will VAR be scrapped or greatly reduced in scope within next three seasons

within 3 seasons all games will be decided by ai simulation and an online fan vote

ooh I like that, I can rig those votes

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i mean this poll is over before an average offside call

caught me. I'm trying to use this thread to sow doubt and sell my proprietary replay system, RAT (ref assist technology) to Premier League. so I need results fast!

I don't know if there's such a big deal been made of it outside the UK tbh. I wouldn't be surprised if it's considered a great innovation and major improvement in some countries - I'm thinking of South America in particular, where they've always come up with terrible ideas on how to ruin the game they consider beautiful.

in the States, in Major League Soccer, it's also unpopular, but for different reasons. here, the complaint is often when it *isn't* used, as the mistakes more often than not involve VAR official missing something. most likely because lol we're not Premier League and don't have the money for all the fancy cameras and tight camera angles, and also, none of these refs having a dream of reffing at the World Cup, so maybe not so worried about fucking it up.

interestingly, MLS's use of VAR has been superior to Premier League's in almost every way. The reviews seem to be shorter, less common, and the controversies much milder. The organization that employs the referees, PRO, is garbage, and their officials are terrible at officiating, their game management sucks, they call fouls like it's the NBA, they obstruct play...but the VAR officials are usually fairly mediocre (a compliment!). more often the complaint is someone quite obviously headbutted another guy, someone obviously committed a foul in buildup, etc, and VAR official didn't radio the official to come to the monitor, or official came to it and disagreed with his VAR official.

I honestly thought the version of it at the 2018 World Cup was pretty good! idk why Premier League botched it so bad.

prior to VAR, the only time I was ever at a match and thought to myself "god, it'd be nice to have instant replay to stop this shit from happening" was when someone got sent off for bullshit reasons. because a red card completely changes the complexion of the match.

other things, y'know, you can rebound from.

but this is off topic, in this, the Howard Webb for PRison thread

it won't change.

hate to talk about football as a 'product' but it is so insane to willingly make your product so much worse to watch on tv. let alone to actually attend in person but we all know noone in English football has ever cared about match going fans.

It seems we can blame the Dutch for VAR.

Is watching live football on TV as important to clubs/broadcasters as it used to be? VAR creates a lot of content which drives engagement. It’s going nowhere anyway.

Voted 3 hours, but on reflection should have voted other- human administered VAR replaced with AI.

Don't understand why they can't just make "clear and obvious" the overriding principle.

So don't spend 10 minutes drawing fancy lines to work out if the attacker's big toe is half a centimetre offside, only overrule on-field decisions where it's obvious they're wrong.

not a fan of var and sadly no chance they'll stop using it. we can't be far away from "this var check brought to you by unibet - bet now on whether it's a foul or not", for all i know there are already sponsorship deals with var somewhere?

xp wolves penalty last night wasnt considered a clear and obvious error

for as long as the english refereeing apparatus are charged with running var they will discredit it. i think thats as clear as day at this stage

not necessarily biased towards or against any one team, but biased towards not making their man in black look bad. and because the man in black is invariably a biased coward fool, it leans in from there

var "wasnt working" for a handball and elbow in spurs favour the last day.

the liverpool phantom goal nonsense

constant decisions telling us we dont see what we see, contortions against the obvious like onana/wolves

at this stage its a farce and the delays are the worst part of it, because before var if a ref was gonna do you he did it quickly

agree with all of that. the technology itself isn't the problem. the broader self-defending power of referees and the rules scientists at FIFA etc are determined to make the "product" all about them. the biggest single issue is the ridiculously lengthy interruptions to matches only to arrive at a wrong or obvious decision no better than what the on-pitch officials could've come up with

both Fulham penalties very similar in terms of degree of contact etc last night. one of the ref's decisions was upheld by VAR presumably on the basis of "no clear and obvious error". the other decision was reversed in favour of Fulham. very hard to see how both of those decisions could be consistent and correct

xp yep in a nutshell

delays for nothing, the loss of the immediacy of the moment for nothing, the unacceptably poor decisions have remained so and its only made worse by knowing that they have removed any doubt that its down to panicked cowardice instead of (understandable) human error/limitations

and you're supposed to be deciding on whether there's a foul or not lads. reviewing the entire passage of play leading up to a goal/penalty looking for every possible infringement from offside upwards doesn't seem like what we were promised and it certainly doesn't help with the endless delays

it didn't help us when sterlings dive wasnt important enough to be a foul but romero (admittedly) smashing enzo five seconds later was

id have a lot more respect for rugby style reffing, where they manage the game self contained but tell you that- like a judge you can annoy or has warned you a few times.

theres more fairness in that than there is this half implemented bureaucracy from a van with mike dean in it

anyway- fuck em

the whole package was sold to fans as a way to deal with outrageous dives and players giving the elbow away from the ball in play. next thing you know we're debating whether standing 5 yards offside bang in front of the keeper is interfering with play and whether you can find one camera angle out of 24 with some evidence that two feet have touched each other

the default on first replay should be as follows:

"onside for me trev"

"not enough in that for me trev"

"ball to hand trev"

honestly if that were applied across the board i think we'd be fine?

yeah, the point of a replay is to look at something a second time as it happened in real time. once you get into Zapruder territory you're asking for deeper logical insight than the average referee is capable of

before var if a ref was gonna do you he did it quickly

this times 1000.

like I said above, in the US it's not handled so poorly, but if I'm at a match and we score, halfway through my celebration, I go to the Twitter account of our team's fan page to see if that guy is indicating there might be a review.

what utter fun.

Gary O'Neil revealed referee Michael Salisbury admitted officials were wrong to award Fulham their first penalty in Wolves' 3-2 defeat; Wolves boss also said officials conceded they should have sent off Tim Ream for a second yellow card and Carlos Vinicius for his clash with Max Kilman

lmao thanks guys, does this come with points attached

it worries me that it's become a distraction for manager and squad but i dunno how you can avoid that. to paraphrase another goalkeeper you still have to get your heads down and play better, even in the face of an arbitrary meaningless system.

agree with that.

xp pope john paul ii,rc

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well it's been decided

If they add power plays I’m blaming VAR

https://amp.theguardian.com/football/2023/nov/28/sin-bins-football-trial-ifab-referees-abuse

It's as if football's administrators are ashamed at how simple football is, in comparison to many other team sports, so they're determined to make it more complicated.