Football / Soccer / Calcio / Futebol / Fußball

VAR hasn’t ruined football PGMOL, just need to be a little less shit.

You will never end controversy or opinion difference, but cast your mind back to pre-VAR days and just fuck me things were bad. Total guess work everywhere, refs completely cowered by crowds (United went a decade without conceding a penalty at Old Trafford!), it was so much worse.

Literally just get PGMOL to a point where computers not some old guy is running offside lines manually and where apologies aren’t being handed out for wildly incorrect decisions and it’s party time.

The vast majority of gripes aren’t that VAR intervened it’s that they didn’t! Second most common gripe is that VAR did intervene but in a way that it never usually does (pull on a shirt at a corner for example).

Literally just get everyone on the same page, publish some guidelines/polices for commonly encountered situations (say shirt pulls in the box will only be a penalty if they have an observable consequence on the game) and lower the bar for intervention from clear and obvious to material and impactful and we’d be there.

This isn’t a hard situation to solve, it just needs to be iteratively improved, with the underpinning assumptions of what would work best critically evaluated and the games stakeholders communicated with openly and honestly.