V.A.R. Check: In Premier League, Almost No One Is Happy
The Premier League introduced video assistant refereeing this season, but a string of controversies, and at least four significant mistakes, have players, coaches and fans running out of patience.
The referee Stuart Attwell waiting out a V.A.R. review.
LONDON — England’s Premier League has long prided itself on the kind of soccer it sells to the world, a compelling product that it bills as a unique brand of high-octane, fast-and-furious soccer. So it is perhaps little surprise that the league’s introduction this season of video assistant refereeing — the game-pausing, controversy-inducing, fan-aggravating replay system in growing use worldwide — has been an uncommonly bad fit here, a case of sound and fury meeting a handbrake.
The new system has dominated coverage of the first four months of the season, where hardly a week has gone by without a major V.A.R.-induced controversy. A missed penalty at Bournemouth. A disallowed goal at Manchester United. A toe, or an armpit, inches offside at one stadium, a handball overlooked at another.
Not even the biggest matches have been immune. Long before the final whistle blew in Liverpool’s 3-1 victory over Manchester City on Nov. 10, in one glaring example, the match already had been overshadowed by yet more questions about officiating, with City Manager Pep Guardiola quickly transformed into an internet meme over his televised outrage at two calls in particula
Afterward, a markedly calmer Guardiola demurred when he was asked about the decisions he had protested. “You’ll have to ask Mike Riley and the big bosses about that,” he said. “Don’t ask me. Ask them.”
Riley, the Premier League’s head of officiating, would prefer no one was talking about him at all. A former match official, he, like most referees, spent his entire career doing his best to go unnoticed. This season, though, Riley has been transformed into a convenient lightning rod, a totem onto which players, coaches, fans and pundits can pin their frustrations with V.A.R Unl in
Asked this week what his life had been like at the center of every V.A.R. storm, Riley, a slight man with a race-walker’s build, went out of his way not to answer. “We’re involved in one of the most exciting things that will happen in football in our lifetime,” he said, ignoring the question.
The task he has been handed has not been not easy. He has been asked to balance a type of English soccer exceptionalism — the need to retain that fast-paced game that brings in the big money and those millions of worldwide eyeballs — with the intrusions inherent in any replay system that stops the game’s natural flow, and sometimes makes things worse.
There have been missteps, Riley conceded during a media briefing this week, including four times when V.A.R. officials overturned on-field penalty decisions that had actually been correct.
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The referee Michael Oliver tries to appease Raheem Sterling of Manchester City. City’s recent showdown with Liverpool was marred by questions about several decisions.Credit...Paul Ellis/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
For Riley, who spoke for over two hours last week with executives from the league’s 20 clubs to try to quiet growing consternation about V.A.R., such errors are the worst possible outcome.
