As Peter Drury articulated excellently on a recent episode of The Athletic’s Football Cliches podcast, the automatic disdain for referees at all levels is a stain on football and the way in which we consume it.
And societally, we have arrived at a place with an exceptionally low level of tolerance for mistakes. Perfection has become an expectation. One that is unrealistic at best and damaging to the notional value of correctness at worst.
Given this, it was amusing that the arguments for the introduction of VAR were so compassionate towards referees. Standardly so maligned, expressly there with the primary intention of ruining every fan’s day, the referees “needed help”. These were human errors. And the implementation of video review technology would depreciate the centrality of their role and impact by helping them to make objectively correct decisions.
Unfortunately, midway through the second season since its introduction, we are again negotiating the kind of hysteria that suggests the technology is brutally murdering the very soul of the game. As though this were something remotely tangible.
And while I could do without the game being gone again for the umpteenth time, I can appreciate the sentiment here. I feel it too.
VAR has unarguably taken something from the fan experience. Whether it be a severance of the instaneousness of the emotional reactions of a matchday experience, or just a protraction of the space between them and the event… Regardless, it’s a hindrance to the degree to which football fans can submit themselves to the undulating emotional escape of a football match.
We can’t quite switch off into the blissfully ignorant arms of the game as we once could. Questions of validity now pervade the experience and have dismantled what minimal trust we once had.
And if we were achieving some kind of unanimously understood objective correctness or fairness at this cost, then maybe it would be worth it. But football is a game of subjective governance. Why does it work in cricket? Because if the ball hits the leg before the wicket, it’s out. In football we are debating the tightness of a clenched fist prior to a red card.
Layering subjectivity (a first and a second referee’s opinion) has not and will not draw us closer to any objective truths and thus, it has become a farce.