UEFA Competitions 2023-2024 Referee Discussions [Rs]

This is where I'm at with this. UEFA has dug their own grave here. Their handball instruction has been very harsh, and their VAR interventions very aggressive, for the last couple of years. They seem to have only just now realized that the public (at least the English public) hates this handball interpretation so they're throwing the VAR under the bus.

Just have a look at the most recent RAP. C2, C16, C18, C24, C25, C26 are great examples of how UEFA has stripped the word "unnatural" of all its meaning, caring only for whether the arm makes the body bigger. When this is how they interpret things, it's no wonder that the naturality motion of the Newcastle defender's running motion was not considered relevant.

To be totally fair, I will say that the two most analogous plays in the RAP to the Newcastle one are C10 and C2. C10 is no handball (but no VAR intervention expected), C2 is. Both feature deflections off the defender's body, but those aren't mentioned as relevant, and there are several other clips that feature a deflection off the defender's own body going in both different ways. So I think there's some gray area on the Newcastle one, but when your VARs are playing fast-and-loose with their intervention threshold, you get what you bargain for.

 

"Clear and Obvious"

 

Example #9876 of how VAR is just making the game so much better. How can we live without it.

 

But here it is, the computer fixing the human problem... isn't that what fans just wanted so badly?

Lol.

You sell perfection but give them drama. That is your you hook them.

 

Offside is clear and obvious. Where do you want the line drawn (no pun intended)?

By the way here’s a better angle of this offside decision that shows nearly his entire upper left shoulder is offside. Offside, by the book. Period.

https://imgur.com/1dg0Yc2

So you complain about human error, you complain about a computer calling it perfectly. What do you want exactly?

Oh also, I forgot to add that the AR called this correctly in real time with a delayed offside flag. The SAOT is just confirming his correct decision. So are you saying the AR is actually wrong, that this shouldn’t be offside? LOL

 

They want to complain.

Ideally, they want the on field officials to be perfect, but we've already debunked thar perfect is a thing.

 

What it seems the public wants is the magnitude of the error being corrected directly related to the amount of delay or intrusion introduced while correcting that error.

For a toenail offside, that decision time needs to be in the order of magnitude of how quickly GLT makes its toenail goal decisions.

 

GAL MUN min 89, Man U crosses in and after a little bit of pinball, a shot is blocked by the gk and the defender, on the ground from earlier, kicks the ball about 2 ft into the keeper’s (who is also on the ground) grasp. A clear back pass- i guess that’s not going to be on anyone’s radar, esp at the end of a 3-3 game.

 

I only view it as being right or wrong. This brings in more subjectivity. What constitutes an “egregious” error? How many millimeters offside? People don’t get to demand technology for perfection and then complain when perfection is achieved because it’s “too perfect”

We want technology to remove subjectivity as much as possible. SAOT does that as much as possible. I’m sure my opinion is not shared by most here, but it doesn’t really matter to me. To me It’s great to see this called 100% correctly on an objective basis.

Also, big shoutout to whoever AR1 is who got this call right in real time. Whether it was a guess or not, he got it right.

 

What fans like me want is for the offside law to have some actual relationship to whether or not the attacker is actually gaining any advantage by being "offside". Because we're tired of seeing good goals ruled out because a small part of the attacker's body is a couple inches closer to goal than the defender's body, which in real life confers no meaningful advantage to the attacker.

As far as I am concerned, Wenger's suggestion of moving back towards a "even is on" interpretation is a step in the right direction.

 

So what do you consider gaining an advantage then? Should it only be called offside if the player directly scores with the body part that was offside? What if the cross comes in and he controls it with his offside left shoulder, gets it to his foot and scores? What if he controls it with the shoulder, to his foot, passes to a teammate who scores, or it goes through multiple passes and then scores?

And how do you judge that this gave him no meaningful advantage? What if the momentum of his forward sprint that leads to his shoulder being offside gives him an extra few steps past his backpedaling defender, that lets him get the ball first, that leads to the goal?

 

Well.....that's for the IFAB to figure out.....I don't know if there is a workable standard that is better than what is being currently used....but as MassRef noted upthread, offsides needs to go back to being a "gray area" decision instead of a "precise via use of technology" decision.

People want the obvious errors corrected, not miniscule and insignificant ones.

 

I wasn't even sure who to even quote when wanting to offer my thoughts, so I'm somewhat arbitrarily choosing this one. I absolutely adore soccer. Loved it ever since I learned about it and started playing it. I had a decent playing career, made it to the college game, and scored some goals and got some awards. I've been a referee for quite some time and would like to think I've had a good referee career that is still ongoing. All told, I've spent about 70-75% of my life obsessed with this game as a player and referee.

The thing that is addicting to me is the beauty and emotion of good goals, especially good goals in significant moments. That excitement of a building opportunity leading into the release of emotion when the ball hits the net is what makes the game so great. I remember Landon Donovan v. Algeria; Fabio Grosso in extra time against Germany; Sergio Agueroooooooooooo. The list goes on. My favorite goal I scored in college wasn't my diving header against the school rivals in a game we lost, but instead was a garbage rebound-volley off a corner to win in golden goal overtime (and the ensuing celebratory dogpile). Goals and the emotions tied to them are what make this game so great.

Compare those goals to some of the recent goals in champions league competitions. Can you even remember any? I can hardly do so. The first that comes to mind for me is VAR taking away Sterling's goal-that-wasn't-a-goal when Manchester City lost to Tottenham in 2019.

Outside of training materials for refereeing, I'm hardly making time to watch European football anymore. I'm not watching the EPL religiously every morning. I'm not moving around my work schedule to try and catch champions league matches. I used to. I really think VAR is the reason.

I read a twitter thread a few weeks back that talked about something called the "trust thermocline," and it made me think about soccer and VAR's impact (source:

One of the things I occasionally get paid to do by companies/execs is to tell them why everything seemed to SUDDENLY go wrong, and subs/readers dropped like a stone.

So, with everything going on at Twitter rn, time for a thread about the Trust Thermocline /1

— John Bull (@garius) November 3, 2022

). I somewhat expect soccer with VAR will have to deal with reduced demand/attention similar to what the twitter thread talks about. People are losing the joy they once had for the game because the product with VAR no longer provides that raw emotional joy.

 

To bring this back to where it began, isn't that the problem with the plinko theory of handball? And isnt that true regardless of var? I think Newcastle would feel equally hard done by if the center ref called handball and var didn't overturn (which it wouldn't, bc again, the issue is more with the handball rule than VAR here)

 

OK who's got the Havertz clip

 

From what I can decipher, it appears only 1 OFR was waved away in the Premier league so far this year.

 

If the fans, players, managers, the “football world” as a whole care more about passion and joy than getting calls correct, then there’s no problem with that. Remove VAR and go back to that standard then. Then get calls incorrect and accept it as “just part of the beautiful game” without endless player, manager, fan, and pundit dissent. Stop letting tv networks put up their own offside line immediately after a play happens so that everyone watching can criticize the referees.

It’s happened across all sports. MLB got called “dinosaurs” for taking so long to institute replay and that they didn’t want to do replay because “their egos were too big to be corrected”. NFL referees got called “deliberately sabotaging” when they almost never overturned pass interference unless it was the most egregious of the egregious. It seems that no matter which way video replay is used, it’s always criticized.

They can do whatever they want. VAR, no VAR, SAOT, only AR offside calls. Just have the sports world accept whatever decisions are made with whatever standard they choose.

 

This is brilliant. And, throw in FFP and it’s why I’m watching way less EPL. Up until this year, I would watch the early game, the 10:00, the 12:30. I could name every manager in the league, and if you gave me a players name, I could tell you where he was playing, and who his last TWO teams were. I know about 6-7 managers names now, no idea who plays where. VAR sucked the life out of the game, and it will only get worse. I had an opportunity next weekend to go to England to see a couple of matches. Cheap flights, too. Couldn’t get up for it. If I have to wait 3 minutes to celebrate a goal, I can do without the sport.

 

Red card given after OFR in Braga vs Union Berlin: https://streamin.me/v/cf6b387b

I'm fine with the red card, but clear and obvious? Really? Very funny to contrast this to some of the plays that were ruled not SFP in MLS earlier this season.