I sort of agree here, but not about the 'test it somewhere else' bit. The only way you get to where it's going quickly and properly is by going for it in real world scenarios – it's the fastest way to learn and iterate. Real data is always better to learn off than practice data.

I do however think they went a season too early with it, there were some pretty obvious changes they could have made and 12 months more testing would have been beneficial.

Calling for it to be taken away until it's vastly improved... not sure we'd ever get there though as the whole point of throwing it out there in the real world is to improve it faster but also more crucially demonstrate it works vs the goals that the governing bodies have set (and it does, the stats speak for themselves).

So yeah, it's a rapidly improving prototype in some ways, but if the end result is going to benefit and ultimately improve the game significantly and measurably then short term growing pains are an acceptable trade off.

It doesn't seem to be affecting the popularity of the product, really, other than fans grumbling about change. The amount of correct decisions has increased significantly. Yes the flow of the game has been affected but that will improve over time, and it's not done so fundamentally – i.e. people stopping coming to games and popularity waning. If anything it's more popular now than it ever has been.

In a way it's similar to this viewpoint regarding self driving car software prototypes being allowed on the road in their millions (although obviously without the saving lives bit, but the point is more or less transferrable)

Short of forbidding all testing of prototypes, there is no way to demand perfection. It is difficult to craft a regulatory regime that would ban self driving testing that doesn’t also ban or slow down the development of very important technology that will in time save millions of lives.

Nonetheless, we could define a set of rules for who can supervise a prototype system, and it might stop Tesla’s activity. But to do so would be to fall into the paradox of “the better it is, the more we don’t like it.” We don’t want to make it harder to cross that valley to becoming a better system. The real question is why we would want to even go there if nobody is being hurt. Right now there are not reports of people being hurt, certainly not at any levels that would indicate there is more risk than that from ordinary driving. We don’t want to fall into the trap of banning things because we have an intuition that they are dangerous. We only want to ban things that actually are dangerous.

So, is it dangerous and an existential threat to football itself? No. So it's here to stay (and improve)

Edited by SW19 CPFC (15 Feb 2023 5.51pm)

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Cost

There's no way the Championship would be able to implement it as it's far too expensive. There also is less of a business case, less money at stake etc. Not to mention you then have to maintain it in perpetuity – once the genie is out of the bottle... Plus the complexity of teams getting promoted having to pay up to have the system installed, lower league grounds not being up to standard to effectively implement it and so on. Not practical

On the latter point – VAR was brought in to reduce errors. It can't eliminate human error, which is always going to be present in an augmented system. The point is howlers like the weekend are happening with much less frequency because of the system. Significantly more decisions are being called correctly than ever before. It is working. The point of it is not perfection – that's impossible. So if you're asking for that before it gets introduced then its never going to happen.

It is better than it was at launch, and it will continue to improve until a point where errors become less and less frequent. But there will always be errors unless it is a fully automated system and you do away with refs and humans augmenting the process (not happening any time soon).

A weekend of big errors is not a valid reason to bin the whole thing off. Doesn't make any sense. It is an excellent reminder that the human component is the fallible element of the system and things like automated offsides need to be brought in faster.

Edited by SW19 CPFC (16 Feb 2023 11.44am)

Did you know? 98.0000001% of people are morons.

You're right, cricket has umpires call. And it works well.

However, this is effectively the same using VAR... it's not just the incidents that get pulled that are the ones that get reviewed. The game is being reviewed constantly, and they are making decisions in real time that an incident is either not worthy of a review or that it's not conclusive enough to escalate and therefore better to stick with the onfield decision (effectively umpires call).

You're also right that anything that requires interpretation is an issue. However this happens with replays in Rugby and no-one sees that as an issue as they accept that the addition of the review allows the right decision to be made more often than not (and more often than before) which is also the point of VAR.

Regarding offsides, which I personally think is the biggest time drain and most fallible use of VAR, as soon as the semi-automated system comes in next season the issues with time taken and line drawing will disappear. The only time contention will feature is for issues like the Rashford offside earlier in the season where the decision is down to an interpretation of what 'interfering with play' means, rather than the offside/onside itself.

I agree it's not a threat to the game, I don't agree that it doesn't work, as the facts prove it does – significantly more correct decisions are being made than ever before, and at elite level that is gold dust.

Your gripe seems to come down to whether it improves or detracts from the game as a spectacle, which is of course entirely subjective.

As previously stated I do agree that VAR can work a lot better and there are still too many stoppages and time wasting because of it, but I also think this will improve exponentially over time, and the incidents that do require more consideration take no longer than the time it used to take for the referee to disperse hoards of angry players desperately trying to influence him, wander over to his assistant and discuss what happened before making a final call.

NFL is an extreme example – it's hyperbole to try and say Football is now the same in terms of stoppages and time wasting.

On the point about 'its meant to be sporting entertainment' – is Rugby not entertaining then? Cricket? Tennis?

Did you know? 98.0000001% of people are morons.

Ah you mean instead of VAR instead of in addition to it

Possibly. You'd have to look at statistics re. how many critical incorrect decisions were made per game over the years pre VAR though to see if it would be enough/worthwhile.

The other problem with it is managers and players could challenge for anything, effectively, rather than just critical decisions. So all those reviews could be wasted on relatively unimportant incidents and when a critical one pops up they're screwed as they've run out. On that basis I'm not sure it would be any better, really. At least with VAR there's no limit on what can be reviewed and it's as neutrally assigned as possible.

Also as someone has already pointed out players and manages would still continue to abuse the ref regardless.

Edited by SW19 CPFC (16 Feb 2023 1.44pm)

Did you know? 98.0000001% of people are morons.