Last week 19 of the 32 clubs in Norway’s top two divisions voted to get rid of VAR. They have only had it in Norway for two seasons, but already the fans have had enough and want to go back to VAR-free football like they have in Sweden. Norwegian football’s Federal Assembly will decide whether to act on the recommendation of the clubs in the first week of March.
Last summer Premier League clubs voted on a similar proposal brought forward by Wolves. They voted 19-1 in favour of retaining VAR. Of course, unlike their Norwegian counterparts, Premier League clubs are not owned by their fans so they’re not democratically accountable. Obstinately they persist in the delusion that this is all working out.
One of the arguments for introducing VAR was that we would all waste less time arguing over wrong decisions. As we now know the “wrong” decisions have only become more incomprehensible and the arguments have become more bitter and intense. Fans who used to accuse referees of blindness now scream about corruption and conspiracy.
The weekend just gone was, as so often, dominated by a row over a controversial refereeing decision, aggravated by a controversial VAR non-intervention.
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Arsenal’s Myles Lewis-Skelly was sent off for a tactical foul on Wolves’ Matt Doherty that referee Michael Oliver decided had crossed the threshold for violent conduct. Mikel Arteta talked about the red card as though it was such a blatant miscarriage of justice that an apologetic FA would surely quash Lewis-Skelly’s ban without Arsenal even needing to appeal: “I think it’s that obvious that we don’t need any comments today. Hopefully the right thing will happen after today.”
If only it really was that obvious.
The BBC’s Mark Scott’s commentary probably reflected the thought process of most of the people who were watching the game live: “…And now that’s a clip there by Lewis-Skelly that is going to be a nailed-on yellow-… OH IT’S A RED! Well… this is quite something. I was convinced that was going to be a yellow card for stopping a promising attack, but Michael Oliver has seen it differently.”
This was more or less exactly what had passed through my mind as I watched. A crazy decision, that was just a basic trip, definite yellow but never a red.
I thought of a similar incident when Manchester United’s Wayne Rooney was given a straight red card for overdoing a tactical foul against West Ham’s Stewart Downing. Rooney’s effort to trip Downing took the form of a flying lunge which the referee deemed violent conduct. “I can see why he made the tackle but I think you have to be far friendlier,” then-United coach Louis van Gaal commented. “He did it too unfriendly and that is maybe his biggest mistake.”
Lewis-Skelly’s foul on Matt Doherty was less spectacular than Rooney’s on Downing, but watching the replays you began to see that it was a little bit unfriendly.
It was plain that his intention was to trip Doherty to snuff out the counter-attack, but he arrived slightly late at a slightly awkward angle, and his attempted trip was executed with a raking action. There was not much force or intent to hurt behind his studs, but with Doherty running at speed that kind of awkward impact could conceivably result in a broken ankle. Was this really enough for a straight red card? Arguably.
And there is the whole problem. The foul was arguably a red, and equally arguably just a yellow. Refereeing largely consists of an endless sequence of such subjective decisions. Two different people who understand the rules can look at the same incident and – in good faith – come to different conclusions about what the referee should have done.
The Key Match Incidents Panel (KMI) is a five-person committee which assesses key refereeing decisions. It consists of three former players or coaches and one representative each for the Premier League and the Professional Game Match Officials Limited (PGMOL). Every matchweek they analyse the decisions and vote on whether, firstly, the referee has made the right call and, secondly, whether the level of VAR intervention or non-intervention was correct.
The intention is to produce some kind of objective assessment to help track refereeing performance and the KMI, like many such industrial watchdog entities, regularly releases statistics which seem to show that everything is getting better and better. How rigorous are its methods? Well, this season the PGMOL has introduced the phrase “referee’s call” to replace “clear and obvious” (after all, what is clear? what is obvious?) yet ESPN have reported KMI describing decisions with circular logic like: “it’s not clearly and obviously wrong, and therefore should remain the referee’s call”.
Whether this body is ultimately of any practical use for improving refereeing is not important. The important point is that the KMI judgments on whether a given decision was correct frequently come down to a majority verdict of 3-2 or 4-1. That is five well-informed and independent observers have looked at a given incident and reached different conclusions about how it should have been handled.
When they proclaim 3-2 that a given refereeing decision or VAR intervention was “correct”, and record it as such in the statistics, we should remember that this is just a panel’s majority view, not a statement of incontrovertible fact.
These split decisions remind us that the business of deciding what is or is not a foul or a handball or a red card is not a kind of multiple choice test where there is one correct answer. Referees are by definition going to get things “wrong” because people cannot agree on what is right.
The effort to “improve” decisions by adding more referees, which is what VAR ultimately is, is therefore a waste of time. It is a fundamentally misguided project based on a misunderstanding of the game and a failure to grasp that refereeing is irreducibly a matter of subjective judgment calls. Wrong decisions cannot be eliminated from football because most of the time wrongness is a matter of subjective perception. All VAR does is annoy everybody while delaying everything. Time to follow Norway and Sweden into the future.
