Last night I watched another controversial VAR decision.<\/p>\n
Or perhaps I should say I watched seven people spend several minutes trying to make a controversial VAR decision.<\/p>\n
When I first started watching football, there was one referee and two linesmen.<\/p>\n
That was it.<\/p>\n
Three people.<\/p>\n
The referee ran around for ninety minutes trying to keep up with play while twenty-two footballers did their best to convince him that every decision should go their way.<\/p>\n
Sometimes he got things wrong.<\/p>\n
In fact, quite often he got things wrong.<\/p>\n
But at least he got them wrong quickly.<\/p>\n
Then football decided what it really needed was more officials.<\/p>\n
The linesmen became assistant referees.<\/p>\n
A fourth official appeared on the touchline holding up electronic boards and looking permanently concerned.<\/p>\n
For a while we even had extra officials standing behind the goals. I never entirely worked out what they were supposed to do, although they always looked very busy.<\/p>\n
Now we have the referee, two assistant referees, a fourth official, a VAR, an assistant VAR and a replay operator sitting somewhere hundreds of miles away surrounded by television screens.<\/p>\n
That’s seven people.<\/p>\n
Seven.<\/p>\n
Most family weddings aren’t organised by seven people.<\/p>\n
And yet somehow we still end up arguing about the decisions.<\/p>\n
The original sales pitch for VAR was that it would eliminate mistakes.<\/p>\n
Instead it seems to have created a new category.<\/p>\n
Mistakes with a production budget.<\/p>\n
We stop the game.<\/p>\n
We draw lines.<\/p>\n
We zoom in.<\/p>\n
We slow everything down to the point where a tackle resembles a nature documentary.<\/p>\n
Then after several minutes of analysis, half the stadium thinks it’s a penalty and the other half thinks it’s a scandal.<\/p>\n
In other words, exactly where we started.<\/p>\n
The truth is that referees are human.<\/p>\n
They always have been.<\/p>\n
The difference is that in the old days a wrong decision took three seconds.<\/p>\n
Now it takes three minutes and comes with graphics.<\/p>\n
Mind you, football supporters aren’t entirely innocent.<\/p>\n
For decades we spent every Saturday afternoon shouting that referees were blind.<\/p>\n
Perhaps football looked at us and thought, “Fine. We’ll add another six officials.”<\/p>\n
That’ll teach us.<\/p>\n
The funny thing is that some of my happiest football memories involve arguing about decisions.<\/p>\n
The debates in the pub.<\/p>\n
The discussions on the way home.<\/p>\n
The certainty that the referee had personally ruined your afternoon.<\/p>\n
Those arguments were part of football.<\/p>\n
Maybe the problem isn’t that referees occasionally get things wrong.<\/p>\n
Maybe the problem is that we’ve convinced ourselves that football can ever be perfect.<\/p>\n
And if seven people can’t agree on what happened, perhaps we should stop expecting them to.<\/p>\n
Anyway, what do I know?<\/p>\n
I’m just a grumpy old man.<\/p>\n
Agree? Disagree? Tell me in the comments \u2014 the Grumpy Old Man can take it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Why Does It Take Seven People To Get It Wrong? Last night I watched another controversial VAR decision. Or perhaps I should say I watched seven people spend several minutes trying to make a controversial VAR decision. When I first started watching football, there was one referee and two linesmen. That was it. Three people. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1129,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[81,13,53,82,1,111],"tags":[91,96,123,79,98,87,90,95,97,101,124,102,106],"class_list":["post-1127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-football","category-grumpy-old-man","category-humour","category-soccer","category-uncategorized","category-world-cup-2026","tag-british-humour","tag-football-fans","tag-football-opinions","tag-grumpy-old-man","tag-modern-football","tag-soccer","tag-sports-commentary","tag-sports-humour","tag-tournament-football","tag-usa-world-cup","tag-var","tag-world-cup-2026","tag-world-cup-diary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davethomasonline.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davethomasonline.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davethomasonline.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davethomasonline.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davethomasonline.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1127"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/davethomasonline.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1127\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1131,"href":"https:\/\/davethomasonline.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1127\/revisions\/1131"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davethomasonline.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1129"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davethomasonline.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davethomasonline.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davethomasonline.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}