VAR evaluation thread

[paul-collins]

They told us VAR would end controversy. It doesn’t. And it won’t because much of what is reviewed is subjective, even seemingly objective things like hand ball and offside are not objective.

They told us it wouldn’t delay games. It does.

They told us it would only be used for clear and obvious errors. It isn’t; it is being used to re-referee games.

They told us it wouldn’t interfere with play; it does. For example, they have instructed linesman to not raise the flag for offsides in order to deal with the fact that VAR is inherently unfair in that it can review not called offsides but not wrongly called ones. So play continue when it should stop. Often.

None of these are implementation errors. They are endemic to VAR. For example, if you try to be more thoughtful about offsides (when is a player interfering with play is a question that could be debated endlessly, for example) you will slow the game down even more through even lengthier VAR reviews.

The biggest problem for me is that VAR is creating a situation where some parts of the game are held to a standard of perfection that the rest of the game isn’t and cannot be. The non call on the foul on Laryea followed by a VAR penalty is the perfect example of what results. Let alone celebrating a win called back by VAR - those spontaneous eruptions of joy are part of soccer and VAR repeatedly kills them.

If if they had a Hawkeye system for offsides with cameras zipping up and down the touchline somehow, I’d be all in favour. But using video review for judgment calls is a failure and the sooner the game realizes it the better.

All four points you made at the beginning are related to its implementation. Part of that implementation is the way it’s used, how, and by who.

There are fundamental issues with having a centre ref walk over to a TV and watch film multiple times, for example. That’s an implementation issue due to technological restrictions or whatever, and it does a lot of the things you’ve stated are inherent to VAR. It isn’t inherent to VAR though, just this implementation.

The idea of VAR is good, the fact that different places use different forms in different ways and interpret it’s use differently show that it’s more in the implementation than the idea of VAR in general.

While technically "implementation errors" the four points and how they no longer apply are actually an example of scope creep.

There has been no benefits analysis on the VAR as currently used to see if the four points that were promised are actually being delivered. The increase in use of VAR is inherent in its being there at all. People can't resist in saying "if we just take a little bit more, we get *this*" and soon enough the actual use bears no resemblance to what it was intended to do.

[Kamp Berg]

The fact that players can seemingly complain to the ref until a play is reviewed should be an obvious red flag to the league. Pretty sure VAR is NOT supposed to be ‘lobbied’ into use on the field.