VAR arrives in the Premier League to unearth sins we didn’t know existed

Robert Lewandowski had strayed offside. Not much of him – in fact most of Robert Lewandowski was onside – but the big toe belonging to his right foot was categorically offside. Unfortunately he hadn’t noticed, and neither had his opponents, the officials or any one of the 43,000 spectators in the stadium, so when the ball ricocheted off Lewandowski and into the path of a teammate, and was volleyed home by Leon Goretzka 10 seconds later, Bayern Munich celebrated like they’d clinched the title, because they thought they had.

“It’s the joke of the year, because it wasn’t a clear mistake,” Bayern’s president Uli Hoeness said afterwards. “VAR is there to correct clear mistakes. A millimetre isn’t any advantage.” With the help of technology VAR had spotted Lewandowski’s toe and chalked off the goal, long after Goretzka had celebrated like a maniac. “I felt like an idiot,” he said. “It was an emotional rollercoaster. I thought I’d scored the title-winning goal in my first season.”

At which point you are probably thinking one of two things: either it’s incredibly harsh and all quite dispiriting, or that rules are rules and the correct decision was reached in the end. Either you agree with Hoeness that there is nothing to gain by punishing a fractionally wayward body part, or you agree with the chair of Fifa’s refereeing committee, Pierluigi Collina. “If the technology makes us able to view something then we cannot ignore it,” Collina said, as he defended the use of VAR at the Women’s World Cup. “It doesn’t matter if it’s 2cm or 20cm. There isn’t a small offside and a big offside.”

Which brings us, in a roundabout way, to Raheem Sterling’s armpit. This was the body part Mike Dean said was offside as he explained the decision to rule out a Gabriel Jesus goal set up by Sterling during Manchester City’s win over West Ham on the weekend, and it already has the game’s lawmaker, Ifab, reviewing its rules. The Premier League introduced VAR this season accepting there was likely to be some initial confusion or controversy, but it would have hoped to get by at least 24 hours without a decision as marginal as Lewandowski’s hallux.

At this point it’s worth considering a few points you might not know about VAR. Those thick lines laid across the screen to illustrate Sterling’s offside are largely for our benefit; the VAR official uses a much more precise line just one pixel in width. The pass is measured not from the moment it leaves David Silva’s foot but from the first point of contact between the ball and his boot. And Dean repeatedly mouthing ‘armpit’ isn’t entirely weird: it’s agreed among Premier League referees to mark where the shoulder stops and the arm begins. It’s not perfect, but at least it’s consistent.

All of which sounds sensible enough if you accept that offside is a straightforward, objective call. Yet as Jonathan Wilson explored with some Twitter geometrics this week, there are several high-speed variables at play which VAR is being asked to calibrate precisely with 50-frame-per-second cameras. VAR isn’t automated; it’s a man in a room with a Hawk-Eye technician by his side trying to marry up several moving parts on a screen very quickly. He is asking for blurry frames to be stopped and minuscule lines to be moved and dots to be joined with armpits, and only once he’s made those choices does he get an answer.

If goal-line technology is comparably definitive to tennis’s Hawk-Eye – the ball is in or out, goal or no goal – then tight offsides are more like cricket’s ball-tracking, where we think we have the answer but we can’t be sure. In the United States’ MLS, VAR is used only for clear and obvious errors and that extends to offsides – if the video official isn’t certain after a quick check of the replay, the game goes on, much like cricket’s method of sticking with the umpire’s call on marginal LBWs. The Premier League has instead followed the Bundesliga model of black or white, despite a thin line of grey.

So we are required to give a little of our faith, to believe in the outcome when VAR is passing down judgement on a matter of inches like Sterling’s. And perhaps we are required to give a little of our soul too, because we know that the benefit of the offside rule, mainly to prevent goal-hanging, has been lost somewhere along the way, and that erasing the craft of Silva’s pass into Sterling’s sprint doesn’t seem quite right.

Maybe the original reason for VAR has been lost a little too. It’s inception was accelerated by miscarriages of justice: Thierry Henry’s infamous handball forced Fifa’s hand and Charlie Austin’s rant last season was one of the final straws for the Premier League. Football’s lawmakers are conservative and new rules are usually reactionary, provoked by moments that matter. It felt necessary to fix those mistakes primarily because the whole world had seen the truth a few seconds later. The oddity is that there has never been uproar over a stray earlobe, because technology has unearthed sins we didn’t know existed.

The Premier League is open to change with all this. It has worked tirelessly behind the scenes to create a version of VAR tailored to protecting its product of fast football and it will evolve accordingly over the coming seasons. It has already learned one lesson from the Bundesliga, which came under criticism over long breaks in play as referees checked their pitch-side monitors: referees in the English top-flight have instead been encouraged to trust the advice of the VAR most of the time.

Ifab will meet in March and version 15 of the ever-evolving VAR protocol might see a flex towards the MLS model. Perhaps this could be the Premier League’s methodology too, except that the technology is already being used in such detail that it would be hard to backpedal now and make decision-making seemingly less precise. Collina was probably right; once you’ve spotted a stray toe, you cannot ignore it.