Given that we can’t agree on anything else without getting angry, let’s at least agree on this: Sunday was the perfect denouement to this Premier League season. What better way to embody the title race and relegation battle’s defining moment than us all staring at super-slow-motion replays for five minutes and trying to work out which of the physical grapples might count as an offence. You get the Totaalvoetbal you deserve.
Should it have taken five minutes? Ideally not. Does the time taken mean that it can’t meet the “clear and obvious” bar? Also no. The repeated replays are to ensure that nothing else more pertinent has been missed. It doesn’t make it less of a foul because you’ve watched it 10 or 20 times.
But what about all those goals that Arsenal were awarded when their players did the same? Well, maybe, although seeing a still of a hand resting on an arm or an arm across a goalkeeper that isn’t grabbing anything isn’t enough to convince me of that. But yes, officials making subjective decisions on slightly different incidents and coming to slightly different conclusions is a thing that can happen.
At this point it’s worth taking several deep breaths, several more steps backwards and work out how we got here: the water cooler moment of this Premier League season being a VAR check and the subsequent ragefest. Is this not objectively quite bleak? And here’s the real kicker: I don’t think anything can be done.
This is a VAR-inspired issue. Before its introduction – which I’ve always hated, yay – the referee giving a decision or not at least became the end of the process. It may have still caused arguments, but there was no mechanism to establish a replay loop during which football could be hyper-examined in freeze frame, unless you wanted to do it in your own time. The overanalysis was not a part of the sport; and then it was.
VAR’s biggest impact, other than making people scream on the internet, is to offer a magnified view of grey areas that we were never ready to see in such granular detail. By devoting more time and oxygen to the coverage of those grey areas, it started a culture war in which conspiratorial thinking was already rife. Like football, like life.
Some people will make grand statements such as “Referees just need to start giving penalties for holding in the box”; there are others. Which is lovely in theory, but take this example: both teams hold at the same time, at every set piece and there are multiple instances occurring at the same time. Do you give the first one, the most heinous one, the one that happens closest to the ball or the one that makes the biggest difference to play?
If you don’t want VAR – like me – then you can’t simultaneously expect referees to get all of this right because, as we have said, there is so much physical contact in a confined space with moving parts that it is impossible to see it all with the naked eye. If anything, that’s an argument for more intrusion from technology.
You can’t just say “Erm maybe the refs should just get every decision right” and pretend that is a solution because most of this stuff is subjective and even if it wasn’t perfection is impossible. And (and this doesn’t get said enough): we are all being subjective too. We are allowed to disagree with each other, with officials, with everything; that’s what subjectivity is. It’s completely our choice to let that anger us.
Finally, back to the culture war, can you honestly say that Premier League referees giving six penalties a game, or disallowing goals at every set piece, is going to make you more chilled out and stop sending stills of live action on social media? Is it suddenly going to make fans of rival clubs shake hands and agree that, thank god, this is a far better experience. Or would everybody just lose their minds more?
Read more
- Daniel Storey: My verdict on every Premier League team after Gameweek 36
- Kat Lucas: This was the most controversial VAR call in history
There are small fixes. There will be a new initiative this summer. Football goes in cycles and will revert closer to the mean. But the general aesthetics and PR of this Premier League season have been dismal. The dominance of set pieces is not a pleasant aesthetic experience for most, and especially for casual viewers. The dominance of VAR is worse still, a part-solution to an impossible problem that inadvertently promised perfection.
Or maybe I’ve got it all wrong. If football is a mirror of society, perhaps this is simply the inevitable end game: changing the framework in the Sisyphean pursuit of a constructed notion of “rightness” that is actually a shapeless mass. Analysing every moment for controversy because it all came to matter too much and put too much at stake. Cannibalising something that used to exist for enjoyment and entertainment thanks to its slow dance with hyper-capitalism.
Ah well, at least the Fifa World Cup starts soon.
