What If… VAR was scrapped?

The Athletic FC Podcast

The episode explores a hypothetical scenario where the Premier League votes to scrap VAR, examining its impact on match flow, fan experience, and officiating accuracy. Host Emma Payton is joined by former referee Graham Scott,

Key takeaways

• Graham Scott reveals the intense psychological pressure on VAR officials, describing a clash between speed and accuracy that often leads to rushed decisions.
• The panel highlights the Luis Diaz offside incident in the Manchester derby as a catastrophic process failure rather than just a technical error.

Main topics

• Video Assistant Referee (VAR) implementation and history
• Officiating pressure and decision-making psychology

Notable quotes

"maximum benefit, minimum interference"

Conclusion

The episode concludes that while VAR was introduced with good intentions to correct clear

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) What does it take to push bold ideas forward? Build new ways of working. And how can businesses help solve society's biggest challenges? Take on Tomorrow is back with a brand new season. Join us as we meet innovators and experts from around the world to discover the secret to building momentum. Visit pwc.com slash take on tomorrow or wherever you listen to podcasts for season five. Speaker 2 (0:35) The Athletic FC. Speaker 3 (0:40) Hello and welcome to the Athletic FC podcast with me, Emma Payton. This is What If, where we chat about the biggest sliding doors moments in football and examine how different life might be on an alternative timeline. This week, we're asking, what if VAR was scrapped? Speaker 3 (1:02) Well, here with me in the studio today, we have The Athletic's Dan Kilpatrick. Hello, welcome back. Hello, thank you. Doing Speaker 5 (1:08) all Speaker 3 (1:08) right? Speaker 5 (1:08) Yeah, very well, thanks. Speaker 3 (1:09) Welcome back to Tim Spears as well, two weeks away. Yeah, I'm slacking off. Not Speaker 4 (1:13) acceptable. Speaker 3 (1:14) What's going on? I'm back. You're back, okay. Back with a bang, hopefully. And we've got a very special guest joining us here in the studio as well today, former Premier League referee and now columnist for The Athletic. It is Graham Scott. Graham, welcome. It's great to be here. Really, this episode is perfect for you. You say that now, let's see. We'll Speaker 6 (1:31) see, Speaker 3 (1:31) we'll see in an hour's time. Before we get into it, for those that don't know, I said you're a columnist now. for the Athletic. So tell us a bit about what you've been up to. Speaker 6 (1:38) Yeah, so I was a journalist before. Paused that career to be a Premier League ref, which is rather great. And then I've gone back into journalism and I write now for the Athletic. I do a weekly Q &A. So if anyone ever wants to write in with any question, could be topical, that weekend's action, it might be something more general around what on the hell, how the hell do you do? What on earth is going on? How are they all quite so bad? And Speaker 4 (2:03) all Speaker 6 (2:03) that sort of stuff. Don't write in with your conspiracy theories. You really are wasting your time. I won't be responding to those. So I do those every week. And we also do ad hoc columns as well as issues arise or maybe during the international break, take a step back and do something a bit more reflective on the season so far or the future like we're talking about today. Speaker 3 (2:24) The first thing Graham said, by the way, when he walked in the studio was, why isn't there a picture of a referee? on the wall. So we're going to work on that for you, okay, for next time. We are going to do things slightly different this week. We are traveling into the future to imagine a VAR-less world. So here are the three alternative timeline moments we're going to be focusing on. The benefits and drawbacks of getting rid of the technology, how VAR could be changed rather than scrapped, and simply... Would we enjoy football more? So I am going to be very intrigued to hear your thoughts on all of those. Let's start though, Tim, where we always begin and with a bit of a history lesson. So when did the idea of VAR first come about and why, I guess? Speaker 4 (3:09) I mean, I guess VAR as video technology improving football has been around as a sort of a notion for a long time. It was a discussion point, I don't know, turn of the century onwards, it really started to... become more of an idea. Other sports kind of led the way there, really. If you actually look at the timeline, football was really slow to get involved. Like cricket and rugby, you know, in the 90s, we're using video. Tennis brought in Hawkeye, like early part of the century. So football took like 20 years longer, really. And it's, I guess it took like a succession of sort of big incidents, like the Lampard goal, which was, as FIFA said, the Lampard non-goal at the 2010 World Cup, which FIFA said was the instigator for. goal line technology and then you had things like the Thierry Henry handball around that time as well 2009 which was a huge sort of why can't we just watch a replay to decide that that was handball and it is it is sort of important to remember in this discussion that if you go if you try and go back in time the clamor for for for a form of VAR was huge you know I've kind of looked up some some things that the manager said at the time and like they were all in favor like Fergie Wenger was a massive one on it. Mourinho, repeatedly, after a decision went against him, which was every week, he'd be banging that drum. Pep Guardiola. He's happy now, isn't he? Speaker 6 (4:27) He loves VR. Exactly. Solved his problem, which was great. Speaker 4 (4:31) So, yeah, there was a groundswell of support. And if we were to scrap VR tomorrow, that would just come back again. So the way that it's implemented, I'm sure we'll have a discussion about that, but the fact that videos came in, everybody was pretty much... in agreement with that. Speaker 3 (4:46) Graham, take us back a little bit into what life was like for referees before VAR. You would, obviously, Speaker 6 (4:54) just a referee of Speaker 3 (4:54) the Speaker 6 (4:54) game that was put in front of you and make the decisions in the moment based on your single view at full speed in real time. And you'd get some wrong and some of them would be really poor errors and you'd just completely misread them. There was also a lot of things you didn't see. So the off the ball elbow or the blindside foul, the on-rehand ball. you could make a thin case the assistant might see it, but you're asking someone who's 60 yards away with lots of moving parts, doesn't know what's about to happen to spot it. Could it have been his knee? I mean, you know, it wouldn't be sure enough to say, I'm going to disallow that goal because I'm absolutely certain he's batted it with his hand. So you had situations like that going on and you, after the game, would find out straight away that, well, you just made this calamitous error here and you just cost this team a World Cup place or a... championship or just three points is bad enough and um you drove home feeling wrong about that you don't you know none of us want to get decisions wrong we had to take great professional pride in getting them right and get indeed do get most of them right but the ones you get wrong wrong are the ones you are remembered for and it was it was grim and it didn't make any sense to us either that someone could have told someone could have watched that straight away and just gone bang um But then you start getting into where's that line drawn? So we say, well, the on-rear handball is obvious. Yeah, but every handball now is going to be looked at because how do we miss? We can't decide they're obvious until we've looked at them to check whether they're obvious. And of course, then you add up where we are now, which is this kind of netherworld of grey areas and thresholds and bars and language that most people just can't get their heads around. So Speaker 3 (6:32) what was sort of a referee reaction when VAR was introduced? Speaker 6 (6:37) We were concerned about the practice because we'd started doing it in training and were finding that it was nothing like as straightforward as maybe even we'd anticipated. We knew it wouldn't necessarily be as easy as everyone thought. But you sit in that chair and you are now confronted with real-time decisions. So we started doing it like an EFL Cup and the FA Cup. And I did a game. I was one of those kind of, I think it was the third person to be a VAR. And I did a game at Wembley that Tottenham were playing in, in the snow. It finished 6-1. They were playing Rochdale. So everyone's forgotten about it, apart from maybe Rochdale fans had a great day out and all that. And it was, it was awful. I mean, there were six checks. It was, I had a penalty. I overturned the game of penalty. I disallowed a goal wrongly, thinking that looks like a foul in slow motion. It wasn't. So all those things started happening and you, and we thought, gosh, this isn't. this isn't easy. This is really tough, this. And the public feedback was very negative that we were useless. We were ruining the games. And it's not the technology, it's the people running it, which of course is a running theme as well. So we were concerned about it. We were relieved when the Premier League put it back a year, which they did. The timeline was that the Premier League was going to introduce it and they decided to push it back. I think it was in, it would have been 20... It was going to bring it in in 2019. It eventually did. So we were concerned about it, but we hoped it would take away that sense of we've just cost that team the game, which was obviously the worst feeling we ever had. Speaker 3 (8:14) What's your memory of the sort of public response at the time when VAR was introduced? I Speaker 5 (8:19) think to Tim's point, there was a kind of clamour from within the game. And I think there was a kind of cautious optimism from fans and the general public. I think most people were kind of interested in seeing how this worked and hopeful that it would. improve the game. And there was this phrase that went around that Graham remember, maximum benefit, minimum interference, which we still hear it today. And that was very much the way it was pitched. Like this isn't going to interfere too much, but you're going to get loads of benefits from it. You're not going to get the big mistakes from referees. And it's not really going to disrupt the way you enjoy and kind of follow the game. Fans were kind of desperate for this to happen, but everyone was sort of broadly in agreement that at some point. it was going to come and kind of had to come because again, to Graham's point, there was just so much noise about refereeing decisions. And it was, I think the Premier League and football as a whole probably felt we've got to do something about this because after every game, pundits were talking about decisions endlessly. Managers were, players were, fans were, social media was a huge thing and it was all the talk on there. So something had to give. Speaker 5 (9:34) the introduction of VAR kind of felt inevitable. Big change, eh, in the last few years. We don't talk about Speaker 3 (9:39) refringes anymore. Not Speaker 4 (9:40) at Speaker 3 (9:40) all, yeah. You talked about those sort of early stages, Graham, and the learning process. I mean, you were on VAR duty over 100 times, I think you're right in saying. Tell us what... what it was like being in that booth when the pressure is on you? Speaker 6 (9:56) It's a really weird experience. So you're sitting in a relatively small cubicle. It's all black and you've got these screens in front of you and you're bombarded by images, really. So you've got a large screen with the main camera angle and then below that you have what we call a quad split where you've got four different angles on a three-second delay. And the idea being, well, that could be... I need to check that. So he can look down. Oh, actually, no, it's fine. We can move on. But sometimes you look down and your eyes wouldn't land on the right bit of the screen and you miss it and you go, I'm going to need to check that again. You've got a replay operator who works for Hawkeye. So we're not employed by any of the referee bodies who is trained by Hawkeye. They're very variable in their experience. Some are absolutely outstanding, very good at what they do. Others, you turn up at about one o'clock for a three o'clock and you say, right. Nice to meet you. How many games have you done? This is my first one. And you think, okay. So there's things going on like that in the background that people obviously wouldn't be aware of. And then next to you, you have an assistant VAR who's there to take live play if you're checking something while the game's going on. An example of that recently was the Phil Foden red card at City United. The VAR was still looking at a penalty appeal from 15, 20 seconds earlier. Doesn't see the Foden incident. joins it late. So goodness, there's been a red card. What's happened? And is Avar saying, well, I think he's kicked out of him. I'm not sure. So he's looking at it under pressure of time already and actually starts watching. what Foden did first and didn't start these first because that was what was given to him it's not his fault so it's all these things going on at the same time And you've got this real clash between what I call the irresistible force of speed versus the unmovable object of accuracy. And they're completely in conflict with each other. People want a very, really quick process, please. I don't want to hang around waiting for you to get your ducks in a row to work out what the best decision or the correct decision is. But it's got to be right. So at what point in that process are you going