5 Reasons VAR Is Ruining Football

5. What Do We Need The Ref For Anymore?

Let’s face it, who would want to be a referee? Surely someone who likes football enough to run around the pitch for 90 minutes in their mid-30s would feel frustrated not being able to touch the ball. They suffer verbal, sometimes physical, abuse from players and fans. When having a bad day, they are scapegoated, receiving hate mail and a place on the tabloid back pages, and when they do a good job, they are forgotten. Could you even name a referee?

Despite all this, they are essential. Or were. Today the referee is no longer the master, but the servant, no longer alert, but asleep. Before VAR, a marginal offside call or a slide tackle inside the box would ring alarm bells in the referee’s head as he came quickly to a decision. But there is no need for this level of concentration anymore, for all the ref has to do now when unsure is tune into his earpiece and wait for the decision of his superiors who have the benefit of the replay. They are puppets, their strings pulled by a group of retired referees hidden in a room somewhere probably sipping away at a mojito.

We cannot have our cake and eat it. Referees are becoming a waste of time, money and energy: either we scrap VAR and hand full authority to the ref or the latter’s role will suffer the same fate as shop-workers with the invention of self-checkouts.

In such a scenario, who would be left for the players to harass?