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Norway on the verge of abolishing Video Assistant Referee from domestic football league after clubs in the country's top two divisions recommended formally that it should be discontinued
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- Title
- Norway on verge of abolishing VAR from domestic leagues after club vote
- Authors
- Nick Ames
- Published
- Jan 22 2025
- Word count
- 541 words
Almost every sport I watch has had video umpires for years with no problems. Football, for some reason, has always made a massive fuss about it.
I used to play squash at county level. My coach, who had previously coached world ranked players, always said there's no meaningful thing as objectively right decisions - obviously a rule is either broken or not but functionally there's only what the umpire sees and decides. Sometimes it goes your way, sometimes it doesn't. They're just people doing their best. Umpire decisions are part of the game. You're not going to win or lose based on a single decision, even if that decision is the point (or goal or whatever) that puts you behind at the end of the match. If you were playing badly enough to be that close to losing, that's on you, not the umpire who made that 'incorrect' call. Most sports are a long game with lots of umpire decisions - including lots that you don't hear about.
I've never agreed with this. As long as there is another team competing against you, it is only your job to do better than the other team and not some arbitrary bar of [other team + referee interference].
And even if you aren't competing against anyone, the standard is still just to be good enough without some arbitrary extra requirement.
See, I would say that "referee interference" very much implies a biased ref. Obviously that is a problem. But a ref who is doing their best to be impartial and, being human, occasionally making less than perfect calls, isn't interfering. Average an honest ref's mistakes and they will go in your favour as often as not.
The human factor of the umpire(s) and their decisions is not an arbitrary extra, it's part of the game. Also all the bars are arbitrary, this is sport. Why is this one arbitrary requirement - which has always been there above a certain level - a requirement too far?
This actually isn't true, as even honest refs are impacted by things like uniform color, who the home team is, which team is "supposed" to be better, etc. Plus, even if a ref isn't biased against one team, they are still biased toward their initial reaction. Even their initial reaction was to call something a violation, they are incredibly unlikely to recant even when everyone else in the stadium could see that they were wrong.
So if you disregard the implication of bias, they can still interfere (get in the way of the contest).
Because "we've always done it this way" is not a good reason to not try to be better.
I didn't say we shouldn't try to be better. I'm all for trying to be better. Which is why I like VAR/Hawkeye/etc. But we can't get rid of umpires. That's not better than having them there. We can make it easier for them to do their jobs more impartially, and that's great.
The point I was trying to make is that umpires and their decisions are part of the contest. Just like the weather or the crowd or any other factor which affects play. Refs have to be there, even if they ultimately end up being almost entirely AI systems or whatever. There is no un-refereed sport, it just wouldn't work. Professional sportists will always try to cheat, break rules, skirt guidelines, play the edge cases or whatever. That's as human a thing as referees making imperfect judgement calls.
Has anyone suggested getting rid of them?
Other than in baseball, where they are just atrocious and could legitimately be replaced with a computer.
This is erasure of the Banana Ball umpire. He can really dance
/J
Are you talking about the Savannah Bananas? Surely we can move him from home plate to first base or something! But the important thing is to preserve the accuracy of calls in Savannah Bananas games because what could possibly be more fun than computers?
I am, but nah, you gotta watch him shake it during dance breaks on the pitcher's mound, it's not the same on the side of the field.
First to the mound is the same distance as home to the mound! Imagine the outrage if a strike were called a ball at a crucial moment in a Bananas game!
You don't understand, so I'm going to share a few videos (tbf he's only sometimes on the mound, he's dancing at home plate while the pitcher/infield dances)
The Dancing umpire
Now, this one could theoretically happen anywhere but we'd lose the iconic mask throw
Footloose
Booty Work
Diva
Flossing
These were all necessary for demonstrating my point and not an excuse to watch Bananas videos
I believe the problem is twofold:
The rules of football are very arbitrary. This is different from sports like tennis (mostly ball in or out) or field hockey (ball hits foot inside penalty circle -> penalty corner). In football you can legally use your shoulders, but you can’t body check someone. But where’s the line?
The other thing is influence on the referee. In tennis, complaining to the referee is a direct warning (second time you immediately lose a point). In football you can simulate fouls. You can crowd, scream and push the referee to get influence on their decisions. This influence disappears when you have a VAR, because you can’t do those same things. Of course you can argue that in the long run it’s 50/50 but we all have teams and players we believe somehow always get the advantage.
Actually, now that I think about it: The second problem is also a problem of rules and their enforcement. I rarely see referees hand out cards for a player’s behaviour, time wasting or other unsportsmanlike conduct.
At the last Euro’s they introduced a rule that crowding would result in a yellow card, and it only took a few matches to see changes in the players behaviour, because people actually got yellow cards now! It was only small change but had a big impact.
It’s just really strange to see how little a sport like football develops its rules and enforcement compared to other sports. It could easily be a much more enjoyable sport.
With football in particular, there's also just a culture of unfairness being part of the excitement. Sometimes it works in your favour, other times it doesn't, and many fans see that as ok, especially when you've just benefitted from an atrocious referee decision. There's still a bit of Greavesy's "it's a funny old game" about the attitude to football. It doesn't always make sense, but that's why we love it. That kind of thing. Personally, I want 100% fairness, but I don't think everyone sees it like that. There's so much tribality that fans often revel in that unfair decision that downs their rivals. Other sports obviously have tribalism, but many of them are just used to video refereeing so they accept it. Football is an old sport and is slow to change.
It also hasn't helped that VAR has been implemented poorly. It was meant to clear up controversial decisions, not cause them. How they managed to be just an inconsistent with it as old-school refereeing beggars belief.
They finally implemented VAR and instead of taking notes from field hockey (most similar sport imo), they just reinvent the wheel very poorly!
You're right, it's never the same, but I'd rather know it was a fair goal than have a "hand of god" moment. Sport is meant to be fair at least.
This is simply not true. In some sports the decision can literally determine the end of the match.
Nagayama vs Garrigos
It can cause psychological shifts that tilt players so they can no longer perform well.
Tiafoe vs Safiullin
Players can be ejected creating impacting the rest of the game
Duncan vs Crawford
The way these other sports work does not apply to football at all. You absolutely will lose based on a single decision on football. It is a low-scoring sport. A single call can and will decide entire tournaments.
Football isn't a special case. A football match is usually longer than a squash match and with all the extra time and players (and I think, more rules) has many more factors determining the outcome, which I would argue makes it even more resilient to human/referee error, not less.
Goals mostly don't just come out of nowhere. They're the culmination of everything a team has and hasn't done. If a team isn't playing well enough to keep the other side from their goal, or not well enough to reach the opponents goal, that's on them. One could-go-either-way decision going against a team is almost never going to be enough to lose a match. It might be the final and most obvious factor that causes the scoreboard to tick over, but I don't think that makes it more significant.
Also I wasn't just talking about goals. The vast majority of referee decisions are not goal/not-goal. There's hundreds of decisions in a match - many of which are "that was borderline but I'm not stopping play" or "that was clean, carry on" - but they could easily go the other way.
I still think one mistake isn't going to tip the balance in almost all cases. There probably are a few matches where that was true but almost every time it's only going to be one factor among many.
It's easy (not to mention lazy!) for players/supporters to blame the ref for a result they don't like but at the end of the day - barring malicious officials/cheating - it's the team who didn't win, not the referee who made them lose.
I'm sorry, but have you followed football for a meaningful amount of time?
From a quick glance, it seems like there are 11 points in a squash match. The most common result in football is 1-1. The second most common is 1-0. There are many ways in which a referee can effectively determine results because, often, it only takes producing a single goal. That would be the case of incorrectly giving or denying a penalty kick to a team. 80% of penalty kicks result in goals. They can, more indirectly, either expel or fail to expel a key player. A referee may also annul a valid goal or fail to annul an invalid one. These are only a few examples of some extremely forceful ways to determine a result that are not nearly as easy on high-scoring sports.
In any case, the point is, because the scores are so low a single incorrect call can and often does have a direct effect on the outcome of a match. That's a very simple and intuitive point to make, I think.
If I may add on...
The amount of win equity that a single event can have in football is truly enormous. This is core to the appeal of the sport: Nearly everything that happens is ultimately meaningless, but carried a small chance of being enormously important. This covers referee choices just as much as player actions: mostly they are ultimately irrelevant, except for the handful with an entire goal (or the "mere" 79% shot of a goal of a penalty) of swing value in a score state (most of them) where that goal is overwhelmingly likely to decide the final result.
So although goals mostly don't "just come out of nowhere," they really kinda do. This is one of the things that becomes very clear if you try to dig into football analytically: we've got a very good idea of how likely a shot is to score (in the vast majority of cases, not very likely), and an increasingly shaky idea of how likely an action is to lead to a shot the further back you go. Footballers are constantly doing good and impressive things which made their team slightly more likely to score, and nearly always someone makes a tiny mistake or an opponent a great play or (far more often than anyone likes to think about) the ball just bounces kinda funny, and this elaborate chain of difficult accomplishments collapses into nothing before it can turn into a goal and you're basically back to square one.
Or just as easily, three really big things can go very right in sequence and a team which has been anemic all day suddenly has a 1-0 lead.
Football is chaos, and key referee choices are among the handful of things that can reach through that chaos and just add or remove most of a goal. To blame a team that gets screwed over in one of those unplanned, unexpected pivotal moments for not just winning more is ridiculous.
Squash games are played to 11 points, that's right - but there are multiple games in a match. But that doesn't matter. Also yes, I'm well aware of how football works.
I'm not sure I'm making my point very well. It's not about the goal count. That's a distraction. If your team (or player, in individual sports) is playing so badly that they're only one 50/50 decision or a mistaken call away from losing, it's not that single decision that is making the difference.
There are hundreds of referee decisions in any given game or match, and way, way more factors that are nothing to do with the ref. In football there's 22 players all making decisions for one thing, not to mention the people on the sidelines, the crowd, the weather, etc. etc.. The ref might appear to be the deciding factor but that's only true in a very trivial reading, the dynamics of sports matches are way more complex.
Also, and I'll only say this one last time - the ref's judgement is part of the game. It doesn't really matter if they make mistakes. I mean sure, it's good if we use technology to try to make sure they don't, but when they do it's no different to a sudden gust of wind blowing the ball in (or out of) the net. That's just how the game is.
In the context of the conversation I was having all those years ago on the squash court, it's about accepting that human factor and playing the game in the spirit of sportspersonship. Refs are people. They make mistakes. Their mistakes are not going to make you lose, the only person who can make you lose is you - either by making your own mistakes, or by just not being as good as the other player. The minimum number of rallies a squash match can end in is around 55. One dodgy call puts you 54-1 down. If you lose the whole match due to that one call, you were going to lose anyway. Football is no different. Just because most "rallies" don't end in a goal doesn't mean they are not factors in the final result.
But of course the other side of the argument is that there's almost certainly another call which goes your way anyway! So again, it doesn't matter.
I understand you know how football works on a general level, but that is simply not true in football. It kinda feels like you're not giving other comments, most likely from football fans with greater knowledge of the sport, proper consideration. On a low-scoring game of the kind that football is, this is absolutely not true. That is because, in an exceedingly low-scoring game with an element of chance, the score is often not a reliable indicator of quality of play. You are importing your intuitions from other sports into football, and those intuitions are leading you to sustain what is, in my opinion, a poorly constructed argument that is leading to a false conclusion.
I've played and watched plenty of football. I don't follow it these days but I have put in plenty of hours both on the pitch and on the terraces in the past.
But this is exactly the point I'm trying to get across. There are a huge amount of factors in the winning or losing of a match. One factor among all those is the referee's decisions, and among all the many decisions in any given match, the number that are borderline are - at least with a reasonably skilled and reasonably impartial ref - minimal and will average to near-zero anyway.
There's way too much going on for one or two borderline calls to be the difference between winning and losing and that's true in any sport. Football is not special in that instance any more than squash or table tennis or competitive wife throwing. If anything, the scale of a football match renders individual ref's decisions even less important than in a shorter 1-on-1 sport like fencing. The maths of that is pretty obvious, surely?
Also I don't think football would be anywhere near as popular as it is if a few judgement calls could tip a match one way or the other with any regularity. Because that would make it a bad sport to both watch and play, and for all the nonsense that surrounds the professional game, it's not a bad sport.
Well, it is that popular, and yet here we are.
Sure, the average decision is less important. Frankly the average decision is meaningless in the end, like nearly everything else that happens over the course of a football match. But referee decisions in which a goal or a penalty hang in the balance are still massively influential, because however long the players are playing actual scoring events are vanishingly rare, and only barely influenced by whatever happened even a couple minutes earlier.
I don't know much about squash and I don't really understand the 54-1 example from earlier in this thread. I also agree with the spirit of your comments about "the only person who can make you lose is you", the importance of accepting that referee judgement is an intrinsic part of sport and you have to live with it, etc. That's good life advice and a helpful thing to tell oneself when something doesn't go your way, no matter how high- or low-event the sport you watch or play is.
It would remain good advice to follow if one were playing squash matches confined to a tight time limit in which most games can only fit in 2-3 points, and matches with no score at all are common. But it does, in those conditions, become much easier to encounter situations where a little thing that causes an "undeserved" point can completely swing the result even if one side has clearly outplayed the other.
That's high level professional football for you, just stretched out on a few dimensions.
I am having trouble understanding what you're aiming at. If a match is 1-1, a single wrong referee call can make it 2-1. Because of the low-scoring nature of the sport, it is highly probable that the match will end with 2-1. In that situation, the referee effectively determined the result -- the team with 2 goals won due to the advantage provided by their error. However, on a high-scoring sport, a single wrong referee call is less likely to determine the outcome. For instance, NBA results are often in the 100s, and the difference between the scores usually exceeds 3 points by a great margin. It stands to reason that a single referee mistake that wrongly attributes 2 or 3 points to a basketball team is less likely to determine the outcome of the match, as it will seldom be enough to give a decisive edge to any team.
This is just basic reasoning on my part. If there's some complicated math behind your thinking that I fail to comprehend, feel free to share it with me. Just be aware that I am a humanities and arts person, so you will have to explain it at a very elementary level.
People in this thread are arguing against you, so I wanted to pop in and say I agree 100%. I used to play and referee soccer (in the US, as you can guess). I have refereed possibly in the low thousands of matches. I truly don’t think that I, as the ref, could throw a match if I wanted. If two teams are almost identical in skill, I could maybe tip the balance one way or another, but in my experience that is very rare. Without outright fraud like lying on the scorecard, I didn’t have much influence on the game. And that is if I was explicitly biased. If I was trying to be remotely fair, a single decision never made the difference in a match. The instances where one goal is scored in added time is almost always because the other team stopped playing as well. And on top of all of that, a single game (in a properly set up league) never makes the difference between an overall win and loss. I think people in this thread are giving referees way too much credit and power.
By and large people forgot why it was implemented in the first place. VAR could be a good thing, but its implementation is simply mediocre.
We don't need more God Hands in football, but on the flipside we don't need to stop the game for every millimeter of offside either.
As with almost all things everywhere: there is a healthy middle ground where edge cases can be solved without disrupting most of the game. Also, the VAR calls per team need a hard limit.
I'm generally in favour of the idea of VAR, but it's clear the current setup is disruptive and flat out breaking the game flow.
Reading your comment, I was thinking, "Well that's why there's a limit to the number of challenges each team has..."
Then I read some more and thought "There are no limits?!"
I'm used to American major league sports, where each team is typically limited in how many times they can ask refs to review a play/call. Like two challenges each per game. Plus additional "penalties" for losing a challenge (like loss of a timeout). It makes it a risky bet if a team isn't fully confident on the challenge. Though not being a sportsballer, I could be wrong.
So it's surprising that there isn't a limit. It almost sounds like the use of VAR in soccer was set up to fail.
Maybe they should also do it like Formula 1. When teams in F1 want to pursue a "right of review," the team actually has to place a monetary deposit with the FIA stewards. If the appeal is successful, the teams get the deposit back. If it's not,
the stewards are having a nice dinner that eveningit's forfeited. It's not a high cost, only like EUR6000, though with F1's "cost caps" for teams, every cent counts. But just like in American sports, it ideally disincentives teams from making frivolous and/or frequent challenges.I've personally always thought it was. FIFA really did not want VAR for years. It took a couple of corruption scandals to get them to loosen up about it.
There are plenty of sports that limit calls, or outright deny you additional calls if you fail the challenge.
Soccer/football does not. It doesn't even allow teams to request reviews. The referee is solely responsible for initiating reviews and the people behind the VAR can recommend a review.
This means it's continuously monitoring the state of play and will respond any time any small offense has been made. It will almost always call for a review during a goal which ultimately slows everything down to a crawl.
The rules are ridiculously dense.
This system does not work in favour of the sport even if it theoretically makes it more fair. I say theoretically, because the final say lies with the ref and he can ignore the results of the VAR after review. Bias can and does still play a role.
The system I think should be in place is simple: Three challenges per team, lose them all on a failed challenge.
It forces teams to challenge only when sure the call was incorrect, making it more fair and prevents them from just dropping it on every goal or bump, keeping momentum as it was before VAR.
Your cost suggestion is very effective, but not possible on national or club level play. VAR tech should not be limited to world cups or Olympics only and since clubs have no spend limit (with some being stupidly rich) the Champions League is no place for it either.
Its intention should be to stop outright steals, not police the game to death. Flat limits get results, tennis proves that.
As an aside, can you believe they didn't have a line check like Tennis's hawkeye until 2013? More than a decade after its invention..
This isn't the case. It's true that VAR continuously monitors the state of play, but not that it will respond to any small offense. The rules aren't that dense, at least not the basic gist of it. It's at the top:
This means there's an array of minor offenses and referee calls VAR isn't allowed to weigh in on, unless they have a direct bearing on a goal scored. And only in cases of "clear and obvious error."
Of course, that's the principle, not always the practice. But that's not a core issue with any and all forms of VAR, it's an issue with the current implementation of it. It shouldn't and doesn't microanalyze every single thing that happens, by design. And that's a good thing.
Effectively this means any action towards a goal is scrutinized. I'm sure you've seen the offsides that were down to millimeters that would've had no bearing on the game otherwise. It's clearly overbearing even with the potential goal limitation.
I actually very strongly prefer the "eye in the sky can weigh in on stuff" concept behind VAR more than the challenge system that most American sports use, the problem is that referees don't really like it and (relatedly) tend to be bad at using it.
I'd like to see a lot more of referees doing things like asking VAR "hey, I didn't see how this guy's shoe came off, did he actually get fouled?", and getting a near immediate "yeah he got stepped on" or "no, he kicked it off himself, card him". Or "It's not obvious, stick with your call" if they aren't certain after five seconds of slo-mo footage. Those replays can be shown to the TV audience extremely quickly, there's no technical reason what the VAR ref can't see them and render judgement just as quickly as we all do (often fast enough not to delay restarts). It's just that the on-field ref very rarely asks for that kind of help, and the replay guys themselves are shockingly sluggish about rendering it.
Then there's the handful of extremely clear cut and technologically solvable ones, like offsides (and "did the ball go in the goal", which as best as I can tell is definitively solved with current implementation). UEFA has plenty of reffing problems, but their semi-auto offsides has worked really well and much quicker than the more manual process the Premier League is still stuck with. They can even show graphics to fans that can be frustratingly close, but wholly unambiguous: Yup, there's his knee, sticking out past the defenders foot, he was off, end of story.
Football is full of judgement calls and getting all of them "right", at least from the perspective of a random angry guy at the pub who thinks there's a grand referee conspiracy against his local club, is impossible. But things could be so much better without americanized gamification of the process in the form of coaching challenges, which become a strategic tool as much as any actual help for getting calls right.
Am I missing something or did the entire article not explain what VAR is even once?
Explanations welcome. 😅
Video Assistant Referee.
I'm confused. The framing of the article and it being controversial makes it seem like it would be some automated thing, like AI processing the video feeds, but it also reads to me like it's just having some officials reviewing video feeds? What am I missing? I'm assuming I have to be missing something because I'm not sure why having the video feeds be watched by other humans for corrections would be a controversial technology.
I'm not anti VAR, but there are some legit complaints. The most cited reason is that it kills spontaneous joy for fans. Sometimes a goal check takes minutes, during which time fans have to temper their celebrations, and supporters physically present in the stadium generally get very poor communication. TV watchers at least get to see what the video referees are looking at, usually. There's also concerns about it affecting referees on the pitch, making them overly hesitant to go with their instincts on calls that aren't super obvious, relying instead on VAR as a crutch.
Of course, there's also the fact that it's still a system of technology-aided human judgment, rather than an unerring machine. Which means there will still be human error, but tolerance for it on the part of fans is much lower since the video refs have so much technology to help them make the right call. Some top leagues use goal-line technology, which is an automated system that only determines if the ball has been over the line (a goal can still be disallowed due to a foul, which is a human judgment call, but with goal line tech, the question of whether the ball actually was over the goal line or not is automated). This system has worked very well. I think in the English Premier League, there's only been a single instance where the technology clearly made the wrong call. It's much less controversial because it's so damn reliable.
I believe the most commonly used goal line tech is, as you say, "AI processing the feeds" - it's called Hawk-Eye and is also used in other sports like tennis. But the scope of it is much more limited and much more objective. Whether something is a punishable foul or an allowable incident in a contact sport is much broader and more subjective than "did the ball pass fully over the goal line within the posts".
On top of all that, this article is specifically about the Norwegian league, and VAR as implemented in Norway has been particularly bad. Small countries and smaller leagues struggle to recruit enough competent referees in general. And doubly so with a new technology - people are learning on the job, and that causes additional frustration. That plus the technical side of things hasn't been perfect either. Even the clubs that are pro VAR in general agree that the current implementation needs to be improved going forward.
I'm not sure if it's the case here, but I recall it being an issue in some Olympic sports. It turned out there were small rule violations that were happening extremely often but were very hard to see. Slow motion video put them in the awkward position of either disqualifying a large number of players or explicitly ignoring the rule.
Something similar happened in cricket. They found with modern biometric analysis that almost all bowlers tested were bowling illegally, albeit invisibly so to both themselves and the officials. Nobody was cheating as such, it's just the rules specified one's arm had to be dead straight during bowling but it turned out human bodies don't really do that. I believe they just changed the rule in question to say "95% straight"
This quote comes from a Guardian article that also sheds some light on the slow motion problem.
VAR is people checking the video footage of the game to check if some action in game were done within the rules (most notably : was a goal scored with no offside?).
I think it's controversial cause even smaller clubs in lower division also have to use it, and this things probably cost some pretty penny. Also it's relatively new in football (first high profile use was in the 2018 world Cup). However there's a similar (or even better) system that has been used in like forever in Tennis (Hawk eye).
Here is an archive link to an article from The Athletic explaining some of the controvery from the perspective of the Premier League in the UK.
At last! VAR is killing football. Let’s hope this inspires others to do the same.
Sorry, I am going to go on a bit of tangential discussion here.
I find it so interesting that there is this push against VAR as it "ruins" the game. I understand that it can interrupt the "flow" of a match, but I honestly do not find that minor annoyance to be as upsetting as a clearly bad call going forward, especially one that effects the final outcome.
That said, I find it interesting that none of these discussions really bring in legalized sports betting. I realize that sports betting is very limited in Norway, so it's probably a somewhat moot point on this particular instance, but the backlash against VAR does exist outside of that country.
I think VAR is one of those things that can be a firewall against sports betting enabled corruption. It is much harder for ref's to make OBVIOUS mistakes that tip the scales towards one team or another. The incentive for collusion is high (and not unheard of) and VAR can help to prevent some of that from being as effective. Sure, there are "small" calls that work one way or the other and can't be reviewed, but most of the big ones can and are.
I just wonder if people think further down the line on the things that VAR can affect that are net positives for the sports and it's fans, or if it really just boils down to "I hate that they pause the game to check things."
I think that's a weak argument anyway. Lots of times VAR is going on in the background while the game continues. They don't stop every time a VAR check is done.