A schism is definitely needed in football, as I don't see how the current state of affairs is sustainable. Not only is VAR expensive, but it's impractical and has taken resources away from other important areas of football. This causes systemic dysfunction and just a general unease throughout the sport. And curiously there seems to be a kind of red tape protecting VAR from being removed.
VAR is just so utterly counter productive and problematic, whatever benefits it brings does not stack up to the amount of problems that it creates. I mean I get the theoretical desire to have a fail safe mechanism to prevent the rare howler, but what they've created through that idea is a kind of a monster that hovers over football.
And I was just thinking about this in the sense that what VAR does is that it tries to normalize the idea that getting it right the first time isn't a big deal as long as a wrong is then corrected. And that's really the wrong mantra to have. Referees need to be urged to get it right the first time, and to not look back. If you're constantly looking over your shoulder, if you're constantly second guessing yourself, you can't be confident in your decision-making. Thinking that you need help when you're more than equipped to do the job yourself is just a recipe for disaster. And when they screw up, they'll hear about it, and that's part of how tough it is to be a ref. But they're paid well for having such a difficult job. But their job has been made much more difficult with VAR, having to second-guess themself and be told they are wrong when another set of eyeballs thinks they messed up, it's gotta be insulting to have your decisions questioned in such a public way. They're supposed to be the sole arbitrator, and to use an analogy, VAR really is like having too many cooks in the kitchen.
Just seeing a ref run over to a monitor like a little school boy being scolded by a teacher, it's so demeaning. I just can't believe that they would tolerate such a thing to be normalized. It's public humiliation for a referee to be whisked away to a little monitor, only to then be guided through how to interpret an incident, as though he's too stupid to make the decision on his own. I don't know how anyone in their right mind could have ever envisioned this sort of thing ever being part of football.
If someone would have come up to you 10 or 15 years ago and described such a thing, any fan of football would laugh and think you were crazy for even suggesting such a thing. But yet here we are with this sort of thing being pushed and pushed despite any and all resistance to it, by fans, players and managers. It's as if football has been hijacked and is being held ransom by VAR, and none of us deserve seeing football reduced in such a way. Fans need to demand that VAR be brought to its knees, and taken out of football. And yeah, dominos can fall but only after that first domino is pushed over. We've seen the Scandinavian countries have voiced strong opposition to it. Sweden successfully rejected VAR, whilst Norway followed suit in a preliminary vote, only for a second vote to occur to overrule it.
And to understand what happened there in Norway with the VAR vote, then the reversal, I highly recommend listening to this podcast :
He gives a first hand account to what happened there, how corrupt the whole process was, with the pro-VARers essentially throwing money at smaller clubs in exchange for them voting VAR to overrule those who voted against. It also really gives you a sense of how VAR subjective their decisions are, whilst they try to pretend as if they know it's accurate.
