VAR and referees aren't killing football, the rules are

Paul Macdonald

• Updated: 15 Feb 2023 14:59 GMT
• 5 min read

The fact of the matter is, VAR is not the pressing issue. Nor is it the referees.

No, football’s biggest problem is the rules that govern it. The rules have always been the concern, and how football has been unable to adapt them for the modern game.

Rules can be applied in different ways. VAR simply provides different visible angles on the incident. Blaming that for what’s happening here is like blaming your TV because you don’t like Mrs Brown’s Boys.

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It's the rules that we are applying around VAR and around referees - rules that have become so utterly confusing that even officials that make it their job to understand them simply can’t.

The offside rule, for example, was never designed to catch toenails or leather at the edge of boots, or T-shirt marks to designate whether a player is beyond the last defender.

Offside was meant to ensure that players weren’t ‘goaltending’, and was brought in 100 years ago. If you look back at World Cup 1990, countless goals were disallowed despite the forward being LEVEL with the last defender. We finally got rid of that silly regulation.

But this is now the single most regressive rule change - maybe ever - in the history of the game. In terms of allowing a striker to time their run effectively, it’s a disaster, and impossible to judge. They stand more chance with the naked eye of the official than with the drawn lines of the machine.

And it means that we're chopping off goals regularly. In an actively low-scoring event, we’re trying to find a way to disallow goals rather than finding ways to allow them, with lines drawn all over the place to find minor infractions.

That is exactly how we get the incident in the Arsenal-Brentford game of the weekend, where the first case of interfering with play caused the second legitimate case of offside to be completely missed.

Then you've got cases where a player can clearly handball it (West Ham v Chelsea), but because his arm is by his side, the referees just simply don't know how to apply the rules in that situation.

VAR is already too slow. But it’s because officials are trying, desperately, not to miss something for fear of being accused of incompetence, or bias, or anything other than trying to apply an out-of-date rulebook to an entire scenario in seconds. Some of these rules are so arbitrary, that we are asking the referees to be quicker in the application of rules that are stupid in the first place.

And that's the main problem. Five years ago, in the pre-VAR world, Kylian Mbappe’s goal against Bayern Munich ruled out for an offside against Nuno Mendes - his knee was two inches ahead of the defender, simply wouldn’t have been chopped off, and no-one would have much cared. It’s a goal.

But we’re going all in on automated offsides which will catch the most narrow part of a human’s body to disallow a great attacking move. I’m not sure why anyone, anywhere thinks this a better system than what existed before.

The rule book was written before technology. It was written long before a ref had to take the long walk to the monitor. And so we’re capturing even more things that we ever could, and therefore putting referees on the spot each and every time. It’s a tiring, soulless, emotionless experience now for everyone. The joy of a goal, reduced to a wait for a reason why it might not be.

Referees and the standard of refereeing isn’t good. But the bar for incidents and the application of rules has never been higher. It’s important we don’t victimise them, rather avoid putting them in situations where they have to perform a checklist of reasons to make the game less exciting.

And so let’s rewrite the rules. Let’s make offside, handball, and the barrier for fouls clearer, and higher. And let’s salvage the game from the technology that was designed to aid it.