VAR is a complete abomination that will ruin football as entertainment, which is what it should be.
I have given this some thought recently. If it were not close season, it would be the subject of a monthly article.
I fully accept that I am a football dinosaur, from the Sixties and Seventies, with ideas that are forty years out of date and more. Curiously, younger football supporters believe VAR is a great addition to the game, which I find incredible. But I am a dinosaur, remember. If that is the case, so be it. But I am going to say this anyway.
With all the money in the game today, and with all those wonderful footballers from all over the world plying their trade in English football (and they are wonderful), why do I think football was better forty years ago? And by a significant margin?
It could be due to all the money in the game that has attracted a breathtaking assortment of crooks and mercenaries from all walks of life. It could be due to the advent and overuse of technology, driven and enhanced by the microscopically analytical eye of television. Perhaps. But personally I blame the rule changes made by IFAB (FIFA by another name) during that period. Actually in very recent years, but we'll gloss over that for the purposes of this rant.
Why does the morass of rule changes over the last twenty years make the game a far worse spectacle in my eyes? Because every subsequent rule change designed to clarify previous rules actually makes everything worse. It has been known since Roman times that the more rules you have, the less enjoyable and the less workable everything becomes. Until you arrive at the point where everything simply grinds to a halt.
IFAB (FIFA, remember) has realised that, so now they have given us VAR to sort everything out, to provide
certainty. So why does the advent of VAR make my blood boil? Why do I see it as the latest nail in the coffin of football as an entertainment?
Possibly because it obliterates everything that makes football exciting. Speed, strength, intensity,
fluency. Goodbye, fluency. If you need a roomful of referees a hundred miles away to do the job that was done perfectly well by one referee and two linesmen only a few short years ago, you have got something very wrong somewhere along the line.
Will FIFA realise that?
No, of course not. The only thing FIFA realises is how to make the maximum amount of money from its deteriorating product in as short a timescale as possible. Like it or not, VAR is here to stay, and will shortly be rolled out across football at all levels and across all major football playing countries. We will have it at Lincoln within a couple of years, for sure. I'm sorry, but we will.
At least we will know for sure that John Akinde's left bootlace was marginally (but mathematically and therefore correctly) offside when he scored the last minute winner that wasn't against Portsmouth in March 2021.
Anyone feel better for knowing that?