VAR Discussion Thread | 2024/25

BlueHammer85 said:
No but it was the point being made that the game is stopping to much - so made the point that punishing players for kicking ball away and time wasting means it’s all quicker, also the subs rule change was a good idea. Also mentioned average VAR check now takes 40 seconds, whereas last season it was one minute and six seconds. Hopefully that can be improved season on season.
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Why should the players be punished? They weren't the ones stopping the game!

It wasn't their time wasting that was the source of the complaint. The complaint was against VAR and how it (VAR) was stopping the game too much. The solution? Start punishing the players for time wasting? This is an insane shifting of VAR's responsibility on to the players.

This is why VAR is so damaging to the sport. Not only is it failing on such a scale but it is causing other bad changes to attempt to shirk their responsibility into feeling a need to be more stricter of the players for time wasting. This is sending football down a dark and dangerous road and we need to come out of this and reverse course.
 
danielwood5 said:
How many times do you remember this happening in the 7 years pre-VAR? You always say that there were ridiculously obvious offside goals given "all the time", what instances can you remember from the 7 years pre-VAR?
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He is talking about offsides that looked debatable on first sight and were later proved by slow motion TV cameras to be offside, conveniently forgetting that the large proportion of decisions were right, and that now they are checked for two to three minutes.

The question isn't whether more decisions are right now, compared to before. They fucking well should be. The question is whether the interruption to the flow of the game is worth it for the extra 5-10% of the decisions they claim to get right.

I'm with @TheBeautifulGame on this. VAR needs a complete rethink. If people want VAR it should be checking and making all the decisions. Checking corners? It's not principled, it's just reactive. Why not throw-ins? Why not free-kicks in the middle of the park, yellow card, red card or no additional sanction. They can all lead to goal-scoring opportunities within a phase of play. Referees call? Why, FFS? If it's a mistake in the eyes of VAR, just correct it. Anything.

Forget this ridiculous pretence that VAR isn't re-refereeing the game.It's artificial and doomed to fail. Just embrace it if that is what you want. The way the game is refereed now is a complete bastardisation, neither one nor the other. Just let VAR tell referees when they get something wrong. Anything. It would be complete carnage, of course, but, if you want VAR, just welcome it. The game will be unwatchable but it will cut out these stupid mistakes that are being made.

Or would it? Narrator's voice: No it wouldn't because it's a game with subjective rules that would still be being interpreted by fallible humans.

Just bin it and let's all shout at the referees again. It's just a fucking game.
 
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It’s funny to me that VAR will use AI to say that MacAllister was onside by an inch, but COMPLETELY IGNORES the fact that he was open because he pushed off his marker immediately before he ran into the ball.

However, it did a great job of showing the handball was inside the penalty area, but wasn’t actually a handball. I’ve no idea if that was the reason they called him to the monitor, but it was the correct outcome and took some actual backbone to correct his mistake.

It’s like the fact that Gigi got a mitt on the ball against B’mouth negates the fact that he was held so he couldn’t simply time his jump and get a good fist on it, let alone simply use his size to come and catch it!
 
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halfcenturyup said:
I'm with @TheBeautifulGame on this. VAR needs a complete rethink. If people want VAR it should be checking and making all the decisions. Checking corners? It's not principled, it's just reactive. Why not throw-ins? Why not free-kicks in the middle of the park, yellow card, red card or no additional sanction. They can all lead to goal-scoring opportunities within a phase of play. Referees call? Why, FFS? If it's a mistake in the eyes of VAR, just correct it. Anything.
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The challenge is to design a system that addresses all your concerns whilst minimizing disruptions. And what we've learned after many years of VAR is that lip service and promises about how it's going to work is meaningless without imposing strict conditions on their ability to interrupt or disrupt a match. When you leave them with the power to interrupt the match as they please like they have and to make decisions without any accountability, well what we've seen is the result.

A major pillar of a rethink would seem to be the understanding that we need to strongly limit the power that VARs currently have to interrupt a match as they please. They should not have that power. What they should be reviewing in my estimation should be strictly factual. They should have no role in deciding if penalties or fouls are the right decisions unless called upon in my view. And they should only be called upon very rarely and in my estimation, perhaps, only as a result of manager's challenge. And as far as corner kicks and goal kicks, I do think that could be checked automatically behind the scenes without much of a problem given its nature but what happened the other day wouldn't have been perfectly corrected from a simple corner / goal kick decision so even that needs to be thought out. There are certain things that are mostly or entirely factual that aren't being checked by VAR, like corners / goal kicks. I've been thinking a lot about this so if you would like to have out that rethink I would be happy to do so.
 
TheBeautifulGame said:
The challenge is to design a system that addresses all your concerns whilst minimizing disruptions. And what we've learned after many years of VAR is that lip service and promises about how it's going to work is meaningless without imposing strict conditions on their ability to interrupt or disrupt a match. When you leave them with the power to interrupt the match as they please like they have and to make decisions without any accountability, well what we've seen is the result.

A major pillar of a rethink would seem to be the understanding that we need to strongly limit the power that VARs currently have to interrupt a match as they please. They should not have that power. What they should be reviewing in my estimation should be strictly factual. They should have no role in deciding if penalties or fouls are the right decisions unless called upon in my view. And they should only be called upon very rarely and in my estimation, perhaps, only as a result of manager's challenge. And as far as corner kicks and goal kicks, I do think that could be checked automatically behind the scenes without much of a problem given its nature but what happened the other day wouldn't have been perfectly corrected from a simple corner / goal kick decision so even that needs to be thought out. There are certain things that are mostly or entirely factual that aren't being checked by VAR, like corners / goal kicks. I've been thinking a lot about this so if you would like to have out that rethink I would be happy to do so.
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A lot is made of the statistical improvement in decision making that VAR has brought with it but based on the average of 4.4 VAR interventions a game the non fouls on Gigi and Josko in the Bournemouth and Villa games mean that 22% of the VAR decisions in these games were wrong. They wont be classified as wrong though, so I never trust the figures quoted.

I would prefer a system where the Ref has VAR there to check things if (s)he wants to. It needs to be no more complex than that.

Add to that goal line technology and offside technology if (and only if) the margin of error of the technology is transparently published alongside it
 
The concept of VAR is brilliant i.e. eradicating blatant errors from the game. Anyone remember the goal scored by Spurs at the Swamp when Carroll dropped the ball two foot over the line but it wasn't given, or the Maradona goal against England, the Henry handball against Ireland etc. We now have goals disallowed because a player's toe is literally an inch offside despite the technology being used not good enough to determine this. We also have people manipulating the system for their or someone else's means. Whether it's to manipulate a spot bet or an overall result I am not sure but VAR isn't helping the overall game. Take the West Ham penalty given then overturned at the weekend. The Newcastle player barely touched the ball whilst wiping out Bowen, same as Pope against Arsenal. It now looks like the barest touch on the ball will mean no penalty awarded, the precent has been set on two separate occasions yet we Gvardiol being pushed over by Rodgers and no mention. Arsenal at pretty much every set piece pushing, blocking and holding, all fouls yet nothing given. The LOTG change not only from week to week but even during a game! It's the people operating it that's the problem as well as the fact nobody knows exactly what VAR is meant to look at or not.
 
The Marseille vs Atalanta had a controversial ending.
I thought Marseille had a clear enough case for a penalty.
The Atalanta defender miscontrolled the ball and it bounced up and hit his hand. The players were claiming a penalty as Atalanta went on the break and scored.
VAR then started looking at the penalty incident but went with the refs decision.
 
Doku taken out by goalie, can’t blame ref for not seeing that. Thankfully VAR spotted the touch and Man City rightly awarded penalty.
 
I was there today.
Some might tell me that Var helped us, the penalty decision, their 'goal' and other incidents.....
All I can say is it was shite. City players played the ball out to force the ref to review the Var decision!!
Then there was a delay after the saved penalty .... apparently the keeper moved too early, not that any fucker in the ground knew that.
Their goal, can anyone tell me the linesman wasn't told to flag ? Who told him? (cough var)

It takes all the emotion out of the game for a match going fan.

It's shite.

All in, as a match going fan it was shite, fuck it off. If it meant the dipper goal stood so be it
Its wank.
 
johnnytapia said:
Taken out!!!! You stick to watching non league mate. Clueless
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I called it a pen, everyone around me in pub said it was 'joke' decision and went down to easy.
social media moaning about it, so caused some controversy.

Pen for me and without VAR it wouldn't have been awarded and Van Dijk goal would have stood. but its all corrupt apparently and must be scrapped.
 
BlueHammer85 said:
I called it a pen, everyone around me in pub said it was 'joke' decision and went down to easy.
social media moaning about it, so caused some controversy.

Pen for me and without VAR it wouldn't have been awarded and Van Dijk goal would have stood. but its all corrupt apparently and must be scrapped.
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You are so disingenuous at times that it’s ridiculous. The reason that I and a lot of others want it scrapped is that the disruption to the flow of the game, and the ridiculous delays are not worth it when they still get basic decisions wrong. As you well know.
 
BlueHammer85 said:
Doku taken out by goalie, can’t blame ref for not seeing that. Thankfully VAR spotted the touch and Man City rightly awarded penalty.
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Pen was the right decision. The contact was slight but significant and he really extended the leg.
BlueHammer85 said:
I wouldn’t, very tough to see any contact which wasn’t much anyway, from the refs position
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He was right there in front of the play, but chose not to make any decision and instead to defer to VAR. The contact was hard to see in real-time but the goalie's leg extended was clearly visible. Typically a big part of making such a decision in real-time is seeing the leg extended and seeing the player run through the leg then fall down. Not necessarily seeing the contact just seeing the components involved and making an assessment of what occured.

In this case it's another one of the ref standing there and choosing not to do anything, so it's not necessarily a corrected decision it's just the ref choosing not to make a decision. Now, in this case, VAR confirmed what was hard to see in real-time and gave the penalty. I just object to making the referee useless on the pitch as such with him standing right in front of something but then just standing there helpless to do anything.
 
The decision to issue a offside on the 'pool goal was curious in that, after a long delay, and during a goal scoring celebration, the on field decision was said to be offside, which is apparently what then guided the decision-making during the VAR review. So they say, because the on-field decision (a subjective one mind you of interference) was offside then when it came to the review they claim they didn't have enough evidence to reverse the on-field decision. I would say this gave the impression of being dodgy in that we've seen how inconsistent these kind of rulings are. For example there was a similar review for offside in a recent United match and through VAR they did not review it for offside or rule interference when a very similar situation occurred there. He ducked in a similar manner to the ball coming in and in both cases the player did not block the keeper's view of the ball, but he could be said to be in the keeper's peripheral line of sight and certainly close enough to the ball to have had to duck.

This decision could certainly be argued either way and could be said to be controversial due to how inconsistently these kinds of decisions have been applied, it may be due to how the on-field decision seems to carry great weight heading into a VAR review for such a thing, which is a serious flaw to the process in my estimation. I also do not like how they have essentially copied the NFL model with even the decision announcements.
 
Andy TheCatalyst Morrison said:
You are so disingenuous at times that it’s ridiculous. The reason that I and a lot of others want it scrapped is that the disruption to the flow of the game, and the ridiculous delays are not worth it when they still get basic decisions wrong. As you well know.
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They have also disabled the referee in key situations like on the tackle in the box where he's looking directly at something but can't make a decision. We talk about how the standard of officiating has declined, and a lot of that has to do with VAR, but it all begins with the referee and his newfound "freezing" in key situations like that does not instill confidence.
 
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