VAR and Offside
I love football. There’s no time when the beautiful game is more beautiful than when an exquisite passage of play ends with a through ball and a sublimely taken goal. It’s why we watch the game. In recent years, however, this joy has been tainted. You’re celebrating a goal and then you see the notice or hear the commentators, “VAR check”. What follows is a gut churning wait, the lines come out and we see that an attackers toenail was beyond the last defender and the goal is chalked off. I understand a line has to be drawn somewhere but the current use of VAR is sucking the joy out of football and it needs to be changed.
First used fully in the 2018 World Cup in Russia VAR was put to a vote for Premier League clubs in November 2018 and unanimously accepted for the 19-20 season. From the premier leagues own website VAR will be used “only for ‘clear and obvious errors’ or ‘serious missed incidents’ in four match-changing situations: Goals, Penalty decisions, Direct red card incidents, and Mistaken identity”.
While the original intention may have been to correct ‘clear and obvious errors’ or ‘serious missed incidents’, most of the interventions made by VAR as far from clear and obvious. The VAR will freeze on the frame where an attacking player plays the ball and out come the lines. These lines are arranged level with the attacking player and the last defender and the attacking player can be judged offside by an inch. Not only is this not clear and obvious it isn’t even scientific, it just looks scientific.
In the year VAR was brought in more than 10 players clocked speeds upwards of 37kph, 10 mps. VAR uses cameras that run at 50 frames per second this means that a player can cover 20cm between frames. If the VAR selects 1 frame too late a player can advance 20 cm between frames making the player appear offside when they are not. Similarly, if the camera is slightly out of sync with the action and the player plays the ball mid-way between frames the player can advance 10cm before the next frame moving from onside to offside in the review. This is a classic specificity accuracy problem we see in science. Just because you can be very specific in a measurement does not mean you can be very accurate, it is possible, and this is a case, that you can have a very specific reading with a very high margin of error. Given this margin of error inherent in the way the action is recorded and reviewed, holding players to inch perfect standards is ludicrous.
The second side of this is the interruption to the flow of the game. While VAR adds less than a minute, on average, to the length of a match the reviews typically take 84 seconds when overturning a decision, nearly a minute and half! FYI the differential we see is mainly due to the fact that most VAR checks are partly or wholly done while play continues. But the threat of VAR and the length of time it takes to reach a decision makes fans and players alike delay or tone down their celebrations knowing that their joy can be whipped. This uncertainty and delay undercuts and spoils the enjoyment of the game and, going forward, we need a faster review process that allows fans to celebrate properly.
The other side of this is the way VAR interprets the offside rule, it is missing the point. The purpose of the offside rule is to prevent attackers gaining a material advantage from being closer to the goal than the 2nd to last defender. If the VAR can’t tell an attacker is closer in a couple of replays from different angles how material is their advantage? Immaterial, in my opinion, hence my proposed solution.
We need to return VAR to it’s initial brief by using it “only for ‘clear and obvious errors’ or ‘serious missed incidents’ in four match-changing situations: Goals, Penalty decisions, Direct red card incidents, and Mistaken identity”. To do this we should apply two constraints. First VAR can only review incidents in real-time, no slow motion footage, and without aids like lines. Secondly we should limit the number of replays the VAR would be able to view incidents a limited number of times or in a certain time window. These changes will both prevent the overly precise method, and ultimately mean minded, chalking off of goals for an inch and allow fans to celebrate properly knowing that VAR will not take overly long to correct any refereeing mistakes. Hopefully changes like these will bring some of the joy back into the game.
Premier league VAR
https://www.premierleague.com/VAR
Player speeds
https://www.1sports1.com/fastest-players-premier-league-history/
VAR times
