VAR — An unpopular opinion
It’s the Betting Companies stupid!
It’s the Betting Companies stupid!
Whilst the ever increasing betting companies are huge beneficiaries from the abomination that is the Video Assistant Referee (VAR) in football worldwide, it’s not entirely their fault. There are malevolent dark forces at play too, and we’ll come to those shortly. But I’ll commence with nailing my footballing colours directly to the mast of this sure to be bombastic article:
I’ve been a passionately obsessed football fan since 1980. My interest has waned a little over the past decade (despite my own team being crowned the greatest club team in the world) and I grew up with the final years of the traditional 4 tiered league before it became the Premier League (and 3 others). I’m an old school football fan who couldn’t believe the Liverpool team(s) of 1987 through to 1990 could ever be beaten for footballing quality and yet today I watch “PlayStation Football” from my heroes in Red, and the greatest football the world has ever seen in it’s sporting history is playing out in the English Premier League and Champions League season in, season out. The quality, pace of the game, quality of the pitches, players as athletes who train as such, nutrition, diet, psychologists, back room fitness teams and so much more is now de rigueur in the modern game and a surreal and outstanding brand of “PlayStation Football” is the result.
Football is theatre, art, instantaneous, a spectacle, unpredictable and if you’re a fan of the game: tension filled, anxious, exciting, nerve shredding and perhaps the very thing that defines you. Please don’t get me wrong, I love the current ridiculous nature of the almost otherworldly feats these athletes come footballers achieve today. It truly is (copyright pending) “PlayStation Football”. It’s just a shame that we’ve truly driven headlong into The Matrix with the VAR system (or DRS in cricket or almost every sport imaginable around the world), and systems that are bureaucratic, tiresome and soul sucking.
At best.
At their worst, these VAR type systems are anti-human (despite the humans necessary to run the machines), intrusive and against the very sporting fabric that football is made out of, the immediacy, tenacity, spontaneity, of a baying crowd demanding that damn ball be smashed into their opponents net. That very thing happened on Sunday at Wembley, and is the prime reason that VAR in football is the final death knell of the once described “beautiful game”.
Before, during and after every game of football there is a huge market for the betting industry. Huge with a capital H. The only ever football bet I made was before the 1988 FA Cup Semi-Final between my beloved Liverpool and Nottingham Forest. I was only 16 but the proverbial “big for my age” so could easily pass in the adult world of a late 1980’s betting shop. I placed two whole English pounds (£2!) on Liverpool to win 2–1 and rather unbelievably I won. With odds of 8–1 I sheepishly collected my £16 from the betting shop and couldn’t believe my luck! Via my Father’s genes I should’ve been a huge betting man (with a capital H) but I’ve never placed a single bet for the rest of my life and have had zero lifetime desire to do so. So it’s safe to say that I’m not the target market for the incessant, constant and nerve jangling adverts that swamp the coverage of every televised game of football. And there’s rather a lot of those these days if you have the correct streaming gizmo, and there’s plenty of advertisements from betting companies to fill the televisual void before, during and after the actual sporting main event.
Where VAR fits into the all pervasive betting bubble surrounding football is that it ensures, for good or ill, “correct” decisions. Those correct decisions are enshrined by the almighty televisual eye in the sky (as well as a referee watching the action on a monitor hundreds of miles away) and so in theory those correct decisions are indeed “correct”. Since when has life or indeed football ever been correct? Fair and equitable you say? It’s always been a cacophony of madness, decisions debated after the event, “rub of the green” or “the bad decisions even themselves out over the season” used as a salve even when you’ve seen with your own two eyes that the striker was way offside when he scored the winning goal but the linesman and the referee didn’t. Equity and fairness? Sure. I’ll take Tiger Wood’s golf swing (circa 1997 through 2001) and take my chances. That seems very fair and equal to me.
Now VAR ensures, even if it’s deemed necessary that the Referee needs to traipse to the side of the pitch to see a replay of the incident that he saw not 30 seconds ago, and with his very own eyes right in front of him, that “correct” decisions are made. Sunday in the Carabao League Cup Final at Wembley Joel Matip, a Liverpudlian cult hero forever more, scored a perfectly good goal in a drab Liverpool performance until that point, and his goal had literally “stolen” a lead with 20 minutes to go in a pulsating Cup Final. The explosion at the Liverpool end of Wembley was thunderous, as was the reaction of an unexpected scorer and his thrilled team mates. If you’ve ever had the good fortune to be in a stadium such as Wembley when the opposition score and their fans faraway at the opposite end of the stadium explode with joy, you’ll understand that feeling of energy, explosion of power, relief, guttural screams and the screaming sporting insanity that overtakes you when your team scores at a vital time in an even more vital Cup Final.
If you have, now you’ll also recognise the feeling of coming down after such an event when a referee drains the entire collective energy of that event by loping off to the side of the pitch to watch the bloody event on a TV monitor.
It kills the moment stone dead.
Following Sunday’s Cup Final Virgil van Dijk (VVD) alluded to the fact that these types of decision, as well as the VAR system itself, needed to be looked at and in a rare showing of antipathy toward the bureaucratic constraints placed upon the beautiful game. Maybe VVD is as pissed off as the rest of us at the intrusion, the stop/starting of a game that he plays so majestically, and that when flowing with the natural order of life the game of football can be a joy, and one of life’s pleasures.
From the blitzkrieg of advertisements from betting companies I note, through a lens of ignorance, that you can seemingly bet on anything and everything these days, and if there isn’t a market for “Alien invasion during the Super Bowl”, there will be soon. So these “correct” decisions are manna from heaven for these betting companies, as are the rolling and scrolling statistics every five minutes and not forgetting of course the red and blue digital lines of doom whenever VAR is adjudging an offside decision. Where once a striker could score a wonder goal from 30 yards, now if it flicks the knee cap of an onrushing defender and deviates away from the goalkeeper if becomes an own goal to the poor defender who certainly doesn’t want the own goal and annoys the striker who definitely does. But if you have “in play” running markets for the first goal scorer, own goals, the striker scoring at any time, last goal scorer, you need “correct” decisions. Winning punters need paying and judging by the monumental amount of betting companies and their associated advertisements, these betting companies are winning too, and winning big.
As the old saying goes, “You can’t put the shit back in the horse”, and VAR is staying forever more. And both the oft quoted beautiful game and copyright pending PlayStation Football will be the poorer for it. As will you and I, and time and time again the exact same incorrectly correct VAR decision as noted above will come to define Cup Finals and games throughout the world. The spontaneity of seeing a live event, be it at the stadium or via a telescreen, is gone. How can you celebrate wildly one minute, you know, for having the audacity to score a goal in a Cup Final and exactly as you’ve dreamed of doing so since you were a child, to then have some nosy parker a hundred miles away draw lines all over the screen or stop/start a replay a thousand times.
It’s so anti-football it’s past itself on the irony curve.
But you may have noticed something lately, and especially so in the past couple of years: there seems to be one singular answer to everything these days. No nuance. No debate. Approval or Cancelled. No dissent allowed. A “blob world” of singular ideas and dare I say it, “correct” ideas at that. It’s the well worn trope of 1984 “Freedom is Slavery” etc. Everything seems inverted. Up is down. Left is Right. Right is Wrong. There are no dissenting voices allowed where the Media narrative is concerned and to speak out and question the veracity, let alone the soul sucking and sport destroying aspect of VAR is virtually verboten. It’s akin to a draconian Government policy that receives wide spread condemnation and keyboard outrage before we all meekly comply. Perhaps the spontaneity of going to a local restaurant or the cinema gets mired in fumbling for a mobile phone, searching for an App or a QR Code.
Or all bloody 3.
So place your bets! Place your bets. The wheel is spinning, you all should know. And where she stops, nobody knows. Except perhaps the owner of the roulette wheel. Betting sure is an industry that seems to be melting it’s way into the very fabric of The Matrix and is as here to stay as VAR. Oh each “industry” (and they are both industries) will be tweaked and seen to be in the very best interests of their customers. You can be sure of that. Ebony and Ivory. Working in perfect harmony.
Effective. Officious. Technocratic. Painstaking. Soul sucking. Energy destroying. But at least we get “correct” decisions and more correct statistics that can be converted into a “cheeky bet”, and a bet you’ll look at as there’s a break in play. Another stop/starting break in play. There’s been a goal!
But has there?
You’ve seen the ball fly into the net and your eyes aren’t deceiving you, those dastardly chaps in the blue shirts have scored. Damn! But have they?
It’s been over two minutes now, and two minutes elapsing like mud through a sieve as the Referee appears to be talking to himself!
Oh no, he’s talking to someone miles away who’s watching the very game he’s watching in real life, on a pitch made of green grass and the last time I looked, very real. So what are they talking about?
Why hasn’t he restarted the game?
Why is he still talking to that other referee?
Oh no.
He’s making a large rectangular shape with his fingers denoting he’s going to watch the very action he saw WITH HIS OWN EYES IN THE REAL WORLD on a pitch side television monitor.
And now we’re watching a referee watching a television and watching the very replays we’ve been watching for the past two minutes.
I think I’ll go into the kitchen and make myself a cup of tea and perhaps check that betting slip after face scanning into my App and scanning a QR Code. That’s sounds far more fun that watching a referee watch a game of football on a television after he’s watched it, in real time, from the very best vantage point in the entirety of the universe.
VAR is the death knell of the once beautiful game and a beautiful game that has become spectacularly and almost inextricably linked to the unbelievable feats achievable with a gaming console. And that’s beautiful in it’s own way too. Players such as Virgil van Dijk play the now more modern beautiful game in an astoundingly beautiful way. He strolls around the pitch akin to a battlefield commander who is three steps ahead of his wartime prey. He’s elegant, a ball playing central defender, passionate leader and up there with the very best in his footballing position in any generation you wish to discuss. He deserves better from a game he’s helping to promote and dare I say reinvent. We deserve better than watching a referee watching the very action he’s just watched before being advised he maybe, just maybe, had better go and watch this again via a pitch side monitor. VAR sucks the very soul and joy out of football but the institution and industry that is VAR (and it’s betting subsidiaries) are sacred cows no-one dare criticise. Oh you have the criticism, and in spades, but you don’t have the ultimate criticism, anywhere, stating that VAR must be abolished and dispensed with to save the very heart and spontaneous soul of football. Despite this authoritarian and bureaucratic system destroying the game, and sounding a death knell around the world, no-one calls for it’s abolition. No-one would dare.
Football is eating itself and it’s a beautifully tasty morsel indeed. It’s just a shame there’s very little left on the carcass.