Abuse, high-pressure work environments and harsh physical demands have been a part of the ball witnesses' routine for decades. Now, they're even more so with visual enforcement (VAR). From the start of the 2019/20 season, there will be an additional visual assistant referee in addition to the on-field referees, who will watch matches from the video room, an office room located in a commercial area of Stockley Park in West London. (19 will be on the
England Premier Soccer League
(Enforcement referees will rotate in this role.) If they believe the on-field referee has made an incorrect call, VAR can intervene from there.
Ever since VAR was introduced, it has been pissing everyone off. Soccer can be a fast-paced and exciting sport, but VAR has been slowing down the pace of the game and not bringing joy to the fans. Its presence does not allow people to celebrate too early even if a goal is scored, because there can be some minor incident on the field 15 seconds before the goal that can nullify the goal. What's worse, VAR has never been able to fulfill its function - preventing goal-scoring errors. Commentator Danny Murphy said: "Even my 12-year-old at home knows how the goal should have been awarded."
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VAR has also lowered the standard of on-field enforcement, according to referee Urs Meier. Urs Meier, a Swiss referee who played in the 1998 and 2002 World Cups, said that it indirectly makes the referees in the stadium irrelevant, that they don't care where they're supposed to be, and that the reliance on video makes the referees forget all about the basics. When I put this argument to Darren England, a young England referee, he agrees that it's a subject worth looking at. "Because the whole world thinks you can have a second chance to put a verdict right."
Andre Marriner enforcing the Carabao Cup final, January 2022
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Referee Roberto Rosetti said the root of the problem is not the technology itself, but how we use it, and that VAR was originally intended to "eliminate scandals and correct human error in refereeing." For example, in the case of the 2010 World Cup handball by France international Thierry Henry that cost Ireland qualification for the final week of the tournament, Rossetti said that VAR had become a tool for referees to use for nitpicking. He thinks it's dangerous to utilize VAR in this way because good enforcement should bring out the sportsmanship of the game, which cannot be replaced by high technology. He once experimented with VAR to re-enforce a ball game and pull out all the missed fouls, and he found seven questionable balls to be called 12 yards and three red cards that were not issued, "but that wouldn't be real soccer," he said. He said.
That doesn't mean VAR has no place at all in the game of football. But we have to be careful where we draw the line on enforcement. "If they're too obvious," Rosetti said with empathy, "you shouldn't have to look at the ball 25 times." When I relayed this to young witness England, he agreed: "All of the enforcement errors today were caught by the VAR, and that's where the pressure of our job comes from," he said. "We thought VAR was a super computer, but in the end it's just another person behind the TV refereeing."
One morning earlier this year, I followed a young witness, England, to the PGMOL headquarters in Stockley, where the VAR room is huge, with only four walls without windows, dimly lit, and with ergonomic chairs, like a presidential war room. There are 10 VAR workstations with three chairs in them, so referees can watch more than one game at a time. During the game, a play is broadcast live in front of each seat, and another screen just shows four different angles of each. If the VAR believes the call involves human error, the referee will press the red button, which will open another channel so the VAR referee can instruct the court referee to temporarily play the game and review the call.
In that moment, things can get complicated and the challenge for VAR is always time. Depending on the circumstances of the match, VAR has at least 12 angles of the incident for the referee to review, all of which can be replayed from different angles. But for fans and players, even if the VAR 'just' pauses for a minute to look at the footage, it can be a century for them. (In the first season, Saffy United had a trip where the VAR had to take 3 minutes and 45 seconds to finally disallow their goal). The longer the pause, the more pressure they are under to make the right call.
At Stockley Park, the thing that made me furious was the silence in the middle of it. the VAR was all picture and no sound, no commentary, no fans cheering. This is supposed to make the decision more objective. But it also makes it harder to make a decision. On the field, "you can feel the reaction of the players to get an idea of whether you've made the right call or not," England said, "but in the VAR room, you can see what's wrong on the screen, but then you walk out of the building and it's as if nothing's happened. You don't have the option to 'call the crowd'."
Precise judgments take time They also have to be done under pressure, which also conjures up too much. "The difficulty is that you may just be looking for that Scheidinger's cat all the time - when it never existed." PGMOL psychologist-in-residence Paul Russell said. Howard Webb, the head referee at PGMOL, who was still working in the US when VAR was introduced in the first season in the USFL, said that on one occasion a referee replayed the same angle of the incident 32 times. "It was like, 'What the fuck are you doing? Webb said. "The referees are afraid that they're missing something important, and they're always trying to figure out how the outside world is going to see it."
England VAR Headquarters in Stockley Park, London
"I think people need to be patient with VAR." Law
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Total Laura Georges had this to say "The ball license takes time to get used to as well." Rosetti's view is exactly the same. He told me that the work of VAR and on-field enforcement are two different things. On-field refereeing involves managing 22 large players from two teams in front of tens of thousands of spectators; VAR is watching film in a dark room. One side requires intuition, the other requires careful brain analysis. A live referee has only one point of view; a VAR needs to "play the game with the camera, the speed and the point of contact." Therefore, the best referees in Europe are unlikely to be good VAR referees."
In the future, Europe
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Chief referee Rosetti believes this will evolve into having professional VAR referees, just as we have professional assistant referees. Italy and Spain already have courses to train active and trained referees to become professional VAR referees. webb told me at dinner that they are in the
England Premier Soccer League
There will be a similar program. He agreed with my suggestion that, like Rosetti, the sidelines should know exactly when to "take the shot" and not just memorize the rules and regulations. "Good license enforcement starts on the field." Webb told me, "You have to know how a game works from the inside out. We don't need robots. "We have whistles and licenses that can handle the reactions of the different players on the field."
