Improving VAR In Scotland

Date: 23rd November 2022

VAR has been shockingly bad thus far in Scottish football. Who would have guessed? Yes, every fans of Scottish football. 

As it seems like we are stuck with VAR I’ve tried to think of ways in which we could improve it before Scottish football resumes in December. 

I think having professional officials should be a long term goal for our footballing authorities. At the moment we are relying on the same old faces to call the decisions. Surely it would be better if we had professional referees who were focused solely on learning the technology and constantly referring to the rule book and not part time officials. I’d like to think having professional teams learning and training beside each other every week would give our game more consistently correct calls. There’s still too much inconsistency within the decisions we are getting from Video Assistant Referees. 

We need better angles and every TV angle afforded to the VAR teams. I don’t think we have enough cameras with different viewpoints being used to make these important decisions. Going cheap can often cost you more in the long term. 

There should be a liaison officer between The SFA and those that hold our media rights. Someone who can explain clearly why decisions are being made and why the technology might not always give instant answers. Transparency to those covering our game would filter through to the fans and that would hopefully stop a lot of the confusion that still exists. As I constantly say on here, the footballing authorities and clubs often forget about the biggest stakeholders in the game -The Fans. 

I hope they can speed up decisions and concentrate on the main calls. I think VAR taking over all the decisions brings in more doubts to officials and leads to even more bad calls. It’s about assisting not about taking over. We want as much ball 0n the pitch time as possible and not 10 minutes of overtime we are currently seeing at the World Cup. Stop start games are the worst! 

At the moment VAR is the bane of every fan in Scotland’s top tier and that shouldn’t be what Scottish football is about. It needs to improve and it needs to happen fast. 

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