VAR, as a great philosopher surely once said, is some foolishness.
I write this partly because I do not have a good, snappy answer. And I hope, sincerely, that you do not come to this newsletter for answers. There are plenty of very good writers out there that can come up with answers and proposals and ideas for how to fix all the problems that face us. We do not do answers here, at least not now. We water ski across the surface of the problem and feel the way it keeps us up, helps us walk across the water. What shall be done about VAR? I don’t really know. But I do know that we almost assuredly will not go back to a life without VAR.
Why did we get VAR? Because being a referee is hard, perhaps too hard. And it’s impossible to get every call right. And we were tired of referees getting calls wrong, especially when there was an option open and available to us that referees getting calls wrong could be eliminated.
Why do we not like VAR? This is why we don’t like VAR.
It’s because referees apply it and its rules wildly inconsistently, sure, and that even when a video is slowed down, zoomed in, and isometric lines are painted on the field, those images are still up to the ref’s interpretation, which is fallible. The most interesting reason I see crop up most often, however, is how people dislike VAR because it’s made the correct call.
Most often, you see this when a goal is called off for offside. The attacker was a fraction of an inch in front of the last defender when the ball was played, a stray toe or armpit infinitesimally farther down the field, and VAR paints that little red line onto the picture, and the ref waives the whole thing off. People hate that. They begin to talk about things like the flow of the game or the spirit of the rules or some such. Referees using VAR have no common sense. THAT argument is what really gets me. THAT argument, coming out of the mouth of George from Peterborough or Milton Keynes or some other incredibly English-sounding town, while Carlsberg drips onto the front of his shirt. We got VAR because we were tired of referees being wrong. And when we got it, we didn’t like it because it got things correct. Too correct.
There are other arguments against VAR as well, mostly about how it interrupts the flow of the game and ruins the drama of goals being scored, as everyone looks back at the referee to see if he’s going to call a review. The flow of the game point is a fair one, although I think most refs, at this point, have gotten the hang of not taking seven whole minutes to sort out a video check. The drama point is laughable. I challenge anyone to watch Tottenham and Manchester City’s 2019 Champions League tie and tell me VAR did not enhance the drama.
No, the biggest reason we don’t like VAR is that it is too correct. It judges the rules impartially, fairly, and with 100% accuracy, and we do not want that out of our referees, either. That seems clear enough to see. Getting rid of VAR, however, only leads us back to life before VAR, the life in which we all saw a problem, one that we wanted fixed. And sure, maybe we’d be chuffed to get rid of all VAR and let it all ride on Mike Dean every weekend. But give it six months. People would be grumbling for it again.
Ultimately, I don’t think the problem is VAR, or no VAR. The problem is the Laws of the Game, yes, and how they’re not written nearly well enough for an era of video review. But the problem is also all of us, and our differing opinion on what makes a good referee, a good rule, and a good game.
Poetics, broadly, is the study of art and aesthetics, their forms and functions, and one necessary, endgame question for art: what makes something good? What is good taste, and bad? Not simply how a poem or a painting or a song is good, but why?
When we watch a soccer game, we arrive at the soccer game with separate internal poetics on the sport. It is, after all, The Beautiful Game, a phrase which still be said when robots are playing the game and people will scoff at the old men in the stands who swear the game was more entertaining when Lionel Messi was playing it. And we experience every single game thus. We filter it through our own separate standards, what we like and dislike, and arrive at our own separate conclusions. Which is almost like watching many different sports at the same time. We are not only victims to our own perception, but also our evaluations of that perception. My waterfall is not the same as your waterfall; my Fernando Llorente goal against Manchester City is not your Fernando Llorente goal against Manchester City.
I’ve got more to say about this, but it’s already dragged on pretty long, so we’re gonna do a two-parter.
Trivia: Standard Edition
Alright, to the best of my knowledge, this is true, but I would be fascinated to hear some suggestions or be proven wrong. What is the smallest country by population that a U.S. senior international has ever held dual-citizenship with, and what player was it?
Yesterday’s trivia answers:
Most red cards ever given in a game: 36 (Argentine Fifth Division match)
Fastest MLS goal ever: 7 seconds (Mike Grella)
Andres Iniesta’s kit number before he took No. 8: 24
36-7+24= 53.
53 x 1000= 53,000 people which watched the Dick, Kerr Ladies FC at Merseyside Park in 1920. The Lancashire team was so popular during and following World War I that they started women’s international soccer, and the FA subsequently banned women’s soccer from its sanctioned stadiums, probably because they were concerned that Dick, Kerr was more popular than several men’s clubs.