Is VAR Ruining the Beautiful Game?

 by Flo Yearsley

Is VAR (video assistant referee) ruining the beautiful game? I could have picked a less controversial topic like religion or politics, but I decided to discuss the talking point of all football fans almost every Monday morning. 

Each Premier League team seems to suffer (other than Man City curiously) with inconsistent decisions week in, and week out as one or two men sitting in an office miles away from the match see something different from millions of other watching eyes. 

Four years in, this system should be improving, but it seems to be getting worse. In rugby, the referee’s thought process is played to the crowd via the loudspeakers, which is the same with cricket. There needs to be more transparency between officials and the paying public both in the stadium and at home because frustration seeps out of every crevice of the game. 

The very concept of VAR was flawed from the beginning. Football is a fast, high-octane game that shouldn’t be stopped every 30 seconds. 

The inability to celebrate a goal can significantly reduce the passion aspect of the game, which is what football is all about.

The implementation of VAR prevents the occurrence of ‘Aguerooooooooo’ moments, as we’d all be waiting two minutes for the pencil pushers to check the offside lines. 

A report by the BBC in 2020 revealed that fans ‘find football less exciting’ with the introduction of VAR. Before its administration in the 19/20 season, football thrived off spontaneity, but now the referees can see a lot more and thus make a lot more decisions, therefore slowing the game down. 

Post-match interviews are less concerned with the football itself and instead focus on the poorly executed judgments of the coterie of referees. It seems like deja vu watching post-match interviews of Mikel Arteta rightfully condemning the officials' inadequacies. The brains of Stockley Park seem to be atrophying into oblivion.  

The same organisation, the IFAB, are now talking about football sin bins, where players take ‘time outs’ for a certain number of minutes for bad behaviour. What next, scrapping offsides, no keepers, touchdowns? VAR ultimately is a dearth of common sense in the people's beautiful game.