Graham Ruthven: VAR has been a failed experience and has made football worse – it’s time to get rid of it

EVERYONE knew Luis Diaz was onside. Everyone besides Simon Hooper, that is, who wasn’t told by Darren England – the VAR for Saturday’s Premier League clash between Tottenham Hotspur and Liverpool – that Diaz’s goal should have stood. The outcome of the match might have been very different had the laws been applied correctly.

An apology from the PGMOL, the body responsible for referees in English football, came almost as soon as the final whistle was blown on Spurs’ dramatic 2-1 win with a “significant human error” acknowledged. As it turned out, England had misunderstood the on-field decision and communicated “check complete” to Hooper when he should have corrected the referee’s call.

VAR was meant to enhance the quality of the decision-making in football. In some ways, it has. Fewer incorrect decisions are being made in leagues and competitions where VAR is available. Studies also show diving has dipped since the system’s introduction. There have been some benefits to VAR.

However, most supporters would agree VAR has affected their enjoyment of the game. Anyone who has been to a Premier League match in recent times knows just how miserable an experience VAR is inside a stadium and it isn’t much better as part of the armchair-watching experience either.

It certainly hasn’t improved the discourse around football which is tediously dominated by VAR almost every week. Football fans have always moaned about referees, but a layer of paranoia has now been added to the debate. Bad decisions are no longer just bad decisions – they are proof of an agenda against a certain team. Every team.

VAR introduced the idea that every decision made during a football match should be scientifically correct when this was never feasible. Unlike other sports, football is too fluid to be forensically officiated. It lacks the natural stoppages needed to make sure every call is correct and that in itself creates inconsistency.

Of course, the refereeing howler that happened at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium on Saturday wasn’t necessarily down to VAR technology. It was a communication error between two match officials – two humans. Nonetheless, the use of technology added to the incredulity around the mistake. How did they still get it wrong?

Confidence in refereeing is at an all-time low. Since August 2022, the PGMOL have issued no fewer than 14 apologies related to incorrect VAR decisions during Premier League matches. Former referee Mike Dean even admitted in an interview this year that he’d refused to send colleague Anthony Taylor to the pitch-side monitor during a match he worked as a VAR to spare him extra “grief.”

VAR has been a failed experiment because its central purpose was never going to be achieved. Goal-line technology has been a success in football because there’s no subjectivity in the decision-making process. Either it’s a goal or it’s not. In almost every other area of officiating, though, subjectivity is impossible to avoid.

Maybe one day artificial intelligence (AI) will be trained to help referees achieve better consistency in their decision-making, but that technology isn’t in place right now – although semi-automation is used for offsides in the Champions League. As long as VAR is operated by humans, human decisions – and mistakes – will be made.

Football would be better off without VAR. In its current form, VAR serves only to illuminate complex problems within the sport without any proper answers. Far from eliminating a clear and obvious error, VAR helped to create one that cost Liverpool dearly against Tottenham. The problem with VAR will never be solved. This sort of thing will happen again.

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