Are there parallels between the Video Assistant Referee (VAR) in Premier League football, and the technocratic authoritarianism we are all enduring across the Western world?

Photo by Omar Ramadan on Unsplash

I realise that – at first sight – this may sound like a strange question. Equating the biggest assault on our basic human rights and freedoms in my lifetime with a device to improve the accuracy of refereeing decisions in our UK national sport is bizarre; the consequent destruction inflicted by these two enterprises is, of course, hugely disparate. Nonetheless, it recently dawned on me that the reliance upon VAR in in English & Scottish Premier League football constitutes another example of how technocracy (a dependence on ‘experts’) typically harms the very thing it is claimed to enhance.

For the uninitiated, the VAR system (introduced in March 2018) comprises three sets of video operators who closely monitor the game in real time to ensure – purportedly – that the on-field referee accurately gets the ‘big decisions’ correct. Every goal, penalty-kick award, and sending off are painstakingly analysed by these remote experts who continually communicate, via an earpiece, to the match official on the pitch. A few VAR interventions are instantaneous – such as the technology that immediately confirms whether or not the ball has fully crossed the goal line, and thereby whether a goal has been scored – and these, I believe, are advantageous for our beautiful game. But the consequences of installing technocrats in the VAR room have been mostly negative.

I believe football (‘soccer’ to those across the pond) is the greatest team sport in the world, primarily because – unlike other popular sports such as rugby, American football, and cricket – it is designed to move seamlessly from attack to defence with minimal interruptions. Consequently, for the observer, it is the most thrilling and unpredictable of spectacles. Alas, the imposition of VAR has changed all this.

And the specific ways in which VAR has harmed football mirror those that public health and climate industry ‘experts’ have inflicted on Western societies:

1.      Sucking the joy out of human activity

Authoritarian, top-down control of the masses typically results in joyless experiences for those targeted. Just like the dementors in the Harry Potter stories, the global elite - with their world-wide  policy directives - often strive to impose restrictions on ordinary people that stymie human interaction and spontaneity, and thereby remove the pleasure inherent to being alive. During the covid event we had lockdowns, closure of pubs and leisure facilities, social distancing , and mass masking that effectively hid the very features that make us human. Similarly, under the banner of preventing a climate catastrophe, our technocrats instruct us to abandon our freedom-giving cars, shiver in our homes without our gas boilers, abort our air travel to sunnier places, and to munch on a cricket rather than brisket.  

Within the microcosm of football, interventions from the experts in the VAR rooms achieve similarly spirit-dampening outcomes. No longer can supporters engage in unrestrained rapture, and collective expressions of delight, when their team score a ‘goal’. As they rise from their seats to celebrate, they know that those expert overseers, glued to their screens in a remote studio, may imminently chalk off the goal, having spotted an infringement (foul or handball) nobody else in the stadium noticed, or by deducing (after drawing multiple lines on a VAR screen) that a player’s big toe was a centimetre offside. Worse still, these deliberations by the VAR technocrats often go on for 6/7 minutes or more, during which time the supporters are left in limbo, oblivious as to what is going on.

2.      Often giving wrong directives     

The global elites, in both the lucrative pandemic and climate industries, frequently make pronouncements that are demonstrably untrue. For example, the ‘stay at home, save lives’ mantra of the covid event was fundamentally flawed; lockdowns undoubtedly killed far more people than they saved. Likewise, advocating for the replacement of gas boilers with ineffective heat pumps as part of the green agenda will – if implemented - inevitably result in more people dying of hypothermia.

Those boys in the VAR room are also fallible, on occasions reaching technically incorrect decisions. Even after prolonged periods of pontificating over their screens, drawing multiple lines from all different angles to deduce whether the goal scorer’s kneecap was in an offside position, there have been instances where further analysis has concluded that they made the wrong call. When it comes to something much more subjective – such whether a foul or ‘deliberate handball’ has occurred – their error rate is much higher.

3.      Blind to their fallibility

Over recent years we often hear the global technocrats beseeching the ordinary people to trust the experts; those of us who have been openly sceptical about the covid ‘pandemic’, and the draconian responses to it, will likely have heard the pro-narrative mouthpieces tell us to believe the government’s advisors rather than to draw conclusions from our own research. In reality, of course, these official sources are riddled with their own ideologically driven biases and conflicts of interest, yet they seem incapable of recognising these distortions (or are unwilling to do so).

The VAR technocrats share this blindness, apparently motivated by the delusion that the sophistication of their devices will always ensure 100% accuracy of their decisions; they often claim that ‘It is best to spend a few minutes if it means getting decisions right’. While their raison-d’etre is based on the assumed fallibility of the on-field referee, they remain blind to their own flaws.

Whether it be the world’s population or the referees on a football pitch, we should accept that homo sapiens  are not robots. The essence of being human inherently involves imperfection, a key characteristic of a sentient animal that contributes to the uniqueness and vitality of human experience. To strive to iron out these foibles – from Davos or from a VAR room – will always detract from the whole by removing the wondrous spontaneity of human connectedness, both in our day-to-day lives and in football stadiums.