Manchester City and VAR : Ruining Football Together

Manchester City play a fast and furious style of football based around the fast passing and pace of their attackers. This fleet footed game seems to fall foul of referees with some repetition.

Fundamentally I should start by saying that of course I would like all of the decisions made by match officials during a game of football to be correct. As a Manchester City fan, it would be nice if all of those decisions went our way, but this is football and it is beautiful – artful, not necessarily scientific, and above all else instant.

Those moments of sheer joy and elation when your team score and those desperate low blows as results and incidents ruin our lives and blight our sleep. That is all part and parcel of the game I have always loved and I would not want it any other way. As City fans we know more than most it is about the ups and the downs.

Our quick attacking play has often put pressure on referees and linesmen. Decisions can be and are often wrong. These wrong decisions have even cost us important games but at least we understood what these decisions were. Subjective and down to human error.

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Now we face a new threat to our game in the shape of the Video Assistant Referee (VAR). The VAR tool is designed to help those officials make the right decision by reviewing recorded TV footage. In principle this sounds like a good idea, but unfortunately it seems to be ruining the game we love.

Firstly the issue with VAR is it is being sold as non subjective. Things are either right or wrong, we are told. Plainly that is not the case as is the issue with the decision around the excellent disallowed goal on Saturday when Sterling was adjudged to be off side by millimeters.

Replays showed how it all depended as to what point the VAR measurements were taken. The recording system works at 25 frames per second and at the moment the pass was played to Sterling amounted to something like 5 frames of action. In 4 of those frames Sterling was onside and only offside in the 5th. Clearly the VAR referee had used that one frame to decide.

Once we accept that VAR is no more infallible than the referee on the pitch then we should probably be thinking about what rule changes there should be to support it. Should the offside rule be clearer? Should the rule specify when the offside occurs – is it when the attacking player starts to pass the ball or when the ball is released from their feet? Frankly the rule was not created around the technology available so has been superseded.

Secondly, VAR has a major impact on the match going fan and the whole match experience. The fan in the stadium is at best bemused as to what is going on. Consider the retaken penalty on Saturday – no explanation was made in the ground.

Given every goal is now accompanied by around a minute of waiting to see whether it is allowed to stand, the crowd reaction and player reaction to scoring is becoming necessarily stilted. This is removing some of the overall enjoyment of the whole game.

Fans on TV are well served by VAR but those same fans are paying to watch the atmosphere created by those in the stadium. Things which suck the lifeblood of that away, will in the long term impact upon the game as a whole.

Right now City fans are suffering with VAR before fans of other clubs, partly because of the way in which we play. Yet, soon enough the impact will start to be felt by other fans who will slowly begin to realise our objections have some basis in truth.

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VAR needs some careful rethinking and this needs to be quick before the impact becomes irreversible. It should be used if there are clear and obvious errors on the part of the referee – but otherwise should be a silent spectator, carefully ensuring it is not having a noticeable impact upon our experience as fans.

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