Manchester United played us off the park. It wasn’t so much men against boys as men against a 36-year-old Dennis Bergkamp, isolated and immobile, having been handed a lone striker role. Such was United’s dominance throughout the first 120 minutes of the 2005 FA Cup final that I was utterly convinced Arsenal would win the shootout.
Following the game, and with traffic at a standstill, we turned off the M4 and sought refuge in a country pub. The roast chicken was so fresh it may still have been clucking as Jens Lehmann saved the decisive penalty from Paul Scholes.
As we got back in the car and turned the on radio, I heard Gooner and broadcaster David Frost being asked whether United had been robbed. He paused for a moment, before magnanimously conceding, “Perhaps they were borrowed from.”
Mistakes were made
On Sunday afternoon, Manchester City scored a goal at Old Trafford that probably should not have stood. Erling Haaland’s 60th-minute winner was confirmed by the video assistant referee (VAR), despite the fact that City midfielder, Enzo Fernandez, was clearly interfering with play and therefore in an offside position.
Cue uproar from the podcasters, bafflement from the manager and an apology from the Premier League’s refereeing body. Only the trivial matter of parliament currently being in session prevented the Liberal Democrats from demanding it be recalled.
Football supporters, much like the rest of society, are rarely satisfied with the status quo. In prelapsarian times (in this instance, the 2018/19 season, the last without VAR) the interminable demand was for both consistency and common sense from referees. The two of which, you may have noticed, are not necessarily compatible.
What everyone could agree on, however, was that referees made mistakes and that those mistakes were having an impact on the outcome of matches. Given that technology allowed fans watching on TV to instantly see officiating errors from a thousand different angles, was it not ludicrous that the only person whose opinion mattered — the referee — was operating blind?
And so in November 2018, Premier League clubs voted unanimously to introduce VAR.
High variance to the Arsenal
This desire for correct decisions is perfectly rational. Who is going to argue passionately for dubious offsides or ill-gotten penalties? The issue isn’t how VAR is operated, its impact on the matchday experience or even the fact that it is still capable of making obvious errors. Rather, it betrays a fundamental misunderstanding what makes football so great (or maddening, depending on the result).
Football is a low-scoring game. Since the sport began in 1992, the average number of goals per game in the Premier League has been around 2.65, with the typical match being decided by the odd goal. That makes for a lot of randomness: few chances, one lucky deflection, a single moment of individual brilliance from an otherwise inferior side.
Compare that to a sport such as basketball, where each team scores roughly 100 points per game, typically across 40-50 scoring possessions. At which point, the law of large numbers grinds into gear, and the team that is a few percentage points better should be able to more reliably leverage that advantage.