Everyone knows and accepts that football has become sh*t. Especially and specifically Premier League football.
Arne Slot has had a go at it, and is unlikely to have softened in his views after Tuesday night’s hilarity. Pep Guardiola says he doesn’t like it, but he has to go along with it. Mikel Arteta says…well, Legohead McGrappling probably enjoys it very much actually. Fabian Hurzeler not so much.
The consensus is clear. It’s sh*t. But why is it sh*t? How is it sh*t? Can anything be done to make it in fact less sh*t like we’re kind of fairly maybe sure it used to be?
These are big questions with complicated or difficult answers. Not really – you just need to scrap VAR. We’re joking, but only a bit. Or are we?
Anyway. Here’s a ranking of all the things making football sh*t now with some tentative ideas of what might be done about them (SPOILER: it’s scrapping VAR, it’s always scrapping VAR).
6) The (lack of) atmosphere
Almost impossible to avoid ‘in my day’ style embarrassment here, so we’ll just crack on: the atmosphere at Premier League football matches is objectively worse now than it used to be.
Contributing and intrinsically linked factors include ticket prices forcing out ‘real’ fans, clubs prioritising one-off tourists – because 50 tourists coming to one match each will generate far more matchday income than one stalwart coming 50 times, and new stadiums that can’t just magic up the history of the structures they’ve replaced.
With Everton joining the growing new-build ranks this year thanks to the very impressive but inevitably less potent Hill-Dickinson replacing Goodison Park and it’s legendary propensity for rocking, it’s genuinely hard to know what the solution is to that particular problem.
Whereas the wider problem of treating fans as cash cows to be milked for all their worth and then ignored or actively sidelined when convenient rather than an asset to be treasured does have a simple solution, but one that has almost no chance of ever actually happening on a sufficient scale. Not in the Barclays at any rate.
There was a lot of praise and attention heading Leeds’ way for much of this season because they did feel like a bit of an exception to it all. A big club in a big traditional ground that hadn’t been in the Premier League long enough or consistently enough for the life to be sapped entirely from it.
They have, alas, now slightly pissed upon their own self-congratulatory chips there. But there remains a definite sense of Elland Road standing apart as a last stand for what a big imposing atmosphere at a ground full of ghosts and memories felt like.
5) The consistency/common sense paradox
This definitely predates both VAR and the current discourse, but it is definitely part of why football is sh*t now.
Purely for its easy place as the most obvious example of there being no actual solution because nobody knows what they actually want or perhaps more specifically what they want shifts with the tides depending on how it affects their team in the moment.
Common sense and consistency are the two more frequently demanded refereeing traits, their absence near always lamented as if delivering them is easy and straightforward. Again, that’s an element that has been exacerbated by VAR’s foundational lie that this was precisely what it would deliver.
The most perfect example of this came just recently, of course, with the Haaland-Szoboszlai hoopla at Anfield. It was an unimprovable case study, really, because it even stripped away tribal concerns.
Given the time left on the clock, it had no material impact on the result. City were going to win, Liverpool were going to lose no matter what decision was reached. That stripped away the usual tribal concerns where really what you mean when wanting consistency or common sense is “I want this borderline decision to have gone the way of my team”.
So it became a true litmus test of what people actually want, and revealed the similarities between the two tribes. Essentially, it became a personality test that showed up who just really likes rules.
And there’s nothing wrong with that. But what was interesting – what points again to how hard it will be to find any solution to anything that appeases everyone – is that arguments on both sides insisted on pretending not to be able to understand the other side even though it was very easy to do so.
Those pretending not to understand why the laws of the game required the goal had to be chalked off were clearly playing to the gallery. We all know that playing an advantage doesn’t mean you can then just do fouls of your own and carry on. This is obviously, straightforwardly true because the alternative is anarchy.
But those pointing out why the goal obviously had to be disallowed once VAR was involved while themselves pretending not to understand why to lots of people a goal felt like natural justice in this specific situation were just as performative.
In this specific case study it was perfectly reasonable for anyone watching to feel that the fairest and most natural outcome was a City goal. It was also impossible for that to be what the laws concluded.
Our unscientific finger in the air sampling of the way the wind blew on this one is that most people would have been happy enough for the outcome to be a goal and no red card for Szoboszlai.
Yet now here we are just a few weeks later wailing about the lack of consistency over whether a slight push in the back is always a foul.
Rare to see a cliché deliver so flawlessly, but we’re right there right now: all we wanted was common sense, until all we wanted was consistency.
It is a circle that has never been squared and probably never can be.
4) VAR’s existence just in general
You quickly realise when putting together this list that there are in fact a couple of overarching themes. A couple of big-ticket buckets that absolutely everything else could be chucked into.
One of those is VAR in general. Another is that actually nobody really knows what they want. They want consistency until they want common sense. They want a contact sport but not at corners. They want correct decisions but don’t want to wait. They want old-stadium atmosphere with new-build facilities. They want to believe their club is the biggest and best but also a tiny little thing fighting the good fight against the big evil clubs as well as the conspiracy of referees and the league and the FA and football f*cking 365 who are all so obviously biased against them.
At that point you also realise that almost all the problems – from Mikel Arteta playing the most provocatively offensive wrestleball to Arsene Wenger having the most provocatively stupid VAR ideas to the fanbase still most liable to descend into tinfoil territory – can be linked decisively back to Arsenal.
Is the only solution for the greater good and long-term health of the game really to simply liquidate Arsenal Football Club? Answer, sadly, must be yes.
But it does feel like VAR just in general, as a concept, deserves its own section here that stands apart from the specific grievances or how it infests and infects everything else.
Clearly, VAR is another big factor in why the atmosphere isn’t what it was at games. When stoppages kill momentum on the pitch they also disrupt the rhythm of that audible involvement from the stands. People absolutely definitely don’t celebrate goals like they used to at the initial moment, despite VAR-apologists continuing to bafflingly insist they do.
VAR is also constant grist to the conspiracy mill. It all comes back to the false premise on which VAR is built – that perfect unanimously agreed-upon correct decisions are possible in a sport like football where the devil lies in the infinite greys. We know that cannot happen, of course, because we all still see decisions every week where no consensus exists among players, supporters, managers or pundits.
But with VAR, you can see the moving parts far more clearly. One of the many unintended consequences ushered in by the shift to a VAR-ruled game has been that when a ‘mistake’ occurs it is more rather than less irritating.
It’s frustrating, but most grown-ups can or should be able to live with the idea that one set of officials making a decision in real-time from one full-speed look at something can and will make mistakes on occasion. But the deliberateness and deliberation of VAR make that harder to accept. Which makes all those shades-of-grey decisions that happen to go against you harder to accept.
Which makes it far easier to see a guiding hand behind it all, even when all that’s really happening is the same thing that always did: officials trying to do the best they can to deliver outcomes as close as they can to an impossible flawless ideal. Except this time it’s via a method we’ve all been told can take us to that impossible dreamland.
So now when one goal is disallowed for a push and another is allowed despite a push or one player is deemed to be interfering from an offside position and another is not, it is far less easily accepted for what it is. VAR has created zero tolerance for the Seen Them Given or One Of Those decisions while having no way of removing them.
Which again bleeds into another familiar old officiating trope for which VAR has added as a potent irritation-multiplier.
Yes, it’s the old consistency-common sense dichotomy. The greatest paradox in the game. All we want from officials is consistency – so either Randal Kolo Muani and Raul Jimenez both committed fouls or neither of them did, for instance – until all we want from officials is common sense – so that Erling Haaland can score a goal despite very obviously fouling Dominik Szoboszlai because it feels right.
You cannot have everything. You absolutely cannot argue for VAR continuing to exist and also argue for a common-sense approach when you get feels over a specific incident as Gary Neville did in the immediate aftermath of that Man City goal at Liverpool.
VAR very obviously exacerbates the toxicity of modern fandom for all the above reasons. And it definitely plays its part – or doesn’t – in the way your modern wrestling-based corners are governed or not.
Is it really that simple? Is the solution to making football not sh*t any more like it’s become recently simply to get rid of VAR?
It certainly feels like it couldn’t hurt. It’s either that or get rid of Arsenal. Or both, if you want.
3) Joyless offside pixel-peering pedantry
So yeah, pretty much everything on this list is either a) specifically about VAR or b) a thing made conspicuously worse by VAR.
We’re crazy idealists here as you know and we would definitely just scrap all of it with the possible exception of goal-line technology, which barely ever actually comes up and (mostly) just quietly does a job that is often functionally impossible for human officials to do without guessing.
Most importantly, goal-line tech deals with something that isn’t true of all other VAR interferences: absolute, indisputable, measurable objective fact. A ball is either over the line, or it is not. We can measure this. We have the technology. And it delivers instant verdicts the small handful of times per season it is required. Lovely.
Apart from that one time when it confused itself and taught everyone the word occlusion, it does what it was asked to do with impressive, human-beating consistency and – crucial one, this – no mission creep or unintended consequences.
The rest of VAR achieves none of these things and should absolutely be fired directly into the sun. Starting with offside. Whether it’s set-square-wielding nerds drawing made-up lines or the semi-automated Skynet version, VAR has done things to offside that were simply never intended.
This is the main one that serves to cause that initial ‘can’t quite celebrate that’ doubt that has spoiled the moment of goal-scoring. And celebrating a goal is – again, an important yet obvious point that the poindexters, pencil-pushers and warmonger-enjoyers we’ve given the game away too will never, ever understand – not just the best thing about football but the best thing in all of sport and quite possibly life itself.
Slightly sullying that moment is enough on its own to make VAR not worth it. But VAR’s treatment of offside is also built on a complete and total lie: that it can or should be measured to within an inch of its life.
When people threw their arms up in despair at ‘bad decisions’ and demanded we let robots take charge of games, it was never because a freeze frame computer graphic from 2004 showed that this cheating bastard had one millimetre of shoulder that definitely isn’t his arm in an offside position.
VAR has been a parable of unintended consequences and this is the big one. Even when it was introduced it was “Yeah, it’ll probably have to check a goal like every 10 games or something”.
Instead we’ve learned that what we thought we knew by the word ‘level’ was not in fact what level meant. A vast number of VAR interventions are now spent poring over something nobody ever complained or cared about before. Even when the fandom and punditocracy was losing its mind over the need for technological intervention, not even the most ardent tinfoil-wearer was doing what we’re now doing to prove a toenail or shoulder blade had strayed fractionally offside.
But it’s worse than that. Because we’re now using it to a degree of accuracy that it can’t even do. We’re fussing over a millimetre while vaguely deciding where arms end and shoulders begin and making a value judgement on which frame is the one where the ball was played.
With offside you get the clearest example of VAR as theatre. It is all make-believe. We’re all pretending it can be as accurate as goalline technology despite the many added variables and interminable delays.
And that’s before we even get to offside decisions where we’re arguing about the entirely subjective notion of interfering with play.
And how do we plan to solve this? Not by binning VAR, or even by trying to improve it. No, we are once again bending the game to fit VAR rather than the other way around. This keeps happening with handball as well, but with offside you get Wenger’s Grand Plan. Which is even worse. Worse than what we had before, worse than what we have now, and quite possibly the end of football as we’ve ever known it.
2) Conspiracy theory guff
Add it to the long, long list of things that were bad before VAR but are much worse now. Every decision now is not just one official making a snap judgement in one moment but one made by a group of people deliberating in the shadows for an extended period of time.
With football fans already predisposed to imagined agendas and conspiracies against their team it’s little wonder that idea has festered and grown with the way decisions are reached by committee now.
But it really is all just utterly exhausting. Absolutely everything that happens to anyone now is warped and bent through the prism of a million competing conspiracy theories.
After years of making sure Arsenal didn’t win the league for some reason, the shadowy puppeteers of English football are now apparently doing everything in their power to make sure they do win it this time.
As well as that, the Premier League are – for reasons that would absolutely defy all logic – determined to make sure Spurs, one of the league’s biggest and wealthiest clubs, are relegated.
How do we know this? Because a social-media intern got wind of the grand Send Spurs Down plan and did a vaguely misjudged banter post on twitter about Guglielmo Vicario. We’re through the looking glass here, people.
Ultimately, far more football fans than is healthy know by heart all the birthplaces of all the referees.
1) The set-piece wrestling
Forget all the other tish and fipsy, really. Because it’s this one, isn’t it? This is the actual thing that people are talking about when they say the football is sh*t now. They don’t like the set-piece goals full stop, but more than that it’s the specific nature of the set-piece goals we have now where pretty much everyone is fouling everyone and so no individual decision ever gets given.
Even here, the existing biases and thought processes prevail. We still hear “should do better” and “must be stronger there” when it suits the prevailing wind to go that way rather than gnash and wail about the general trend towards expertly conceived and executed set-piece routines into packed penalty areas.
We must admit that this isn’t really our number one. It’s the consensus number one, we get that. But our own bias is against VAR, so in our head this is still just a product of the VAR age. And we do think that binning VAR would go at least some way to solving the set-piece wrestling crisis, if indeed crisis is what it is.
Because we reckon in a pre (and therefore post) VAR world it would be easier to snuff this out at source. When it’s one referee making one decision, it’s much easier to just stamp it out by giving a load of free-kicks.
One weekend where the referees of all the games agree to clamp down properly and you could have it sorted. Obviously that can’t happen now. It would have to be at the start of the season. Do it now after months of letting all these goals count and you’ve got the Consistency mob on your case no matter how much the Common Sense brigade might temporarily be on your side. Especially when you remember that these two groups are not in any way two distinct groups but rather the same people splitting into whichever of the two factions serves their needs on that given day.
It does feel like every season begins with talk of a ‘referees’ meeting’ in which clubs have told set-piece wrestling and grappling will definitely be clamped down on this season. Which in reality usually means it gets picked up once on matchday three and then never again.
This season Arsenal have inevitably been the focus of attention for this. And it’s no coincidence that it’s why it now matters so much. It’s not an anti-Arsenal agenda either – don’t make us tap the conspiracy theory sign. It’s just basic maths. If one team is on track to win the title doing certain things, then the weight of numbers and thus opinion will be against them.
There are more non-Arsenal fans than Arsenal fans in this world – thank the lord – so that is the way the opinion-forming will break.
We really don’t have that much of a problem with the way Arsenal do things. Our own personal view is that we preferred the Arsenal teams that were easier on the eye and played what is to us a more watchable and entertaining style of football. But that’s our own value judgement. And this Arsenal side is going to be more successful than those Arsenal sides.
They’re also not the only set-piece grapplers out there by any means; they have just honed the art.
But if you do think this is a problem that needs solving or addressing, the solution remains the same, guys. Get rid of VAR.
It’s reached a point where corners now involve pretty much everyone fouling everyone else. VAR is useless here because in its misguided belief that it can get everything right, it is powerless in this situation. How can you make a clearly correct decision about 10 concurrent fouls?
You know that bit in The Simpsons where the secret to Mr Burns’ longevity is that he has so many diseases that none of them is able to actually get through the door to kill him? That’s what set-piece grappling is in your modern VAR football. In a way.
There are so many offences going on that VAR can’t do anything about it. Go back to one ref, one decision and he can stamp it out by picking out whichever individual offence he chooses.
Because at the end of the day, all we’re asking for is common sense.