this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2023
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It is kind of funny to me, people talk about letting the officials officiate the game... they still are but they're still getting it wrong with VAR and it is hardly the systems fault that someone looks at a foul or an offside and still doesn't get it right. Going back doesn't change much, people will still not like referees decisions and they will still cost teams dearly.
That's one of the main reasons that I want to scrap or drastically reduce the use of VAR though. No matter what, football officiating is somewhat subjective and is done by fallible humans. No matter if it's happening on the field or in a VAR booth, it's still subjective humans making the decision, and some will still be wrong or be perceived as wrong by many fans.
VAR comes with very real drawbacks - long stoppages of play, not being able to get caught up in the moment and celebrate goals, not knowing what is going on as a fan in the stadium. If it truly led to better officiating and less controversy, then I think it would be worth having a discussion around if the benefits outweighed the costs. As things stand, I think we're getting the worst of both worlds, and I don't see VAR improving enough to make that not the case.
I think pro VAR people think that there is some magic tweak to the system that will allow us to have consistently perfect decisions, but I just don't think that goal is realistic. The inherent subjectivity of calls is always going to leave room for controversy.
Statistically though it does technically reduce the mistakes, the issue is that they even still make them and in many of those cases they weren't even on subjective ones.
My personal hangup with VAR is around the rule that contact = foul and if they show a freeze frame or a slow mo, it removes the context altogether.
I don't think anything will ever stop people not liking decisions or consistency because there will always be subjective ones and people will always remember the bad ones especially against their own teams. But again that happened with general refereeing, people remember the hand of god, the Lampard goal against Germany and the Henry handball against Ireland. VAR would arguably have caught all those.