The Football Association (FA) has no intention of joining any possible move by the Premier League to get rid of Video Assistant Referees (VAR), the governing body’s chief executive Mark Bullingham has confirmed.
The Premier League introduced VAR at the start of the 2019-20 season but the video-replay system continues to provoke heated debate every weekend, with many coaches, fans and players believing the confusion and delays it causes are not worth the improved decision-making.
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This sentiment was underlined this week when Wolverhampton Wanderers tabled a motion for a vote on scrapping VAR at the Premier League’s annual general meeting next month.
Speaking at FIFA’s annual congress in Bangkok on Friday, Bullingham said: “We like matches with as few mistakes as possible.
“You can ever reach perfection and VAR still needs fine-tuning but, overall, we think it is helping to eradicate some errors and that’s a good thing.
“So, we’re supportive but it’s obviously up to every league whether they adopt it or not.”
Stressing that it was not the FA’s place to tell any club or league what it should do in regards to VAR, Bullingham said the governing body had “no desire to get rid of it” in the FA Cup, which uses VAR when the fixtures are hosted by Premier League sides, as they have the required infrastructure in place.
Having said that “VAR is here to stay”, Bullingham admitted that the system needs to work faster and more transparently.
With this in mind, he believes the introduction of semi-automated offside technology — the multi-camera-based tracking system already used by UEFA to speed up decisions in its competitions — in the Premier League next season will help.
Bullingham, who sits on the game’s law-making body, the International Football Association Board (IFAB), is optimistic that match-going fans will think more highly of VAR once referees start explaining their decisions in the stadium, something American football and rugby’s two codes have had for years.
“Our expectation is that will be coming in for next season and (referees) will be explaining their decisions,” he said.
“That’s a continuation of the trial at (last year’s) Women’s World Cup. What we experimented in FIFA competitions is they have multiple languages to deal with and it worked really well there, so there is no reason why it won’t work well everywhere else.
“Our starting point is that the crowd in the stadium should never know less than the viewer at home and we think this is a step forwards in that direction.”
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On whether VAR would move to a protocol where teams have a limited number of views, like cricket or the National Basketball Association (NBA), Bullingham was less convinced, saying that idea is part of a “VAR-lite” trial that IFAB has run in futsal and some youth tournaments but it is not planned to be the solution for full-blown VAR.
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On the subject of the big decision made at the FIFA Congress, the awarding of the 2027 Women’s World Cup to Brazil, Bullingham does not believe the defeat of the joint European bid by Belgium, Germany and Netherlands will automatically postpone England’s chances of getting a Women’s World Cup for at least a decade.
Some congress delegates have speculated that the FA’s decision earlier this year to vote against UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin’s plan to possibly remain in charge until 2031, which would be a 15-year reign over European football, meant England was in UEFA’s ‘doghouse’.
This, the theory goes, would make it hard for England to bid for either a men’s or a women’s World Cup until Ceferin moves on, particularly when the Belgians, Germans and Dutch are likely to want another run at it.
“Today was about their bid for 2027, which we supported and they didn’t quite win,” Bullingham explained.
“We’ve always been upfront about the fact that we’d love to host the Women’s World Cup one day and we are continuing to look at the opportunities there.
“Overall, our relationship with UEFA is still really strong and I’m sure they’d get behind a European bid.
“We think, in the long term, we’d be able to host a brilliant tournament and we proved that with the Women’s Euros (in 2022) but it’s too early for us to decide when and how we’d go for it. We’ve got to evaluate whether it’s 2031, 2035 or 2039.”
(Alex Livesey – Danehouse/Getty Images)
