Please don’t stop reading, but we need to talk about VAR. We need to talk about VAR, and I need to make a confession. Mea culpa, I was one of those people who shouted and begged and cajoled for the introduction of video help for referees. Sick and tired of seeing TV replays of poor officiating, and suspecting that many of those wonky calls favoured the bigger clubs, I used a national radio platform to bang on and on about the need for technology. On one occasion, a producer came into the studio and told me to calm down; my balled fists pounding the desk was rendering the output unlistenable. Also something about my blood pressure.

Video Assisted Refereeing duly came in, and I was delighted. But, unless you count that time I said Hard-Fi were going to be bigger than The Beatles, I have never been so wrong about anything in my entire life. Football’s frantic flow, it turns out, is utterly unsuited to the gaze of the electronic arbiter. Cricket, tennis and rugby all have natural, predictable, even necessary, breaks in which the tech can do its thing. Turns out that continually halting football for a lengthy deliberation about someone’s possibly offside elbow completely spoils the tumble-dryer chaos that makes the game so universally adored.

And neither could a sane person have imagined the way that the newly-approved VAR would be implemented. It simply never occurred that the system (designed to aid the referees and to occasionally highlight their shortcomings) would be operated and overseen, by… the referees! The writers of 1984, The Handmaid’s Tale and Squid Game, working together and round the clock, couldn’t have come up with anything more dystopian, unworkable, certain to fail. 

Who watches the watchers? These people are colleagues in a high-profile, highly desirable job (the top officials in the Premier League pull down a quarter million a year) – of course they are going to watch each other’s backs. It’s human nature. And so you get to a situation like the one that unfolded at West Ham this weekend. Tottenham score from a corner. The referee finds a reason to disallow the goal, feeling a Spurs player has mildly impeded his opponent. The replay shows that, if anything, the initial foul was by a Hammers player. But the VAR – clinging to the directive to give weight to the onfield decision – backs the ref. Afterwards, nobody could be found who thought they had arrived at the correct arbitration. Seven years on from its introduction the new technology has pivoted through 180 degrees. Brought in to help reverse the most evident mistakes, it’s now being deployed to support even the most amateurish howler.

Christian Romero has his goal ruled out for a foul after being judged to have pushed Walker-Peters out of the way in the build-up ❌ pic.twitter.com/SE97wE8Vod

— Sky Sports Premier League (@SkySportsPL) September 13, 2025

The result of all this is calamitous. In exchange for (let’s be generous) a marginal improvement in a few rulings, the game has sacrificed two of its most important attractions. The ceaseless, bordering on reckless, back–and-forth of the pre-VAR era is gone, each match now likely to be punctuated by interminable chin-scratching by distant, faceless overseers. Worse, the unfettered exaltation of the moment a precious goal is scored has been replaced by a hesitant paranoia that someone somewhere is busily combing the footage for any reason, however skimpy, to poop the party, pop the balloon, deny the joy. 

There is another unintended consequence, which would be comical if it wasn’t so bloody annoying. I once asked Stewart Robson (a bright pundit, who’d captained both Arsenal and West Ham) to explain the mysteries of “home advantage”. Stewart reckoned that nearly all the prevailing theories were pure hogwash: “home advantage”, he was sure, was just the ability of a large crowd to sway the referees in the host team’s favour. He’s probably right. Home supporters have ever got onto the officials; but VAR seems to have driven them bonkers.

There were always stadia (like Newcastle, Everton and yes, Arsenal) where you could feel the locals sometimes putting immense pressure on the bloke with the whistle. Now it’s every ground, and all the time. Whenever the home side get the ball into their opponent’s penalty area, the demented clamour erupts. Every gossamer touch of an attacking player’s anatomy must be a penalty! Every contact between defender and the ball must be handball, even if the thing has struck him squarely in the privates! The possibility of a VAR review, and a penalty, seems to have separated people from their senses. The orchestrated squawking makes some games unwatchable. Do people really want to see the contest reduced to who can most successfully strongarm Stockley Park into giving their team a leg up? The appealing is appalling. Home fans – shut up!

VAR is threatening the long-term future of a sport made hugely less enjoyable by its interventions. We need to campaign long and loud for its complete abolition. Seven seasons of tinkering and tweaking has done nothing to alter the fact that it is not suitable for football. Goal line tech, instant and credible, has worked; semi-automated offsides may well follow. But the rest, the whole panoply of Big Brother balefully re-reffing every exciting incident must be swept into the skip. 

Hard to imagine it happening. Too many interests, financial and egotistical, are embedded in its survival. And, folk ruefully ask, when was the last time the human race deliberately jettisoned an expensive, much-hyped, technology? To which I answer: when was the last time you flew on Concorde?