When I started watching professional football, I was actually a bit baffled to learn that there was no form of video review. Even though I had played football from the time I was 4 years old, I had grown up mainly watching sports like basketball and American football where video review was quite common. I had no thoughts as to how well it was implemented or when it was and wasn’t used, because by the time that I had come around, it had been in the league for long enough to iron out all of the kinks.
So, when I heard that VAR was being implemented in professional football, I thought it would be a great addition to the sport. If this would help us catch an egregious foul or an obvious offside call that the officials on the field missed, then great. Perhaps it would make the game more fair. No longer would the team on the end of one of those missed infractions suffer the consequences of human error.
Obviously that hasn’t been the case, as was keenly demonstrated this weekend: Multiple harsh fouls that went unchecked, goals disallowed for the most minor of infractions, and blurry images being analyzed down to fractions of a pixel to check for offside calls. It is putting a damper on the sport that we love. The human error element is still there, but now we have hundreds of different camera angles to analyze everything. We are wasting so much time in games around these kinds of checks and it is ruining the game that we all know and love.
The problem with VAR in the Premier League is a more systemic problem than I have time to address in a quick blog article. However, I believe the problem can come down to three simple words that had me excited for VAR in the first place, and I would bet you’ve already guessed what they are.
Clear and Obvious
When Gabriel Martinelli scored the first goal of the game against Man U in the 12th minute, I went wild. My 19-month-old toddler was taking a nap at the time, so that mainly entailed running in circles around the living room, fist pumping, and silently screaming. However, after I had settled down, I sent out a quite telling tweet.
Martinelli on the break!!!! 1-0 to the #Arsenal How are they planning on taking this one from us?
— GoonerWorks (@GoonerWorks) September 4, 2022
Obviously, we all know what happened next. What’s so telling about the tweet, is that
- I knew there was a VAR check of some sort coming
- I had no idea at the time what it would be for and
- This is the mindset that I’ve come to have after scoring a goal
In the end, it was deemed that at the beginning of our break, Odegaard had committed a soft foul on Christian Eriksen. Had it been given, I would have probably given a soft groan and gotten on with the game. However, it wasn’t called until the ref went to the monitor to have another look. I went back and watched, and it took a whole two and a half minutes to determine whether or not the contact that Odegaard made on Eriksen was enough to constitute a foul. That doesn’t seem clear and obvious to me.
One of my biggest pet-peeves with VAR is the offside line drawing. If you have to zoom in and draw lines on the screen to tell you whether or not someone is offside, then it’s not clear and obvious.
Posters and stickers with the words “Clear and Obvious” should be plastered on every wall, every desk, and every monitor in the VAR rooms. That should be the mindset that referees go into when determining whether or not something should be reviewed. Quite honestly, there shouldn’t really ever need to be a review. The ref in the booth should simply be able to tell the on-field ref, “Hey, you got that wrong.” No need for them to go to the monitor.
I feel like I’m repeating myself, but if the ref has to go to the monitor to make a judgment call on a foul, then it’s probably not clear and obvious. If they want to go to the monitor to confirm, fine. But, they shouldn’t have to take more than the length of one replay to be able to determine what the correct course of action is. Otherwise, say it with me, “IT ISN’T CLEAR AND OBVIOUS”.
A lot of the rules in football are up to a subjective interpretation. What constitutes “dangerous play”? What constitutes a foul vs. simple contact. That’s why most of the decisions should probably still be left up to the officials on the field. But implementing a mindset of “clear and obvious” at the forefront of video review would help resolve some of the instances where subjectivity goes out the window. It may not solve every single issue, but it would sure solve a few of the “clear and obvious” ones (see what I did there).
Other leagues across Europe don’t seem to have many, if any, issues with the implementation of VAR. So, for a league that claims to be the “best in the world”, we really shouldn’t be seeing this much controversy around problems that have already been solved elsewhere. Would this fix all of the problems with Premier League officiating? Absolutely not. But, it would be a great start.
End of rant.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to relax for the rest of my long weekend and get excited for Arsenal’s long-ish-awaited return to European competition.
