Copying this from the premier league thread…
In the business world I’ve seen so many projects fail because lack of clarity of the purpose and the scope of a project - what are you specifically trying to address? What is out of scope? Does everyone understand this? Are you communicating this clearly and consistently? Are you being honest about the limitations of the product that comes from it, both with yourself and your stakeholders? This is what I see as one of the primary issues with the way VAR is being used and received.
It needs to be understood that VAR was eventually brought in in the context of genuine and significant reluctance from the game’s authorities. That means they brought VAR in to only have a light touch…it’s not here to get everything right, because in football there is no such thing. It is here to eliminate egregious errors that can be rectified with replay. That is a small subset of incidents. Yet that is not the perspective of the fans or the media. They expect perfection. They think VAR should mean that no dodgy decisions ever go against them. Add in that a fan’s perspective of dodgy is incredibly dubious and the existence of VAR has created a situation in which fans have been pushed into having a constant state of aggrievement.
And why? Because the refereeing authorities have been absolutely silent. They have allowed a void to exist an that has naturally been filled by complaints. It was negligent and disrespectful for the refereeing authorities to have not put as much effort into stakeholder outreach as they put into learning how to use the system. Everything they ever release is full of bullshit referee speak that is not clearly understood by the people they are speaking to. That itself tells you everything you need to know about how disconnected they are from the game they over see. How do they not have a PR team on retainer constantly putting out information about how VAR has been used, putting it in language that a football fan understands? Fuck off with your “clear and obvious error” language. Speak in words understood by the language of footie fans, not a bunch of people at a weekend training workshop in stockley park.
But I think just as problematic is that for a protocol that was supposed to be a light touch, the incidents VAR has got involved with have so often been rinky dink shit. How do you reconcile the “arm pit” offside decisions with a philosophy of only getting involved in significant and egregious mistakes that are clearly demonstrated by replay? This is a text book example of producing something that does not honour your mission statement, which is a reflection of bad leadership.
Given all of this I am increasingly coming around to the idea that the only way to make VAR work, and by that I mean be accepted by the fans, is to pull it back. Raise the bar for what it is involved with and what it takes to overturn a decision so fans come to accept that most of the game will be untouched by it, even the incidents you think should have gone the other way. Couple that with intense PR - flood the airwaves with communication about why its doing what its doing and what it isn’t. And then maybe add in a manger’s challenge system.