And here we go again… VAR creeping ever closer to making the decision of the referee completely obsolete.
Great, because what the game really needs is ever more interruption, over-analysis and controversy.
I feel like football is becoming more and more like the North American imposter that goes by the same name. A few seconds of open play, followed by minutes of refereeing.
I actually love American Football, but I know what you mean, and I don’t want it for proper football.
To me the problem has been the relentless march of TV coverage since the 90s, with more and more and more games shown and more and more time spent to analysing every last detail - inevitably leading to more errors being noticed.
And as a result (and also partly because of the crazy money in the game now - also an outcome of excessive TV coverage), the authorities have felt pressured into endlessly tweaking the laws and the ways of enforcing the laws, with VAR as its absolute nadir.
Mission creep was long predicted by those who opposed it, but again it feels almost inevitable - once you can provide definitive evidence of something being called wrongly by the ref, it’s inevitable that pressure will build to make use of it more and more. First for whether the ball crossed the goal line, then for offsides, then for penalties and red cards and no doubt soon enough for every yellow card, corner, free kick and throwin.
The pursuit of perfection is not only deluded, but it’s going to kill what’s been good about the game for over a hundred years.
