Controversies around decision making in major football games seem to come almost as thick and fast as the fixtures themselves these days.
VAR has been introduced and the popular opinion at the moment seems to be that at best it has failed to improve decision making while at worst it is leading to more mistakes.
In the world of the 21st century where every decision in a match can be shared and commented on across social media within a matter of moments of it occurring, how can football get to a place where the onus switches back to 'the beautiful game' and away from the constant bickering over refereeing calls?
Lets start with one of the major bones of contention in recent years, the Video Assistant Referee (VAR). Over recent weeks and months there have been growing calls to get rid of VAR altogether after a string of high profile gaffs.
Before considering whether that would really help with decision making, I think it's worth going back to the point at which VAR was brought into the game and the way the technology was rolled out.
Football was one of the last major sports to embrace technology in support of decision making and when it finally did bite the bullet and decide to implement VAR it went from having almost zero decision making capabilities from an off-field source, to trying to implement technology across most rules which up until then had been the sole responsibility of an on filed ref.
By contrast, other sports that have brought in technology in a phased way and faced far less controversy as a result.
Why is this?
There are some challenges specific to the game of football itself which have made VAR difficult to integrate and I'll examine those in further details below. However, there are certain other factors as to why VAR is commonly seen as a failure which are as a result of poor leadership in the world game itself.
In my own professional life, I've been part of both successful and unsuccessful rollouts of technologies that seek to improve business processes. From that experience, I've observed that when things go wrong, it is very rarely the technology itself that has failed but rather it's the inability of those in charge to manage change that causes the problems.
This is true of VAR. The technology was switched on, integrated into almost all aspects of decision making and then stakeholders were left to try and work out how to respond to this new environment. It was doomed to fail from the start because it wasn't rolled out in a managed way. It didn't give players, officials, managers and of course fans the chance to get used to it and as it turns out people don't do well with change (as this needs explaining)!
So what's the answer? Turn it off altogether?
Certainly if you go onto social and even mainstream media you'll find an increasing number of people who would argue that this is what should happen.
Unfortunately that's not going to solve many of the underlying problems. In fact, when you think about what switching off VAR would mean, it would simply be that footballing officials would not have access to dozens of different camera angles, slow motion replays and freeze frames that everyone else watching the game does. So unless you think you can convince major broadcasters to roll back their coverage of games to what it was maybe 50 years ago (grainy coverage from 3 or 4 camera angles) then I'm afraid the cat is already out of the bag and VAR has to stay.
The technology works, the process doesn't
The other reason it should stay is that despite the obvious errors, it actually gets many more decisions correct than it gets wrong. Switching it off just because a certain or specific fanbase throws a post-match tantrum is the very definition of throwing out the baby with the bath water.
When people argue that VAR should be scrapped they often comment that the technology is killing the game as it used to be.
This suggests that prior to VAR either decision making was better or; that we were previously happy to accept that some decisions were not always clear cut or; that in the past fans were simply ok not knowing when a mistake had been made (ignorance is bliss after all) or; that we're wearing rose tinted glasses on what our experience of football was like pre-VAR. I suspect it's a mixture of all 4!
However, for better or for worse, we now live in a world where absolutely every incident on a football field can be both analysed and commented on by millions of people across the world within moments of it happening. From what we've seen in recent weeks it seems very unlikely that all of those people (players, managers and fans included) are ready to go back to a time when we could just accept a degree of ambiguity in the decision making process and move on.
The problem then with the rules of football are that there are so many grey areas that it's impossible for officials both on and off the field to make decisions that are likely to satisfy most people, most of the time.
I don't want to get bogged down in the specifics of each rule and how more clarity could be added to help with decision making because that really requires an individual blog in it's own right for each of those rules (for example the one i wrote on handball rules 5 years ago).
However, there are key principles that could be applied to all rules of football that would make decision making both more consistent and faster. For example the removal of as many abstract conceptions from the rules as is humanly possible.
Let's start with 'intent' which as noted in the handball rule blog above is something that is almost impossible to prove or disprove particularly within a few seconds or minutes. Take for example the Rashford red card in United's defeat against Copenhagen last night. I'd suggest that he doesn't intentionally foul the opposition player and instead is stepping across to protect the ball, others may disagree. However, to make it an easier decision and one that can be applied consistently across all matches all the time, perhaps we should place less emphasis on what we think Rashford intended to do and instead focus more on the outcome, in this case a foul that could have lead to a serious injury.
Is intent really the defining factor in this decision?
In the same game, there was further controversy over a potential off-side in Copenhagen's 3rd goal where the officials are left having to decide whether a player is 'impacting the game'. Again, this is clearly a decision open to all kinds of interpretation.
In essence it would be easier for football to go with one of the 2 extremes and say that anyone standing in an offside position when the ball is played forward is offside or; go the other way and say you're only offside when you play the ball. If you wanted to qualify it further you could say that anyone standing in the penalty area is impacting the game and is therefore liable to be called off-side.
I could go on and on but what matters most is that the removal of abstract concepts from the rules of the game and the simultaneous introduction of immutable, clear cut rules would give a much easier framework for decisions to be made quickly and consistency which is surely the yard stick by which to judge success.
Again, one of football's failings in as far as VAR's rollout is concerned, was to misunderstand where technology is best utilised and where the referee should be empowered to make decisions.
Technology, as we've seen from almost every other sport in the world, is most effective at making 'line calls'. Within football this would include incidents like offside or whether a ball has remained in the field of play or crossed the goal line.
To a certain extent, football has adopted this into it's decision making. Goal line technology has been around for far longer than VAR and as we've seen in recent years, more leagues and tournaments are introducing similar technology to determine whether the ball remains in play (although not the Premier League).
Equally, while offside rulings can technically still be made by the assistant referees aka linesmen, it's common practice now for them to keep their flags down and essentially let VAR do the work after the fact. If this is the case then why not simply remove that from the assistance referees' job descriptions full stop?
The technology involved to put in a fully automated system for judging offside within seconds of the play occurring is not exactly ground breaking. Let's not forget that we are taking about the richest, most popular sport on the planet whose top leagues around the world have the resources to get this kind of technology rolled out within a matter of months if they so desire.
Beyond the immediate benefits in terms of speed and accuracy of decision making in these particular 'line call' situations would be that you've just freed up the officials to concentrate on all other aspects of the game where the benefit of technology is still questionable.
Postecoglou questions the role of on field officials in the modern era
Again, other sports have done this. For example, in cricket, umpires no longer need to judge front foot no-balls which means that they don't need to be looking at a mark on the floor then raise their gaze upwards in the matter of half second to judge an LBW decision.
Ultimately what technology should be doing is supporting the on field officials to do their job to the best of their ability. In some instances, like the ones mentioned above, it will mean replacing them entirely, in others it will mean supporting them as the ultimate decision maker (as is the case with LBW decisions in cricket). VAR seems to have failed on both accounts as it has neither taken on the decisions that it is ideally suited to make while simultaneously undermining the authority of the referee and their assistants at other times.
Let's get one thing straight, accountability is important and if referees or the system of decision making more generally are not fit for purpose then there has to be a way to hold the powers that be accountable for that and to look to fix it.
However, the current spate of manager, player and fan tantrums do nothing to improve the decision making process of the game and instead only serve to bolster an entire industry that is built across both mainstream and social media to undermine football officials and the decision they make.
When for example was the last time you heard a balanced opinion from a pundit on either TV or via their social media accounts about a refereeing decision? These people and the networks they represent benefit massively from the inflammatory and biased remarks that they make on a weekly basis. Those comments do nothing to improve the game and in fact you could argue that these individuals and organisations have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo as far as uneven decision making is concerned. How else are they going to fill 3 hours of pre and post match coverage?
The simplest change to make here would be to have managers and players held accountable for their post match comments, many of which seem to go beyond just questioning a single decision and instead cross the line into accusing officials of some kind of conspiracy against them and the club they represent without being able to provide any tangible evidence that this is the case.
Do rants like this bring the game into disrepute?
Let's be honest, we all know why managers do this, it's because next week they'll be hoping that the 50/50 decision goes their way because the referee in question is worried about how the story is going to play out across the media if it doesn't. Managers and players after all have a much larger soap box to shout from than the referees do. Instead, they get to endure 90mins of abuse from the coaches, players and fans, followed by days or even weeks more on social media. I wonder why we're struggling to recruit competent individuals to do the role?
As fans too we have to take responsibility for our actions at matches and on social media. The FA has a 'respect the referee' campaign but it's difficult to conclude that it's made any tangible impact when you observe fan behaviour week in week out. Instead we see fans kicked out of stadiums for unfurling various political slogans but free to chant that '"the referee's a wanker" till their hearts content. That seems somewhat unbalanced given that the reason that most people go to football matches is to watch the sport and that can't happen without a referee on the pitch!
Again, you'll hear lots of people claiming that the standards of refereeing and VAR are killing 'the beautiful game'. However, I'd argue that the level of toxicity towards officials (and indeed across the sport as a whole) is really what's killing it and fans themselves have responsibility for reversing that trend.
