VAR is the worst thing to happen to football in the five-and-a-half decades I’ve been watching it.
I keep hearing its defenders say: “VAR is fine, the problem is the people implementing it.” This is total rubbish.
VAR is an attempt to impose objectivity on decision-making in football, which is an inherently subjective activity. It will never, ever “work”.
It has utterly wrecked the match-going experience. When your team scores a goal, you can’t celebrate fully… because there’s a sad act in a darkened room many miles away who’ll take five minutes trying to find reasons to disallow it.
The situation around offside is ridiculous and pathetic. You get ludicrous situations, such as the one highlighted by value31, when VAR disallows a goal for a toenail or a nose being offside.
Offside is given at the moment the ball is struck. But, if we’re being that millimetrically pedantic, is that when the man passing the ball starts to make contact with it, or when it leaves his foot? There’s a big difference, as you can see in 25-frames-a-second slow-mo. All that shows on the TV screen is a blur of foot and ball, which makes the fussing over whether someone is offside or not at the other end of the pass utterly infuriating.
There are many reasons why so many match-going fans across the Premier League are falling out of love with football. The institutionalised cheating, the prevalence of dull, safety-first, possession-obsessed “philosophy” football, the growing distance between lifelong fans and clubs who’d rather their grounds were filled with big-spending tourists.
But VAR tops the pile by a mile for me.