Football for years has had many water cooler moments. The type of moments that gets conversations going around the water cooler at work. A lot of this conversation would surround a decision that the referee has made or an incident that a referee acted or didn’t act upon.
The referees job on the pitch is to keep law and order on the pitch and make the final decisions On goals and fouls while maintaining the respect of the players around him. The referee is the person that takes the bulk of the blame whenever there is controversy on the pitch. The old saying “who would be a referee” rings true whenever these incidents happen.
As the game evolved, there was always a constant and thats the abuse of referees for their decisions.
To take the pressure off the referees and give them some much needed protection, VAR was created and introduced to top flight dutch football in 2014. After years of trials and tweaks, FIFA, the international football governing association approved its use in the 2018 world cup. Due to its introduction, the 2018 world cup was credited as the cleanest world cup since 1986 with only 4 players being sent off in the entire tournament and a total of 29 penalty kicks were awarded. The innovation of video assisted refereeing was credited for catching many fouls that a normal refereeing system would not have caught.
The highs of the technology may have started and ended with the World Cup. After its initial success, the footballing associations of many football leagues decided to implement the system and flaws started to show. Some decisions made by VAR were still very suspect and some decisions were clearly wrong. The system clearly does its job very well against factual decisions like offsides but fails with subjective decisions like penalties and other fouls around thepitch that require a player to be disciplined. The fans suffer a little too as there is an unknown waiting period and stoppage in a game when a decision is being checked. Although there has been an improvement with the latter issue, there is a growing belief that VAR is adding to controversial moments on a football pitch rather than decreasing them.
At the end of the day, the video assisted referee is a referee with the ability to view replays of incidents. It’s a system that is still very prone to human error. The system brings some much needed accuracy to the decision making but there’s an argument to be made that nothing has really changed as far as referee related controversies on the pitch because unlike the goal line technology, the decisions are still man made.