see enough. Hopefully the VAR will improve on this sad state of affairs.
Mark Clattenburg admitted letting Spurs’ tackles go because of the coverage it would get.
Mark Halsey revealed Abramovich’s yacht was a holiday option for refs. That Ferguson intervened in an accusation of racism against a referee. That Pgmo require refs to sign a non disclosure for receiving their pension.
There are only a few refs, most of them from the North, at the top level, controlled by Mike Riley of Game 50 fame.
Jon Moss was heard asking if TV had any input on the Kane offside and dive against Liverpool.
The Calciopoli (in coordination with media) and German match fixing scandals happened.
Spot fixing in cricket happened in England. Claus Lundekvam said he and everyone else used to indulge in spot fixing all the time.
Oligarchs, and even states, now buy football clubs, which even the FATF said is prime ground for money laundering,
Not wanting to ignore that all this exists, with billions of dollars at stake, doesn’t make someone a conspiracy theorist.
Referees for the most part want to do a good job. Their mistakes would be accepted if the organisation they represented allowed them to be acknowledged and addressed as such. Not say we get 99% decisions correct and anyone questioning us will be fined (and then be arbitrary there too)
I’ve mostly given up this fight. I watch less of the PL now where I feel it’s the worst. But I cannot accept the assertion that refereeing was doing fine before. Any accountability and transparency there is much needed.