Referees eliminated

The introduction of VAR into the world of football was intended, by those who manage the game, to reduce controversy to zero, giving match officials a tool capable of transforming on-field decisions from subjective to as objective as possible.

"No one will be able to favor one team over another anymore," parroted the supporters of the so-called "On-field replay," along with the other evergreen of "psychological submissiveness" towards big clubs, which seemed destined to disappear.

However, after almost a decade of use, it has been discovered that not only has VAR failed to eliminate refereeing controversies, but it has actually increased them. Every week, on almost every pitch in Serie A and the minor leagues, complaints and accusations are recorded from this or that coach.

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It doesn't matter whether the reason for the protest is a card given or not given, a disallowed goal, a millimetric offside, a foul missed by the cameras, or any other questionable case: no one is happy with VAR, its protocol, its practical application, and those who manage it.

In other words, the experiment (that's how they sold it to us at the beginning) can safely be considered a failure. And indeed, beyond Goal Line technology, a system that nonetheless exists independently of the electronic eye, the system has proven to have enormous flaws.

The worst refereeing "atrocities" have been seen in recent years, when referees delegated much of their decision-making autonomy to the eyes of colleagues in front of the TV. And so goals have been disallowed for offside by a piece of a jersey or a boot stud, or even because defenders disappeared from the camera frames.

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Players have learned that the "on-field" foul, where the referee directly assesses the intensity of the contact, has been replaced by the VAR foul, where every "touch" on the opponent, seen in slow motion, can become a brutal foul, especially if enriched by the classic performance of those who have learned to roll on the ground.

Almost all teams have started to include the "strategic roll" into their game tactics, the performance to be done for the camera at the slightest contact during a potentially dangerous opponent's chance, so they can cling to an alleged foul in case a goal is conceded.

Celebrating scored goals has now become risky, given the high possibility of a VAR review, whether for a contact that occurred thirty seconds earlier, for an offside by a shoelace, or for an accidental handball, effectively irrelevant to the play.

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So here is the question: what are referees on the field really for, if decisions are then mostly made by those in front of the monitor? The revolution I hope to see soon is the following: get rid of all referees, get rid of the linesmen, the fourth official, and VAR, and have decisions entrusted solely to an AI, connected to all the cameras filming the match.

If we must eliminate human decision-making capabilities, we might as well do it properly.

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@girolamomarotta, @sardrt, @mikitaly, @mad-runner, @famigliacurione

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