LONDON—In its long-running obsession with individual body parts, English soccer tends to settle on bits like Jamie Vardy’s weaponized left foot or Virgil van Dijk’s magnetic forehead. But right now the Premier League can’t stop talking about armpits.
That’s because this is fast turning into the season of VAR, the controversial, ever-present Video Assistant Referee that has fans, players and referees scrutinizing this corner of the human anatomy more closely than most doctors. While the instant-replay system is used to adjudicate on all kinds of soccer infractions, nothing has been more polarizing than how it determines who is or isn’t offside.
How that debate came to involve armpits is down to how the offside rule is interpreted these days. A player is deemed offside only with a body part that can’t legally score a goal—in other words, anything but the arm. And since most people pitch forward when they run, the first thing that might stray beyond the last defender is where the arm meets the rest of the body.
“Armpits are becoming quite the rage in the Premier League at the minute,” Wolves defender Conor Coady said over the weekend.
Every day during the Premier League’s packed holiday schedule, it seemed new clubs were feeling aggrieved by zoomed-in, freeze-frames of an offending armpit. Over the past weekend alone, at least five goals were overturned on VAR close calls. The season total is more than 20.
“Every weekend is a big mess about the VAR,” Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola said.
The problem isn’t that the offside calls are wrong. Technically, the decisions are more correct than they’ve ever been. The Premier League said in November that decisions over “key match incidents” were now 91% accurate, up from 82% last season thanks to VAR.
But English soccer has turned violently against the technology, because it has slowed down games and generally sowed confusion. If the spirit of VAR was to correct “clear and obvious” errors, as the league originally stated, its implementation has rendered those words meaningless.
Fans in the stadium and players on the pitch have little idea of what’s going on during a review. Viewers watching on television see only lines moving across a frame of the action like the world’s most public geometry homework. The referee waits for the word without consulting a screen. When a decision comes, it’s communicated via giant screen in the stadium. Unlike the NFL, the officials don’t speak publicly.
“You don’t get clarification of what’s happening. They don’t tell you what’s going on,” Coady said.
More romantic critics argue that it has sapped the spontaneous joy from soccer. A goal might not be a goal anymore until several minutes after the ball hits the net, which is why fans have taken to cheering at the ensuing kick-off—when the window to cancel the goal is firmly closed.
Viewers in the U.S. may know the feeling. The NBA’s marquee game on Christmas Day between the Lakers and Clippers was decided by a referee in Secaucus, N.J. scrutinizing frame-by-frame evidence to determine whether a blocked 3-pointer went out of bounds off the fingertips of LeBron James or Patrick Beverley.
The strange thing about English soccer is that VAR arrived this season after broadly successful implementation in Major League Soccer, Italy’s Serie A, Spain’s La Liga, and FIFA international competitions such as the men’s and women’s World Cups. None of them had quite as many teething issues as the Premier League.
Then again, none of them took the enforcement of offside quite as far as the Premier League. The International Football Association Board, the guardians of the soccer rulebook, have already said that the weekly fiascos in England were never the intention.
Sheffield United has felt the pain more sharply than most, with at least four goals overturned this season, according to Opta Sports. Man City forward Raheem Sterling has also had several goals chalked off for being the wrong side of a few pixels.
“Happy to improve my VAR overruled goals record today again,” Sterling tweeted after VAR disallowed a goal against Chelsea in November. “Damn this thing gonna kill me bro.”
It’s no coincidence that Sterling happens to be one of the quickest players in the league. Situations in which he’s sprinting at full tilt stretch the limits of VAR and the offside rule itself.
The problem comes down to determining the instant the ball is played—at that moment, per the rules, an attacking player must have two players between him and the goal. But while much of the rest of the VAR offside process has been automated, one of the officials must manually select the frame in which he deems the ball has been passed. The result is that the conversation has moved to a level of minutiae that soccer fans never knew they needed to understand.
A player running at the common speed of 20 kilometers (14.2 miles) per hour, will cover a little over 5.5 meters every second. VAR uses cameras that run at 50 frames-per-second. That means from one frame to the next the player will travel more than 11 centimeters, or 4 inches.
“When we talk about serious moments, very important moments in football, it’s not right to sit here and everyone wants to laugh about it,” Liverpool manager Jürgen Klopp said. “It is not to laugh about. It is too serious. Managers get sacked for losing football games.”
Seemingly everyone in soccer has taken a crack at a solution. Those include giving the referee discretion to let the original call stand in the closest cases (regardless of what the computers say); building in a wider margin for error; and changing the offside rule itself so that the entire player (not just a goal scoring body part) needs to be in breach to be deemed offside. The issue with all of them is that they simply shift the point of argument. If it’s not the armpit, it could be the back of the heel.
The Premier League has no plans to change its use of VAR this season, though IFAB is expected to issue new guidelines in February. In the meantime, all English soccer can do is wait and nod along with Wolves manager Nuno Espirito Santo.
“I don’t want to speak about VAR any more,” he said.
Share Your Thoughts
Has the use of VAR hurt the game of soccer? How can it be improved?
Write to Joshua Robinson at joshua.robinson@wsj.com
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2020-01-01 12:00:00Z
https://www.wsj.com/articles/english-soccer-cant-stop-talking-about-armpits-11577880002
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