VAR Check in Progress

Hello and welcome back to the 'VAR Check in Progress' blog. This post, as promised, is all about the pros of VAR. The Premier League were on the phone asking me to focus on the positives as there was talks it was getting scrapped after the last post; so here it goes. The standout positive from VAR is the elimination of human error and thereby the allowance for better decision making to be made in matches. Pre-VAR, the monumental pressure of making the correct decisions in a game relied solely on the officiating personnel and ultimately the referee. With the introduction of VAR, it relives the referee of this pressure  to an extent. It allows them to take a minute (or 5) to look at the footage and make a more informed decision. Before, the referee had a split second to do this, and they had to rely solely on their own judgement. In the past, during a game, there was no possible way for the referee to realise they had made made a mistake until they saw their face plastered acros...

  In this deep dive into VAR and all of its impacts, I'm first going to go straight in studs-up at the major negatives I feel it brings to football. I hate to refer back to the 'good old days', like your gran saying she used to go to the shops with a couple pound and come back with the weeks shopping. However, it seems justified in order to understand, truly, how much VAR has changed the game. I think I don't speak alone here when I say that the idea of VAR is currently still better than how it is being executed. The idea is to eliminate the human errors of a referee and the other officiating staff. So that, ultimately, the match can run fairly and smoothly and for the outcome to be decided based on the merit of the respective teams rather than an unjust decision made by the referee. To an extent this is the case (which the next blog will cover) but there are still some major flaws present that are harming the game. The one that sticks out for me is how stop-start it ca...