Order. As I just said to Mr Perkins, given the number of people here, you will all have longer than it takes for the video assistant referee to make a decision.
That this House has considered VAR and its effect on football attendances.
It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Betts, particularly as it is so difficult to get the opportunity to speak to a Sheffield Wednesday supporter about football at the moment.
I confess that it feels somewhat incongruous, as the country’s attention is focused on the coronavirus crisis and football has come to a stop, for Parliament to debate a non-life threatening matter such as video assistant referees and their impact on football attendances. I have been attempting for several weeks to secure a debate on this subject in the fortnightly ballot; it is somewhat unfortunate that the debate was finally drawn in this of all weeks.
The coronavirus crisis is both a medical and economic crisis, and the financial health of our national game is an issue that should matter to us. Football—particularly the Premier League—is one of the nation’s key economic and cultural exports, and anything that affects the Premier League’s popularity and esteem matters. Although we all accept that the there are more pressing matters, there will be a day when coronavirus is in the past and we will turn again to the normality that makes life rich, varied and enjoyable. I hope that those watching at home will accept that debate is being held in that spirit and that taking an hour or less to discuss the impact that VAR has had on football will not in any way diminish the Government’s preparedness to tackle the coronavirus crisis and to take the necessary steps to support businesses and people through it.
There seems to be almost universal agreement that the way that VAR is currently used in the English Premier League is bad for football. Opinion is less uniform on whether it is a good idea done badly or just a bad idea. During my speech, I intend to make the case for the abolition of VAR, while also looking at some of the steps that could be taken to improve it if the EPL, clubs and the wider game insist that it is here to stay and can only be reformed rather than abolished.
To explain why I believe that VAR should be abolished completely, I must start by explaining what I see as football’s enduring appeal. There is a reason why football is the most successful, the richest and the most widely watched and played sport in the history of our planet. Football’s appeal is in both its simplicity and its accessibility. Wherever someone may be in the world, if they have something round and two rocks for goalposts, they have a game. Until very recently, no matter the level, football’s core rules were the same. Whether in the local park, where more people play than watch, or at Celtic Park in front of 60,000 people, football was football.
Alongside that simplicity, football’s unique selling point is the rarity of the goal. A goal can be a thing of beauty—a thrilling movement that builds to a crescendo with a thrilling release—or it can be workmanlike and brutal, with the ball forced over the line. It can be fortunate, freakish or amazingly simple and, sometimes, it can even be comical and farcical. The goal can be controversial, a moment to delight in and bring a nation together in a shared explosion of joy; or it can be tragic, as an entire ground and nation clasp their heads in their hands in perfect unison. No other moment in any other sport is so special as the moment in football when a goal is scored. However that goal is scored, it is rare and important, and because of its rarity and importance, it matters and it is celebrated.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Betts. I know that you take a close interest in football as well.
I commend the hon. Member for Chesterfield (Mr Perkins) for securing the debate. I had expected that the SNP spokesperson would be summing up many contributions, but understandably many hon. Members are focused elsewhere today. It feels as if we could be said to be fiddling while Rome burns, but as the hon. Gentleman rightly points out, the debate was applied for several weeks ago, and it is not too much of an inconvenience to spend an hour or so focused on an issue that is on the minds of many football fans. Later in my remarks I will refer to the situation with covid-19 and its impact on our football clubs, which is a bigger, existential threat.
I declare an interest, as I am a proud season ticket holder of the pride of Lanarkshire, the Airdrieonians football club, which is the best wee football team in the land. Although I spend the majority of my Saturdays at football, I have never seen VAR in action, partly because we do not have it in Scotland, certainly not at league 1 level. However, I have seen it on TV a lot. This is the only time, certainly in public, that I will confess to being a small “c” conservative. It might not surprise too many people, but on the issue of football, I am absolutely a small “c” conservative and a traditionalist. I believe that football should be played at 3 o’clock on Saturday. It is a nonsense that teams are playing just about every night of the week. For example, a situation where Newcastle is playing Portsmouth on a Thursday night is not helpful for fans trying to get to games. VAR is just another step down the road of pandering to the commercialisation of football, and particularly TV.
As a football fan, I tend to take a view that over the course of a season some decisions will go for a team and some will go against it. Sometimes a stonewall penalty will be denied, but a soft one will be allowed. In my view, it tends to level out over the course of a season. The cost of VAR for clubs, especially in Scotland, is an issue. The technology is obviously hugely expensive. There are situations in the English premiership where the likes of clubs such as Manchester United do not have the screens to show VAR. That plays into the idea that fans are being excluded from the VAR process, and that they are having to watch the referee making shapes in the sky. It is a nonsense and not helpful for fans. It makes them feel excluded.
I was not planning to intervene, but my hon. Friend is doing an impersonation of a footballing Luddite. Does he agree that these decisions can cost millions of pounds and a club’s future can be mapped out on such decisions? It is not that VAR is wrong in and of itself, but its implementation should be improved, rather than chucking the whole deal or experiment out, as he is suggesting.
He and I are very good friends but, unusually, on this point I disagree with him. I tend to take the position of the hon. Member for Chesterfield of being quite keen to see the back of VAR altogether, but I appreciate that my hon. Friend takes a slightly different view.
My hon. Friend is making a fantastic speech. I have always been a big fan of video refereeing coming into football, but VAR is doing its level best to dissuade me of that support. I played rugby and am a big follower of American football. Lots of sports have used video evidence and it has worked. In the likes of cricket, the process is followed in live time. The issue is the transparency of the process, and the fact that fans are not involved. Does he agree that if changes were made to VAR, and if it followed other sports, it could be a success?
I am grateful to my hon. Friend, who reminds us of his time playing rugby. He is far too modest to tell the House that he was actually a very good rugby player but had to retire due to injury. He does not talk about that very often. I once again find myself in a situation in which I must say that, on this issue, I speak personally—there is probably no SNP policy on VAR, but I need to be slightly careful not to over-egg the pudding.
I want to come on to the interpretation of the handball rule.
I am glad that my hon. Friend put that on the record. That point is well made.
Coming back to the interpretation of the handball rule, the rules around handball have been reviewed and changed in recent years, which in many respects accounts for some of the stranglehold on the game. A few weeks ago, alongside my hon. Friends here and my hon. Friend the Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey (Drew Hendry), I watched the Hearts-Hibs game. There was a whole bit of commentary towards the end of the game that focused on whether Hearts had handled the ball. What actually happened was that a player was going down for a slide tackle to try to get the ball and put his hand down behind him to try to break his fall, and the ball came off his arm. Clearly, that was not a deliberate handball, but depending on their interpretation of the rules, some might say it was, so we need to review the handball rules. I appreciate that that decision is not necessarily within the gift of the Minister, although one day he might be that powerful; he can certainly aspire to that.
I also want to see a review of the offside rule. I agree with the hon. Member for Chesterfield that this microscopic analysis is absolutely killing the game. We now see situations where a referee might decide that something was a goal, but the VAR decides, after two minutes of consultation and with 10, 11 or 12 different camera angles, that somebody’s toenail—that was the hon. Gentleman’s example—might have been offside, which is clearly nonsense. I guess it comes back to his point that we call football the beautiful game for a reason. We do not call it the forensic game or the legalistic game, which it is increasingly becoming.
Before I conclude, I will address what is actually the biggest threat facing our game, which is obviously coronavirus. Most professional clubs—certainly my own—do not have a lucrative sponsorship deal or big TV deal. Indeed, many are not sitting on big reserves. In the case of Airdrieonians, something like 45% to 50% of its revenue comes from gate receipts. It is probably a bit of a nonsense to expect the football season to resume in April—I think most of us probably appreciate that no football will be played this side of the summer, although a decision will be taken about that later in the week—so the Government should definitely give more clarity about what will actually happen, in terms of sport being played and the safety around that.
I see that my hon. Friend approves. However, my club is five points off the top of the league with eight games to go. I certainly take the view that we should restart when it is safe to do so in the summer, and perhaps have a truncated season, although I appreciate the difficulties owing to players who might be out of contract in May. However, I fear that I might be diverging slightly from the topic of debate.
The overarching point that I want to leave with the Minister and all of Government is the idea that these are challenging times for football clubs. Most of us in this Chamber appreciate that football clubs are not just a business. For so many of us football is a part of our culture, our community and our history, and it must be supported during these immensely difficult times.
It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Betts. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Chesterfield (Mr Perkins) for securing this debate, which comes at a time of crisis for our country. Coronavirus has closed clubs up and down the country and loads of pressing matters are on Members’ minds today. Earlier we learnt that the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, the right hon. Member for Hertsmere (Oliver Dowden), is self-isolating with his family, so we send him our regards and hope that he gets well soon and is okay. Also, we send our thoughts to all the fans and players around the country who love the game. For them it is absolutely unbelievable that they have to go for weeks on end without watching their players or playing the game themselves, so we also think about them.
There is something incredibly British—
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That moment, which is the fundamental ethos of what it means to love football, is the moment that VAR interferes with. We are robbed of that moment of simple joy or despair by a faceless man sitting in an industrial estate in south-west London, miles away from those who really care. All the fans can do is wait for his dreadful, often imperfect, verdict. The wild, breathless celebrations are halted by the dreadful, purple appearance on the big screen of the words “checking goal”. Sometimes celebrations that have been under way for 30 seconds or more are placed on pause as two sets of fans stop and stare at a screen that offers them nothing but the fact that uncertainty now reigns.
In a sport that thrives on being played without delay, that uncertainty can last for three minutes or more. The chant about VAR is so commonplace that there is not a single premiership fan who could not instantly sing it. If VAR offered flawless decision making, I would still say that it was not worth it, but it does not even do that. When VAR was introduced we were promised that it would overturn clear and obvious errors, but it has become a farce.
For a toenail offside, 30 seconds before a goal was scored—and after a three-minute delay—Sheffield United’s goal at Tottenham was ruled offside. Arsenal scored a goal at Old Trafford that was uncontested by the Manchester United defenders because the linesman’s flag had gone up several seconds before the goal was scored. West Ham fans celebrated their last-minute equaliser at Bramall Lane for a full 45 seconds before there was even a suggestion that it might be called into question. I must confess that that last-minute disallowed goal brought me momentary pleasure, but even as we celebrated the goal being disallowed a part of me mourned what we had all lost.
I have explained why I do not want VAR in football, but even if it must be tolerated, so much is wrong with how it is being delivered. First, the technology is applied to offside decisions on the basis of where one player’s most prominent limb is in relation to another player at the specific moment when the film is frozen. A millisecond either side of that, however, and the player might have been onside. The technology is imperfect in terms of the exact moment when the ball was kicked. VAR is overruling goals on hairline decisions with a technology that is not good enough to deliver the level of precision that it pretends to offer. A camera that is not in line with the offside line is used to overrule a decision by a linesman who was, accepting that arbitrary lines drawn on a screen provide an accurate description of who was furthest forward by a millimetre.
I guarantee that if VAR, this dreadful stain on the beautiful game, continues long into the future, fans will look back in 20 years and laugh at the technology on which we currently rely to determine whether someone was offside. VAR has exposed the gap between our expectation of players’ performances and those of referees. When a striker skies a shot over the bar or a goalkeeper lets the ball slip from his grasp, fans on his side are willing to view that error in the context of the overall performance, but no such allowance is ever given to the referee. That thirst for perfection in decision making—a product of the pundit era and the enormous investment in technology by Sky Sports and others, designed to improve our enjoyment of the game—has driven us to the soulless VAR experiment.
For years, the coverage of every match, and of every post-match managerial interview, has included a section on the decisions that the referee made or the manager’s view of whether the referee was any good. It turns out that managers whose teams lost usually thought that he was not. We all became used to that as part of the background music to every match. Now the focus has shifted from whether the referee was right to whether VAR was right. Every week, the football headlines are not about the performances of the players but about the decisions made and the technology.
In attempting to justify the success of VAR, the English Premier League’s note to me in advance of the debate informed me that a decision was overturned in only one in every three matches, as though that should show me how little it was intervening. Far from it. If VAR is correcting so few decisions, what problem are we trying to solve? It has ruined a lot more goal celebrations for me than that, and not just those that are overturned. Even the celebrations that ultimately are not in vain are not the same because fans wonder whether what happened was something that will be called into question. The spontaneity that is so crucial and endemic to football is lost as a result of VAR.
VAR is also changing the way that football is played, refereed and watched. It is changing the decision making to the detriment of the fairness of the sporting contest. Linesmen are instructed not to flag for offside unless they are absolutely sure, even if they believe it is offside. A linesman in an EFL Championship game who would flag for offside, because he thinks it is, will in the Premier League allow the game to carry on because it was close, giving an unfair advantage to the attacking side. This can lead to a load of football that is a waste of time, because ultimately a goal is disallowed or to an offside player winning a corner or a free kick that then leads to a goal that should never have happened, because the linesman thinks that he was probably offside anyway but did not give it, because he was correctly following the edict not to flag for a marginal offside. When I think about the difference between the fan experience in the Premier League and the Championship, I almost envy you, Mr Betts—but perhaps I would not go that far.
If VAR is to continue, changes are needed both to the rules of the game and VAR’s operation if it is going to be anything other than a drag on the appeal of a hugely successful product. Most crucially, the offside law needs reviewing. New referees and linesmen were always taught that if a player is level, they are onside, as the rules state. In real time, that made sense, but in the VAR era, there is no such thing as level. It now means that if, at the moment that the screen is frozen, one player’s toe is a millimetre beyond another player’s shoulder, the goal is disallowed. That is not what the offside rule was designed to outlaw and it needs rewriting, because it is spoiling the sport’s simplicity, which is so important. We need to return to the original principle that if the majority of two players’ bodies are basically level, the striker is considered to be onside.
Secondly, fans must be involved in the process, as other sports manage, with the pictures that are being viewed by the referee also available for fans in the stadium. Thirdly, the referee is the referee and he should view the original pictures. If he is certain that he has made a clear and obvious error, only at that moment should the decision be altered. Finally, a clear and obvious error should mean precisely that. If it takes someone three minutes to work out whether something was an error, it was not clear and obvious. In cricket, there is “umpire’s call”, which means that a degree of latitude is given, meaning that they stay with the original decision to allow for the uncertainty in the technology and the decision that is made. That should be adopted in football so that fewer hairline decisions are overturned and fans can once again celebrate a goal, knowing that unless there is a clear and obvious error, there will be no change to the decision.
I am pleased to have brought this important matter to Parliament. The title of the debate refers to the effect that VAR has on football attendances. That was partly because the Table Office considered football attendances to be a matter that the House was allowed an opinion on, while the rules of football were not, and partly because the evidence is that VAR is reducing football fans’ enjoyment. A YouGov poll showed that 67% of fans who watch football felt that VAR had made watching football a “less enjoyable” experience. Can anyone imagine any other industry introducing, at great expense, an innovation that its paying customers said made its product worse, and then, instead of scrapping it, reacting by doubling down on it and claiming that it was progress that we all had to get to enjoy?
I do not like the principle of VAR. I hate the implementation of it. It professes a precision that it does not deliver. It makes the game our children watch a different sport from the one they play. It changes the way that football’s rules are refereed and it makes obsolete or unworkable rules that made sense with on-field referees in the pre-VAR era. The beautiful game is diminished by VAR, and I say “Scrap it.”
There is a separate issue with the amount of time being taken to consult VAR. It interrupts the flow of the match. In the English premiership there are now regularly situations where there are five or six minutes of stoppage time for the first half of a game, which is absolutely ridiculous. Some countries other than Scotland tend to have more stoppage time, but I will not necessarily name them. After the second half there might be three or four minutes added, to take into account substitutions, but the idea that there would be five or six minutes of stoppage time in a first half is a nonsense.
In the opening part of the season, Liverpool beat Norwich 4-1, but there were nine VAR checks in that game. That is huge amount of time for fans to sit and try to work out what on earth is going on. It has been suggested that it could be around 10 years before fans finally get their heads around VAR. Perhaps it is for that reason that so many football fans are chanting, “It’s not football anymore,” in the stands.
The hon. Member for Chesterfield made a point about the post-match discussions. More often than not, we have a discussion in the pub or going home in the car about the whether the referee got it right or wrong. With VAR, we need to remember that there is still a human element involved; the decision still has to be made by a human, but now not necessarily the referee in the park but someone in a centre elsewhere, in London, I think.
There is also a question of what should happen to the football season. Will it be declared null and void? Are we in a situation where we just say that whoever is top of a particular league should be designated as champions?