Everyone knows and accepts that football has become sh*t. Especially and specifically Premier League football.<\/p>\n
Arne Slot has had a go at it, and is unlikely to have softened in his views after Tuesday night\u2019s hilarity. Pep Guardiola says he doesn\u2019t like it, but he has to go along with it. Mikel Arteta says\u2026well, Legohead McGrappling probably enjoys it very much actually. Fabian Hurzeler not so much.<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n The consensus is clear. It\u2019s sh*t. But why is it sh*t? How is it sh*t? Can anything be done to make it in fact less sh*t like we\u2019re kind of fairly maybe sure it used to be?<\/p>\n These are big questions with complicated or difficult answers. Not really \u2013 you just need to scrap VAR. We\u2019re joking, but only a bit. Or are we?<\/p>\n Anyway. Here\u2019s a ranking of all the things making football sh*t now with some tentative ideas of what might be done about them (SPOILER: it\u2019s scrapping VAR, it\u2019s always scrapping VAR).<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n 6) The (lack of) atmosphere<\/p>\n Almost impossible to avoid \u2018in my day\u2019 style embarrassment here, so we\u2019ll just crack on: the atmosphere at Premier League football matches is objectively worse now than it used to be.<\/p>\n Contributing and intrinsically linked factors include ticket prices forcing out \u2018real\u2019 fans, clubs prioritising one-off tourists \u2013 because 50 tourists coming to one match each will generate far more matchday income than one stalwart coming 50 times, and new stadiums that can\u2019t just magic up the history of the structures they\u2019ve replaced.<\/p>\n With Everton joining the growing new-build ranks this year thanks to the very impressive but inevitably less potent Hill-Dickinson replacing Goodison Park and it\u2019s legendary propensity for rocking, it\u2019s genuinely hard to know what the solution is to that particular problem.<\/p>\n Whereas the wider problem of treating fans as cash cows to be milked for all their worth and then ignored or actively sidelined when convenient rather than an asset to be treasured does have a simple solution, but one that has almost no chance of ever actually happening on a sufficient scale. Not in the Barclays at any rate.<\/p>\n There was a lot of praise and attention heading Leeds\u2019 way for much of this season because they did feel like a bit of an exception to it all. A big club in a big traditional ground that hadn\u2019t been in the Premier League long enough or consistently enough for the life to be sapped entirely from it.<\/p>\n They have, alas, now slightly pissed upon their own self-congratulatory chips there<\/strong><\/a>. But there remains a definite sense of Elland Road standing apart as a last stand for what a big imposing atmosphere at a ground full of ghosts and memories felt like.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n 5) The consistency\/common sense paradox<\/p>\n This definitely predates both VAR and the current discourse, but it is definitely part of why football is sh*t now.<\/p>\n Purely for its easy place as the most obvious example of there being no actual solution because nobody knows what they actually want or perhaps more specifically what they want shifts with the tides depending on how it affects their team in the moment.<\/p>\n Common sense and consistency are the two more frequently demanded refereeing traits, their absence near always lamented as if delivering them is easy and straightforward. Again, that\u2019s an element that has been exacerbated by VAR\u2019s foundational lie that this was precisely what it would deliver.<\/p>\n The most perfect example of this came just recently, of course, with the Haaland-Szoboszlai hoopla at Anfield<\/strong><\/a>. It was an unimprovable case study, really, because it even stripped away tribal concerns.<\/p>\n Given the time left on the clock, it had no material impact on the result. City were going to win, Liverpool were going to lose no matter what decision was reached. That stripped away the usual tribal concerns where really what you mean when wanting consistency or common sense is \u201cI want this borderline decision to have gone the way of my team\u201d.<\/p>\n So it became a true litmus test of what people actually want, and revealed the similarities between the two tribes. Essentially, it became a personality test that showed up who just really likes rules.<\/p>\n And there\u2019s nothing wrong with that. But what was interesting \u2013 what points again to how hard it will be to find any solution to anything that appeases everyone \u2013 is that arguments on both sides insisted on pretending not to be able to understand the other side even though it was very easy to do so.<\/p>\n Those pretending not to understand why the laws of the game required the goal had to be chalked off were clearly playing to the gallery. We all know that playing an advantage doesn\u2019t mean you can then just do fouls of your own and carry on. This is obviously, straightforwardly true because the alternative is anarchy.<\/p>\n But those pointing out why the goal obviously had to be disallowed once VAR was involved while themselves pretending not to understand why to lots of people a goal felt like natural justice in this specific situation were just as performative.<\/p>\n In this specific case study it was perfectly reasonable for anyone watching to feel that the fairest and most natural outcome was a City goal. It was also impossible for that to be what the laws concluded.<\/p>\n Our unscientific finger in the air sampling of the way the wind blew on this one is that most people would have been happy enough for the outcome to be a goal and no red card for Szoboszlai.<\/p>\n Yet now here we are just a few weeks later wailing about the lack of consistency over whether a slight push in the back is always a foul<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n Rare to see a clich\u00e9 deliver so flawlessly, but we\u2019re right there right now: all we wanted was common sense, until all we wanted was consistency.<\/p>\n It is a circle that has never been squared and probably never can be.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n 4) VAR\u2019s existence just in general<\/p>\n You quickly realise when putting together this list that there are in fact a couple of overarching themes. A couple of big-ticket buckets that absolutely everything else could be chucked into.<\/p>\n One of those is VAR in general. Another is that actually nobody really knows what they want. They want consistency until they want common sense. They want a contact sport but not at corners. They want correct decisions but don\u2019t want to wait. They want old-stadium atmosphere with new-build facilities. They want to believe their club is the biggest and best but also a tiny little thing fighting the good fight against the big evil clubs as well as the conspiracy of referees and the league and the FA and football f*cking 365 who are all so obviously biased against them.<\/p>\n At that point you also realise that almost all the problems \u2013 from Mikel Arteta playing the most provocatively offensive wrestleball to Arsene Wenger having the most provocatively stupid VAR ideas<\/strong><\/a> to the fanbase still most liable to descend into tinfoil territory \u2013 can be linked decisively back to Arsenal<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n Is the only solution for the greater good and long-term health of the game really to simply liquidate Arsenal Football Club? Answer, sadly, must be yes.<\/p>\n But it does feel like VAR just in general, as a concept, deserves its own section here that stands apart from the specific grievances or how it infests and infects everything else.<\/p>\n Clearly, VAR is another big factor in why the atmosphere isn\u2019t what it was at games. When stoppages kill momentum on the pitch they also disrupt the rhythm of that audible involvement from the stands. People absolutely definitely don\u2019t celebrate goals like they used to at the initial moment, despite VAR-apologists continuing to bafflingly insist they do.<\/p>\n VAR is also constant grist to the conspiracy mill. It all comes back to the false premise on which VAR is built \u2013 that perfect unanimously agreed-upon correct decisions are possible in a sport like football where the devil lies in the infinite greys. We know that cannot happen, of course, because we all still see decisions every week where no consensus exists among players, supporters, managers or pundits.<\/p>\n But with VAR, you can see the moving parts far more clearly. One of the many unintended consequences ushered in by the shift to a VAR-ruled game has been that when a \u2018mistake\u2019 occurs it is more rather than less irritating.<\/p>\n It\u2019s frustrating, but most grown-ups can or should be able to live with the idea that one set of officials making a decision in real-time from one full-speed look at something can and will make mistakes on occasion. But the deliberateness and deliberation of VAR make that harder to accept. Which makes all those shades-of-grey decisions that happen to go against you harder to accept.<\/p>\n Which makes it far easier to see a guiding hand behind it all, even when all that\u2019s really happening is the same thing that always did: officials trying to do the best they can to deliver outcomes as close as they can to an impossible flawless ideal. Except this time it\u2019s via a method we\u2019ve all been told can take us to that impossible dreamland.<\/p>\n So now when one goal is disallowed for a push and another is allowed despite a push or one player is deemed to be interfering from an offside position and another is not, it is far less easily accepted for what it is. VAR has created zero tolerance for the Seen Them Given or One Of Those decisions while having no way of removing them.<\/p>\n Which again bleeds into another familiar old officiating trope for which VAR has added as a potent irritation-multiplier.<\/p>\n Yes, it\u2019s the old consistency-common sense dichotomy. The greatest paradox in the game. All we want from officials is consistency \u2013 so either Randal Kolo Muani and Raul Jimenez both committed fouls or neither of them did, for instance \u2013 until all we want from officials is common sense \u2013 so that Erling Haaland can score a goal despite very obviously fouling Dominik Szoboszlai because it feels right.<\/p>\n You cannot have everything. You absolutely cannot argue for VAR continuing to exist and also argue for a common-sense approach when you get feels over a specific incident as Gary Neville did in the immediate aftermath of that Man City goal at Liverpool.<\/p>\n VAR very obviously exacerbates the toxicity of modern fandom for all the above reasons. And it definitely plays its part \u2013 or doesn\u2019t \u2013 in the way your modern wrestling-based corners are governed or not.<\/p>\n Is it really that simple? Is the solution to making football not sh*t any more like it\u2019s become recently simply to get rid of VAR?<\/p>\n It certainly feels like it couldn\u2019t hurt. It\u2019s either that or get rid of Arsenal. Or both, if you want.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n 3) Joyless offside pixel-peering pedantry<\/p>\n So yeah, pretty much everything on this list is either a) specifically about VAR or b) a thing made conspicuously worse by VAR.<\/p>\n We\u2019re crazy idealists here as you know and we would definitely just scrap all of it with the possible exception of goal-line technology, which barely ever actually comes up and (mostly) just quietly does a job that is often functionally impossible for human officials to do without guessing.<\/p>\n Most importantly, goal-line tech deals with something that isn\u2019t true of all other VAR interferences: absolute, indisputable, measurable objective fact. A ball is either over the line, or it is not. We can measure this. We have the technology. And it delivers instant verdicts the small handful of times per season it is required. Lovely.<\/p>\n Apart from that one time when it confused itself and taught everyone the word occlusion, it does what it was asked to do with impressive, human-beating consistency and \u2013 crucial one, this \u2013 no mission creep or unintended consequences.<\/p>\n The rest of VAR achieves none of these things and should absolutely be fired directly into the sun. Starting with offside. Whether it\u2019s set-square-wielding nerds drawing made-up lines or the semi-automated Skynet version, VAR has done things to offside that were simply never intended.<\/p>\n This is the main one that serves to cause that initial \u2018can\u2019t quite celebrate that\u2019 doubt that has spoiled the moment of goal-scoring. And celebrating a goal is \u2013 again, an important yet obvious point that the poindexters, pencil-pushers and warmonger-enjoyers we\u2019ve given the game away too will never, ever understand \u2013 not just the best thing about football but the best thing in all of sport and quite possibly life itself.<\/p>\n Slightly sullying that moment is enough on its own to make VAR not worth it. But VAR\u2019s treatment of offside is also built on a complete and total lie: that it can or should be measured to within an inch of its life.<\/p>\n When people threw their arms up in despair at \u2018bad decisions\u2019 and demanded we let robots take charge of games, it was never because a freeze frame computer graphic from 2004 showed that this cheating bastard had one millimetre of shoulder that definitely isn\u2019t his arm in an offside position.<\/p>\n VAR has been a parable of unintended consequences and this is the big one. Even when it was introduced it was \u201cYeah, it\u2019ll probably have to check a goal like every 10 games or something\u201d.<\/p>\n Instead we\u2019ve learned that what we thought we knew by the word \u2018level\u2019 was not in fact what level meant. A vast number of VAR interventions are now spent poring over something nobody ever complained or cared about before. Even when the fandom and punditocracy was losing its mind over the need for technological intervention, not even the most ardent tinfoil-wearer was doing what we\u2019re now doing to prove a toenail or shoulder blade had strayed fractionally offside.<\/p>\n But it\u2019s worse than that. Because we\u2019re now using it to a degree of accuracy that it can\u2019t even do. We\u2019re fussing over a millimetre while vaguely deciding where arms end and shoulders begin and making a value judgement on which frame is the one where the ball was played.<\/p>\n With offside you get the clearest example of VAR as theatre. It is all make-believe. We\u2019re all pretending it can be as accurate as goalline technology despite the many added variables and interminable delays.<\/p>\n And that\u2019s before we even get to offside decisions where we\u2019re arguing about the entirely subjective notion of interfering with play.<\/p>\n And how do we plan to solve this? Not by binning VAR, or even by trying to improve it. No, we are once again bending the game to fit VAR rather than the other way around. This keeps happening with handball as well, but with offside you get Wenger\u2019s Grand Plan. Which is even worse. Worse than what we had before, worse than what we have now, and quite possibly the end of football as we\u2019ve ever known it.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n 2) Conspiracy theory guff<\/p>\n Add it to the long, long list of things that were bad before VAR but are much worse now. Every decision now is not just one official making a snap judgement in one moment but one made by a group of people deliberating in the shadows for an extended period of time.<\/p>\n With football fans already predisposed to imagined agendas and conspiracies against their team it\u2019s little wonder that idea has festered and grown with the way decisions are reached by committee now.<\/p>\n But it really is all just utterly exhausting. Absolutely everything that happens to anyone now is warped and bent through the prism of a million competing conspiracy theories.<\/p>\n After years of making sure Arsenal didn\u2019t win the league for some reason, the shadowy puppeteers of English football are now apparently doing everything in their power to make sure they do win it this time.<\/p>\n As well as that, the Premier League are \u2013 for reasons that would absolutely defy all logic \u2013 determined to make sure Spurs, one of the league\u2019s biggest and wealthiest clubs, are relegated.<\/p>\n How do we know this? Because a social-media intern got wind of the grand Send Spurs Down plan and did a vaguely misjudged banter post on twitter about Guglielmo Vicario. We\u2019re through the looking glass here, people.<\/p>\n Ultimately, far more football fans than is healthy know by heart all the birthplaces of all the referees.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n 1) The set-piece wrestling<\/p>\n Forget all the other tish and fipsy, really. Because it\u2019s this one, isn\u2019t it? This is the actual thing that people are talking about when they say the football is sh*t now. They don\u2019t like the set-piece goals full stop, but more than that it\u2019s the specific nature of the set-piece goals we have now where pretty much everyone is fouling everyone and so no individual decision ever gets given.<\/p>\n Even here, the existing biases and thought processes prevail. We still hear \u201cshould do better\u201d and \u201cmust be stronger there\u201d when it suits the prevailing wind to go that way rather than gnash and wail about the general trend towards expertly conceived and executed set-piece routines into packed penalty areas.<\/p>\n We must admit that this isn\u2019t really our number one. It\u2019s the consensus number one, we get that. But our own bias is against VAR, so in our head this is still just a product of the VAR age. And we do think that binning VAR would go at least some way to solving the set-piece wrestling crisis, if indeed crisis is what it is.<\/p>\n Because we reckon in a pre (and therefore post) VAR world it would be easier to snuff this out at source. When it\u2019s one referee making one decision, it\u2019s much easier to just stamp it out by giving a load of free-kicks.<\/p>\n One weekend where the referees of all the games agree to clamp down properly and you could have it sorted. Obviously that can\u2019t happen now. It would have to be at the start of the season. Do it now after months of letting all these goals count and you\u2019ve got the Consistency mob on your case no matter how much the Common Sense brigade might temporarily be on your side. Especially when you remember that these two groups are not in any way two distinct groups but rather the same people splitting into whichever of the two factions serves their needs on that given day.<\/p>\n It does feel like every season begins with talk of a \u2018referees\u2019 meeting\u2019 in which clubs have told set-piece wrestling and grappling will definitely be clamped down on this season. Which in reality usually means it gets picked up once on matchday three and then never again.<\/p>\n This season Arsenal have inevitably been the focus of attention for this. And it\u2019s no coincidence that it\u2019s why it now matters so much. It\u2019s not an anti-Arsenal agenda either \u2013 don\u2019t make us tap the conspiracy theory sign. It\u2019s just basic maths. If one team is on track to win the title doing certain things, then the weight of numbers and thus opinion will be against them.<\/p>\n There are more non-Arsenal fans than Arsenal fans in this world \u2013 thank the lord \u2013 so that is the way the opinion-forming will break.<\/p>\n