Hello!
Today, Wolverhampton Wanderers are trying to snare VAR. Like a man with a bin trying to catch a raccoon.
Coming up:
👀 Shock EPL bid to ditch VAR. How have our readers voted?
😡 Ange Postecoglou is bristling. What’s going on?
👕 Retro kits. Big business.
🎈 Chelsea’s Nkunku sends up a balloon
VAR-mageddon?
You know in Terminator 2 where Skynet becomes self-aware and all hell breaks loose (at 2.14am Eastern Time, for those who’ve watched it as often as me)?
Well, Premier League clubs might be about to launch a preemptive strike on VAR. The competition’s video review system is, incredibly, under threat of abandonment. Talk about a bolt from the blue.
The possibility that the Premier League might give up on the system (and it’s hard to stress what a seismic U-turn that would be) was broken in an exclusive story by The Athletic’s David Ornstein yesterday. Here’s what we’ve been told:
Wolverhampton Wanderers are behind this. The club have submitted a formal resolution calling for VARs to be scrapped from the start of next season.
The resolution will be discussed and potentially voted through by the Premier League’s 20 clubs at its annual general meeting on June 6.
The proposal would need a two-thirds majority to pass.
The Premier League, the organisation itself, continues to back the VAR system.
I described this as incredible because even though VAR is maligned and even though plenty of people would like to kill it, we assumed it was here to stay; forever undergoing incremental tweaks in search of general acceptance.
Perhaps the machines won’t take over the football world after all.
Wolves at the door
They have done their best to be polite in explaining their motivation for seeking to cull VAR, but Wolves’ catalogue of reasons is long. It will resonate with critics of the system.
Among their complaints: VAR ruins goal celebrations; it creates delays in games; it doesn’t restrict itself to clear and obvious incidents, the remit that VARs are supposed to work under; it makes too many errors (the most glaring of them coming in September when Liverpool’s Luis Diaz was wrongly flagged offside at Tottenham Hotspur and the VAR mistakenly believed the decision had been to award a goal).
Perhaps worst of all, the discourse around it is constant. Too much focus, too much prominence, too many football newsletters compelled to discuss it.
Wolves claim the VAR system has created “numerous unintended negative consequences”. They won’t be alone in thinking that — although one thing we don’t know yet is how much support for their motion is out there among other Premier League teams. The lobbying will be starting as we speak.
VAR has a tight grip on football. Not long ago, Sweden became the first country to vote against introducing it, primarily because so many fans there were opposed, but the Premier League rejecting VAR would lead to much bigger shockwaves.
Pursuit of perfection
The irony is that so many prominent figures in England campaigned for VARs. Managers, players, Premier League owners: they pitched it as a silver bullet for refereeing errors.
What others warned at the time, and what has since transpired, is that no review system removes interpretation. That’s the thing about football: you don’t just need to know the rules. Judgement in contentious situations relies on the eye of the beholder, too.
Anything that involves humans is prone to human indecision and human error. The competence the VARs have has been a definite problem.
The Premier League says it “fully supports the use of VARs” and is committed to improving it. The VAR system has been on the go since 2019 and the governing body won’t bin it without a fight. It has invested too much blood, sweat, money and dignity in it.
Only last month, clubs agreed unanimously to introduce semi-automated offside technology next season.
Wolves’ view is that the soul and spirit of football, a free-flowing sport in which delays jar, is worth more incorrect real-time decisions here and there. I’m inclined to agree. We’ll see soon enough whether the clubs feel the same.
By no means is the death of VAR in the Premier League a slam dunk, but watch this space closely because the next few weeks could get very interesting.
VAR Vote
We polled our subscribers on whether VAR in the Premier League should be scrapped. They voted in their thousands and… it’s pretty much 50:50 — 51 per cent want to keep it and 49 per cent say get rid. We’ll bring you a separate club-by-club breakdown tomorrow.
🎙️ David Ornstein discusses the VAR issue in depth on this morning’s Daily Football Briefing.
Ange Anger
Ange Postecoglou and Tottenham: the very definition of a honeymoon period ending. He was the bear with a sore head after Tuesday’s loss to Manchester City, stroppy and exasperated with the media.
Two things have happened here. First, Postecoglou completely misjudged the extent to which Spurs’ supporters were happy to see the club lose to City (because, you know, Arsenal). And second, that supine attitude grated on him.
Two of our Spurs writers, Jack Pitt-Brooke and Charlie Eccleshare, spent time reading between the lines of his post-match comments. What Spurs’ head coach said merited deeper analysis. Their season is the family wedding at 3am — a lot of it has been fun, but it’s time to go to bed and regroup before a fight breaks out in the car park.
Retro Riches
Get rootling in your wardrobes, folks. Those tired replica kits screwed up at the back of them? They could be worth some coin.
This feature by Adam Crafton starts with Doug Bierton discovering that a Paul Gascoigne England shirt, picked up from a second-hand shop, was worth £45 ($57) when he sold it online.
Trees grow from little acorns and that was the genesis of Classic Football Shirts, a company that trades in retro replica kits. The story is mad. Bierton and his business partner estimated that selling 10 shirts a day would give them a comfortable living. Presently, they shift more like 15,000 a week.
For the first time, they’ve landed outside investment: £30.4million from the Chernin Group, an American private equity firm. What interests me most is the way niche kits generate big price tags: like the Netherlands’ 1988 shirt. Yours for £1,000.
Around The Athletic
- It’s taken a long time, but Chelsea finally got to see Christopher Nkunku’s balloon goal celebration last night. Are things looking up for Mauricio Pochettino?
- A raccoon stole the show in MLS, invading the pitch during Philadelphia Union’s defeat to New York City FC. They got him. With a trash can.
- Manchester United could live without Erik ten Hag — but can they afford to lose Bruno Fernandes? He came up with an eighth assist of the season in a 3-2 win over Newcastle United. And then muddied the waters around his future.
(Top photo: David Horton – CameraSport via Getty Images)