“Minimum interference, maximum benefit” was the promise when VAR was first introduced. Those were the words used by David Elleray, the technical director of the International Football Association Board (IFAB), in a presentation to journalists at Wembley Stadium in March 2017 to justify the profound change the game was about to undergo.
“We do not want to destroy the essential flow and emotions of football,” Elleray argued. “We do not want to be NFL. We just want to get rid of headline mistakes and scandals.”
The logic was clear enough. Examples such as Diego Maradona’s handball against England or Thierry Henry’s against the Republic of Ireland were held up as proof. Under this new system, those headline mistakes could be surgically removed from the game, keeping everything else intact.
The laser precision of technology was all that was required.
More than nine years on, those comments sound like a cruel joke. This week alone, at the decisive moment of the season when everything is on the line, it has never been clearer that we are all watching, playing and participating in a game that belongs to VAR. “Headline mistakes and scandals” have not been removed from the game but have in fact been piling up like never before.
Mistakes and scandals that are not just one-off errors, misses, lapses of judgment, but rather an inevitable part of the VAR system.
Take the 99th-minute penalty decision on Wednesday night at Fir Park. Celtic were drawing 2-2 at Motherwell, a result that would give Hearts a rock-solid lead in the Scottish title race going into Saturday’s final fixture. Motherwell’s Sam Nicholson jumped to head the ball and it flew away out of play as can only be the case after a firm defensive header.
But VAR Andrew Dallas called referee John Beaton to the monitor to judge for a handball. Even though the trajectory of the ball pointed to a clean header, the penalty was given, Kelechi Iheanacho scored, Celtic won. The balance going into this weekend’s title decider is changed.
Hearts head coach Derek McInnes called it “disgusting” afterwards, and it is hard not to feel sympathy with his position because this was a decision that would never have been made in the pre-VAR era. Our shared understanding of the game would tell us that this was a firm, clear header, with no second thought required.
It is only under the harsh glare of slow-motion replays, exhaustively examining every frame, that it can even begin to look like an offence.
But this gets to the heart of the mistake upon which VAR is built. The theory was always that the technology would support the laws of the game, would enforce them and reveal to the world the moments where the laws had been broken. Nothing could be further from the truth. Because the laws have not been buttressed by VAR. Rather, they have been blown apart.
The laws of the game date back to December 1863. They are as old as Edvard Munch and Archduke Franz Ferdinand. And they were written to be judged by human eyes in real time.
Offside calls were never meant to be done by the millimetre, which is why the concept of ‘level’ existed for so long. Handball always rested on a shared informal understanding, one that is difficult to codify. And yet VAR has effectively dragged the handball law towards strict liability. On the matter of serious foul play, traditionally the most subjective of all the major refereeing decisions, VAR has never been able to provide clear, uncontested answers.
Every time there is an argument about VAR, people rush to tell you that the issue is not so much the technology but rather “the people using it”. And that, with root-and-branch reform of PGMOL, we might finally get to the sunlit uplands of minimum interference, maximum benefit. That has always been a laughable position, and was proven again to be so on Wednesday night.
The issue is, and has always been, the technology itself. As soon as you introduce omniscient slow-mo, you are transforming what refereeing is. And as soon as you demand that the officials judge every little collision, every little event on the pitch under slow-mo, the rules can clearly no longer cope.
No wonder, then, that referees can look so reluctant to make decisions now that they know they have an all-seeing eye behind them. They have effectively been given a tool which it is never in their interest not to use.
Take Tottenham’s game against Leeds United on Monday night. When Mathys Tel accidentally kicked Ethan Ampadu in the head, it was not given on the pitch by Jarred Gillett, but afterwards by VAR. And then, deep into added time, when James Maddison was tripped by Lukas Nmecha, that was not given on the pitch either.
Both calls were effectively left to the VAR, who advised Gillett to re-examine the first penalty but not the second. And that decision not to award Spurs a penalty has indeed become the headline of the following days, showing that even the VAR system is no guarantee of accuracy in the biggest moments.
Of course, it barely needs to be said again that “the essential flow and emotions of football”, something IFAB wanted to safeguard, have been ripped to pieces by VAR. That is proven by every major game.
Goals are not fully celebrated any more, robbing paying fans of the whole point of attending games in the first place. Even the row about West Ham’s disallowed Callum Wilson equaliser last Saturday against Arsenal was proof of this, as one of the biggest Premier League moments of the modern era ended in a lengthy VAR stoppage, with long discussion after the fact about whether laws on grappling were being applied in a uniform way or not.
A terrible week for VAR then, but perhaps no worse than any normal week. The only thing that has changed right now is the stakes. And with so much riding on every game, the inaccuracies, the inconsistencies, the joy-sapping delays are just shown up even more.
There is one clean, clear, simple solution for this, and that is full abolition without delay. Just do not expect anyone to listen.