Football fans join the tech backlash

Henry Mance of the FT provides a balanced assessment of the debate about VAR.  For me, it confirms that most fans are conservative technophobes at heart.  Back in the 1950s many of them opposed the introduction of floodlights.

It does need tweaking and Mance has some useful suggestions. Moreover, if the VAR team can't reach a decision in three minutes, the on field decision should stand.   But so much is at stake financially in modern football that mistakes by officials can't simply be shrugged off.

Here’s some good news about the world in 2026: football refereeing is more accurate than ever. If you don’t believe me, look at the English Premier League’s list of recent wrong decisions. Most of the mistakes are marginal. Thanks to technology, glaring errors are now even rarer than successful Manchester United signings. It is basically impossible that England will be knocked out of this year’s World Cup by an equivalent of Diego Maradona’s 1986 Hand of God (they will be knocked out by another, equally painful method). 

But here is the paradox: fans are as miserable as ever. They grumble that decisions are irrational and inconsistent. In England, complaints crescendoed last week when officials took nearly six minutes to rule out — correctly — a goal by Manchester City. “I think the game has gone,” said Chris Sutton, a commentator and former player.

Is this nostalgia bias? Is Sutton forgetting that he was once so enraged by purely human refereeing that he marched on to the pitch during his son’s under-14s match? Are football fans like the keyboard warriors who complain that London has become awfully dangerous, despite statistics showing the opposite? 

Yes, but the fans also have a point. The video assistant referee (VAR) is a parable of the risks of technological advancement. Decisions are now more accurate, but the decision-making process is worse. The lesson is that tech is not neutral. It doesn’t just take what humans do and make it better. From instant messaging to fitness tracking, it changes what we do. Real progress can be elusive.

VAR’s first problem is that it elevates the focus of the technology — accuracy — over other values. It was introduced in 2019 because accuracy is what fans and managers were demanding. But the football authorities failed to realise what was being taken for granted: speed, simplicity and spontaneity. In some areas, like cancer scanning, accuracy is paramount. In sport, we are less interested in precision if it comes at the expense of emotion. 

One in 25 Premier League goals was retrospectively disallowed by VAR last season — enough that fans can no longer reflexively enjoy the moment that the ball hits the net. In a 2024 poll, two-thirds of Premier League fans said video refereeing had made football less enjoyable to watch, even though wide margins also said it did a good job at individual tasks, like spotting handballs. 

In this sense, VAR is analogous to online dating. Dating apps focused on one problem: scarcity. They allowed single people to meet more potential partners. But they neglected other variables. It turns out that poring over countless matches is dehumanising. Faced with endless choices, people may also act differently: they prioritise flings over sustained relationships.

In football too, technology has changed the rules. Before VAR, there was only so much that referees could notice. Today every key decision must be analysed. The tech writer Daisy Christodoulou has argued that the use of slow-motion replays has pushed football authorities to develop ever more complicated guidance. The spectacle is now legalistic. At times, it has all the escapism of a tax return. 

Another common complaint is that it interrupts play. Tech does this: text messages distract us during work and conversations with friends. Medical trackers promise to make us healthier, but they can also make us more anxious, drawing our attention to metrics that may not matter. 

A final lesson from the VAR debacle is that we are less tolerant of tech-related errors than purely hu

man ones. Crashes involving self-driving cars provoke more outrage. Mistakes due to AI — like the West Midlands police force that republished a chatbot’s hallucination — count double. Tech creates the expectation of perfection. Bad use of it seems almost a moral failing. 

So football fans are joining the tech backlash. A lot want to scrap the use of video refereeing, just like some singles who are giving up on online dating. Yet at least some of these problems could be solved. The tech could defer more often to on-field referees’ decisions. It could be based on an appeal system, like that used in cricket. This gamifies the process: using your appeals wisely becomes part of the competition.   

VAR’s travails remind us that new tech comes with unexpected trade-offs. We aren’t incapable of appreciating progress. But it often won’t take the form that the authorities envisaged — or that we originally demanded.