Full disclosure: I don’t really have a position on VAR. If I did, I certainly wouldn’t share it in public. Occasionally I have been asked on to a podcast or television show where it is tacitly explained that some sort of opinion on VAR will be required and I have just about managed to feign the required outrage.
It’s quite easy, once you practise a bit: just tick off as many of the following words and phrases as possible – “Stockley Park”, “Mike Riley”, “not what the technology was brought in for”, “armpit”, “killing the emotion” – while gradually winding your voice into ever tighter coils of fury. Finally you let a big, exasperated sigh into the microphone and observe, with a tinge of theatrical sadness: “It’s just a mess, Geoff, it really is.”
At which point – if you’ve done it right – your “viral rant” will almost certainly get clipped up and posted on social media, where people will leave lots of applause emojis and comments such as “Jonathan Liew SPEAKS FACTS!!!!” or “this needed saying”, a statement that these days is almost never true. In an age when rage increasingly feels like the only valid emotion, VAR is basically free rage: an opportunity to vent without consequences, at an enemy that to all purposes is nameless and faceless.
Then again, Arsène Wenger has both a name and a face, and last week he was merrily ripped to shreds after suggesting – idly, whimsically, hypothetically – that perhaps the offside law could be tweaked to avoid some of the most infuriatingly marginal VAR calls. You have to assume Wenger is not a regular consumer of social media (although imagine!) and so it’s perhaps unsurprising that he ignored the first rule of talking about VAR: there are no fixes, only non-fixes. Everything is as bad as it could possibly be and yet any proposed solution would only exacerbate matters.
This feels doubly relevant at the conclusion of another rancorous Premier League weekend that included contentious VAR incidents at Stamford Bridge, Turf Moor and the King Power Stadium. Cue plenty of exasperated sighing, pantomime outrage, pantomime restraint (best illustrated in those interminable Twitter threads where somebody very slowly and boringly explains that the technology itself works, it’s just being applied inconsistently) and the usual treadmill of complaint and anguish: a debate of breathtaking and exhausting complexity populated almost entirely by people insisting that it’s all – actually – very simple.
Who benefits from all of this? In a way, we all do: the talking and arguing and uncertainty is the very point of the exercise. VAR makes far more sense if you think of football not as a sport but as a serial drama or entertainment product, where the ultimate aim is to generate a never-ending supply of emotions and talking points.
In this respect it has been an outstanding success, managing to convert even the dullest games into animated discussions simply by arbitrarily chalking off a goal here and there. It is the same rationale behind the Love Island double eviction or internet flash sales, in that there is none at all: just an inscrutable scripted jeopardy whose purpose is to keep us irritably, maddeningly engaged.
Perhaps the reason things like VAR generate such strength of feeling is that they manage to evoke this very familiar dislocation with modern life, the idea that decisions that affect our happiness are being made out of our sight and without our input. The bottle of fruit juice in your fridge says “Hey gorgeous!” and Facebook’s algorithm seems to know exactly where you’re taking your next holiday, but you can’t speak to a human when you call your bank or find a political party that actually represents you. And now your team have just had a perfectly good goal ruled out for handball. Where else was he meant to put his hand? Where is the consistency? The game’s gone.
You wonder idly what may happen if a fraction of the seething anger at VAR were redirected towards some of the game’s other – one may even argue more pressing – problems: increasing wealth disparities, parasitic owners, the grassroots funding crisis, toxic masculinity, homophobia, the influence of the gambling industry. Imagine if pundits and fans spoke out with the same vehement, self-righteous regularity against structural racism that they do against dotted lines being drawn from footballers’ armpits. Some actual, real-world shit may get done.
But then this is English football, a sport and a culture founded on sneering grievance, where the most important problem is always the most recent slight against your team. And this is the complex matrix of 21st-century capitalism and digital platforms that offers fans myriad outlets to air their grievances, but zero ways of meaningfully ameliorating them: a voicelessness of infinite voices, a multitude making themselves heard without actually making anybody listen.
It’s more complex than that, of course. It’s the difficulty in imposing atomic precision on a game that has always been refereed by trust, feel and precedent. It’s the unspoken truth by which a player who gets fouled but manages to stay on his feet almost never wins a free-kick. It’s the rose-tinted view of the past that always emerges in the wake of disruptive change: we have always been at war with Eastasia , and everything was better back in the days when referees could make a simple honest mistake and nobody castigated them for it. You might even posit that VAR is merely the symptom and football the problem but even that feels too glib to be useful. It’s just a mess, Geoff. It really is.
The Guardian Sport
