Ken Early: VAR could further undermine soccer's integrity

Last week, in a video interview with Copa90, Jurgen Klopp allowed himself a little jibe at the expense of Everton: "We have 330 million people who love Liverpool, fans all over the world, they will watch [the Merseyside derby] - and a few Evertonians will watch as well..."

“That makes about 6.7 billion Everton fans who’ll be watching then” was the gist of a common riposte, reflecting the internet’s broad consensus that nobody apart from Liverpool fans wants to see Liverpool win the league.

This might seem strange at first, since neutrals are supposed to like underdogs and Liverpool are obviously the underdogs in this title race against the club that has spent more than anyone else to buy success and, according to copious Football Leaks reporting in Der Spiegel and elsewhere, has broken the rules to do so.

But it’s really quite simple. Football now for most fans is mainly an exercise in trolling, and for neutrals it would be funnier to see Liverpool lose it than City.

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Liverpool are obnoxious to neutrals in a more relatable way. Even many of those students of financial chicanery who made it to the end of Der Spiegel’s recent report “Man City Accused of Using Shadow Firms to Flout Rules” might struggle to describe exactly what was going on. But everyone instinctively grasps what is annoying about, for example, Liverpool’s marketing slogan “This Means More”.

Integrity

Uefa’s FFP system is a bit like the Single Market: people refer to it all the time but there are very few who really know how it actually works. Clubs like City and PSG have been punished for FFP infractions before, but the penalties – a fine here, a couple of players shaved off the Champions League squad there – suggest that even the authorities themselves aren’t too bothered about the supposed threat to the integrity of their competitions.

So maybe it’s asking too much to expect mere fans to care about off-the-field rule-breaking. After all, most of us don’t even really know the rules that govern what happens on the field.

Look at Saturday's North London derby penalty controversy, when BT Sport's Martin Keown, among other ex-pro analysts, joined countless fans in pointing out that the penalty should not have been awarded against Shkodran Mustafi, since Harry Kane had been offside when the ball was played into the box.

If you had to nominate somebody who probably knew what they were talking about when it came to offside, it would be a George Graham’s Arsenal alumnus like Keown. And yet a little-known passage from the IFAB laws of the game was soon circulating to suggest that the referee had made the right call: “In situations where a player in an offside position is moving towards the ball with the intention of playing the ball and is fouled before playing or attempting to play the ball, or challenging an opponent for the ball, the foul is penalised as it has occurred before the offside offence.”

Although Kane had been offside when the ball was played into the box, it could be argued that he had not yet been “attempting to play the ball” and therefore was not yet offside, meaning the penalty had been awarded correctly.

Arsenal coach Unai Emery said afterwards: “VAR is coming forward – it is difficult for referees. You can analyse with TV and it is easy but referees can’t use that now.”

Emery was wrong. It’s not easy – in fact, this had neatly demonstrated why certain incidents are impossible to adjudicate with certainty even with video assistance. The IFAB text says that players who are not yet “attempting to play the ball” are not yet offside, but the question of whether a player has begun to attempt to play the ball is totally subjective.

A personal view would be that of course Kane was already attempting to play the ball – he was just about to jump for it and would have made contact within a fraction of a second. In that case he was actively offside and it should not have been a penalty, even though Mustafi arguably deserved to give one away for the sheer stupidity of the push. Yet it’s possible to see how another observer could in good faith come to the opposite conclusion from the same evidence.

Good faith

Yet VAR also complicates the assumption of good faith. The new problems created by the system are increasingly apparent in the leagues that have already adopted it. Take just one of a string of questionable moments in the Real Madrid v Barcelona match on Saturday night. Just before half-time, Sergio Ramos jumped over a challenge from Lionel Messi and swung his left arm hard into Messi's mouth.

Analysing the match for Spanish TV, José Mourinho suggested that Ramos was trying to “increase the temperature” – to shake up the match by committing a gratuitous act of violence in the hope of provoking the opponents into losing their composure. This is a time-honoured tactic in football, but you would expect that the dark arts of violent intimidation should be among the first casualties of the age of video referees. Crime only pays when you can get away with it and even the cleverest, subtlest aggressions are difficult to hide from 15 HD cameras.

And yet there was no intervention from VAR. Messi lay face down for a long time in what seemed a vain attempt to call the refereeing team’s attention to the fact that something bad had happened. When he realised they were going to ignore it he jumped up and went forehead to forehead with Ramos in the sort of angry posturing exchange that often sees players sent off if they are not called things like Messi and Ramos.

In the end Ramos escaped without so much as a booking. It was an unremarkable episode by his standards – he’s been getting away with it all his life. But the availability of VAR changes the dynamic surrounding these moments in ways that football might come to regret. In the past referees could always claim they didn’t see the incident. Now it looks as though they’ve chosen to turn a blind eye.

What this means is that we are at the dawn of a new golden age of football conspiracy theory. Incompetence was always the great alibi of referees and one unintended consequence of VAR is to take that away. Bad calls that used to be explained as mistakes will now be interpreted as corruption, and football’s integrity, already a joke to many, will become harder to believe in than ever.