![Sample our Sports and Leisure journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5949/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Sports-Leisure.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Introduced with the hope of reducing refereeing errors and increasing “football justice”, the Video Assistant Referee (VAR) has attracted much criticism from players and spectators alike. Drawing on evidence from domestic and international competitions from the past three years, this article investigates the problems that have become apparent with the system. It argues that the success of technological aids like the VAR depends on the nature of the norms on which they adjudicate. Just like legal norms, football laws can be divided into rules and standards. While the VAR has the ability to make a substantial contribution to enforcing the former, its added value for policing the latter is more limited.
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank Jo Murkens, Guilherme Sampaio, Joe Tomlinson, Bosko Tripkovic, Steve Weatherill, and Jack Williams as well as the two anonymous reviewers for their stimulating comments.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. But see Nlandu (Citation2011), 30–31.
2. This is even true of the aforementioned speed limits: in many countries, driving faster than allowed is illegal but minimal infractions, e.g. driving less than 3 miles per hour over the limit, will not be penalised.
3. The fact that the distinction is not clear-cut does not mean that there are not significant differences between the two types concerning their clarity and predictability of application as well as the scope of interpretive discretion which officials have (see remainder of section).
4. Similarly, for tennis, see Berman (Citation2011), 1361 et seq.
5. ‘Passive’ offside is formulated in a more standard-like manner: it requires the player who is in an offside position to interfere with an opponent, for instance, by preventing them from playing or being able to play the ball by ‘clearly obstructing the opponent’s line of vision’ or ‘making an obvious action which clearly impacts on the ability of an opponent to play the ball’ (Law 11.2).
6. It includes attempts to deceive the referee (e.g. by diving), committing an offence that interferes with a promising attack of the opponent, and ‘showing a lack of respect for the game’; see IFAB Citation2020, Law 12(3).
7. The ‘six second rule’ whereby the goalkeeper must not take longer than six seconds to release the ball, which is meant to prevent time play, has, due to underenforcement, effectively become a standard prohibiting exceedingly long tardiness.
8. Instant replays were introduced in 1986 by the American National Football League (but temporarily suspended between 1992 and 1999) and in 2002 by the National Basketball Association. The Hawk-Eye system has been used since 2006 in tennis and 2001 in cricket, which had already experimented with a variety of other technological aids already since the early 1990s.
9. Helsen, Gilis, and Weston (Citation2006), Oudejans et al. (Citation2005), Catteeuw et al. (Citation2010), and Hüttermann, Noèl, and Memmert (Citation2017).
11. The Twitter account ‘VAR-watch’, which monitors the technology’s performance in the German Bundesliga, has rated 13 VAR decisions during the 2019/20 season as ‘questionable’, 8 of which concern penalties.
12. This is not to say that there have not been problems. The French Football League suspended the use of a GLT system developed by GoalControl in 2018 after a series of errors, before signing a contract with market leader Hawk-Eye. But even Hawk-Eye’s technology occasionally malfunctions as the Premier League match between Sheffield United and Aston Villa in June 2020 showed. GLT failed to detect a goal for Sheffield although Villa’s goalkeeper had, after catching a ball from a cross, carried it over the goal line. Hawk-Eye explained that this was the result of the level of ‘occlusion’ by the players involved, which had not been reached in the 9,000 previous matches during which the system was applied (Ostlere Citation2020). Football commentators were quick to point out that the VAR could—and should—have intervened to correct the mistake. These incidents should not detract from the fact that the GLT has worked remarkably well in the vast number of games in which it has been applied, leading to correct decisions in critical situations, some of which have decided titles races, such as the goal-line clearance by John Stones in the match between Manchester City and Liverpool in the 2018/19 season, where GLT correctly signalled that the ball was not fully over the goal line, with only 11 millimetres missing.
13. See Collins (Citation2020, 9).
14. Addressing the growing frustration in the Premier League, Gianni Infantino has noted that ‘In Italy, in Spain, in Portugal, in Germany this offside discussion is not existing on the VAR.’ See uk.reuters.com/article/uk-soccer-ifab/fifa-chief-infantino-says-open-to-changes-in-offside-law-idUKKCN20M2X7.
15. See Wilson (Citation2013). This does not mean that the phenomenon will remain a predominantly English one. The modern game becomes faster across the world and is, for tactical reasons, played on an increasingly confined space on the pitch, which is likely to contribute to the problems described below.
16. Figures for the 2019/20 Premier League season: see www.premierleague.com/news/1293321. These confirm earlier findings from the Bundesliga (DEUTSCHE FUSSBALL LIGA Citation2018), where VAR caused a delay of 60 seconds per game on average during its first season.
17. Collins (Citation2020).
18. See uk.reuters.com/article/uk-soccer-ifab/fifa-chief-infantino-says-open-to-changes-in-offside-law-idUKKCN20M2X7.
19. During the first half of the 2017/18 Bundesliga season, the German Football Federation decided to not employ calibrated lines for VAR offside reviews and, instead, relied on simple video footage of the scene, leading to a situation where only if a player ‘looked offside’ he was offside. The result was several incorrect and many contentious offside calls (Kolbinger Citation2019), triggering much dissatisfaction among players and commentators. In reaction to the criticisms, the calibrated lines were introduced during the second half of the season, eliminating much of the controversy.
20. As of the 2020/21 season, the definition of handball has changed: the boundary between the arm and the shoulder (which is the boundary between handball and no handball) is now defined as the bottom of the armpit. This, on the one hand, means that players can score goals with the side of their shoulder. On the other hand, it also has the effect that players are more easily in an offside position, as their shoulder counts as a relevant body part for the purpose of the offside decision. For an illustration of the problem see www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/54855596 (discussing the ruling out of a Patrick Bamford goal ‘for pointing’ in a match between Leeds United and Crystal Palace).
21. A related question, which is bracketed in this paper, is whether this means that the VAR’s competence catalogue should be expanded beyond the four decisions/incidents that are currently reviewable. In most sports, technological aids are used to correct consequential refereeing errors only, not all errors. This limitation is the result of a cost/benefit analysis: while there is a lot to be gained from correcting a mistake that has a significant impact on the outcome of the game (e.g. goal/no goal), there are few, if any, benefits attached to correcting minor infractions with no genuine impact (e.g. simple foul in the middle of the pitch). As argued by Berman, video review systems should be designed so that they ‘maximize error correction up to the point at which the marginal cost exceeds the marginal benefits’ (Berman Citation2011, 1693; cf. Nlandu Citation2011). This does not mean that the current list of reviewable decisions/incidents strikes the ideal balance between the two, but it makes a prima facie case for not reviewing every refereeing mistake.
22. Berman (Citation2011, 1703–1706).
23. This is a major difference between football and other sports where technological aids are, primarily or even exclusively, used to enforce rule-like norms, such as American football; see Berman (Citation2011).
24. Having different VAR regimes in different countries or leagues is in tension with the principle of universality underlying the Laws of the Game. But the IFAB has, over the past years, warmed up to the idea of differentiated and context-specific arrangements, e.g. in lower-tier and youth competitions.
25. As of the 2020/21 season, the Premier League is following the IFAB’s VAR Protocol on the use of on-pitch monitors.