Football is the favourite sport of people from all around the world. A year ago, the recent Euro competition supposed to got held proved how much the old Continent is still in love with the game. From television ratings to sportsbook Canada, we can see that people are still interested in football. Especially the latter one, where the fans make their games that much more enjoyable by putting something on their favourite team. So, from watching it to making money on predicting the results, football has its devoted millions, even billions of fans.
However, there are two things most fans complain about the state of modern football. First is the apparent commercialization. It’s obvious everyone is in for the money and sponsorship deals. Some clubs having billions of euros to spend and player transfers worth hundreds of millions of euros gives good headlines, making for less exciting leagues. Not that interesting when you can simply outspend the competition. But in this article, we touch upon the second problem with modern football – Technology.
VAR
Video Assistant Referee has been on display for a couple of years now. First, in the Premier League and the Champions League, it got widely used at Euro 2020. In theory, this technology allows referees always to make the correct call. When unsure, they review the replay, consult with assistant referees and decide. But in practice, it is one of the most hated additions among fans ever. And the justice it promised to serve isn’t always delivered.
Wrong Calls Still Happen
We should note that even with VAR, referees don’t always get it right. They make mistakes all the time. No game and no competition is devoid of severe referee errors and decisions that greatly influenced the game’s outcome. VAR has not and can not change that. Since VAR doesn’t fix football, the question is does it hurt it in any way. And fans across the world agree: it does. How?
Football Used to be a Simple Game
VAR destroys the game’s beauty in 2 ways: it ruins the dynamic and its simplicity. One of the reasons football is so popular is because it is a straightforward game—a game for the working class, a game of the everyman. But now, high-level football will be vastly different than the one little kids play on the street or in lower leagues. They can’t afford it, and it isn’t practical for them to have all this technology like VAR or goal line. So football in the streets and non-elite competitions will become a very different game to the one played in the Champions League or World cup. And that’s a significant minus.
Last but not least, VAR destroys the momentum of the game. Somebody scores, a goal is tallied, and the game continues. That’s how it used to be. Now you have to insert minutes of the referee deciding, and the game gets stopped. Because of that, the tempo gets wholly destroyed, and for all these reasons, we can safely say that technology is not saving football but probably doing just the opposite for some fans.
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