Last Saturday I was ready to see with emotion the Derby of Madrid, the most important match of the day of Spanish football. Both the stage, the context and the protagonists lent themselves to see 90 minutes of first level football. However, I found a lamentable spectacle; and not because the teams did not play a proactive football, but because of useless fault and mediocre Spanish refereeing.
A penalty to Vinicius that was not, a goal by Griezmann that should not go up to the scoreboard and countless actions that bordered on the ridiculous. The saddest thing is that this is something that is repeated week after week in Spanish football and that hurts both big and small clubs.
The problem is not the VAR as many stir up, but the application and interpretation that the referees give to it. I find it absurd that a man who is a student of regulation, who makes a living from this, is incapable of correctly judging plays in which a clear and forceful verdict can be given. The most surreal of all is that even with the help of technology today, February 2019, there are arbitration errors in football.
I must clarify that the VAR is perfect, it is the best implementation that has come to modern football and has managed to give it the justice that this sport so badly needed. It is enough to see how the VAR was used in the Russia 2018 World Cup or how the technology has a percentage of almost perfect success in the Bundesliga and Serie A. This is when we realize that the problem lies in the deplorable level of Spanish arbitration and not in the technology that has been hit and criticized so much because of mediocrity and human futility.
It seems that in Spain they had decided to intentionally boycott the VAR or had some kind of conspiracy against them, because it is simply unheard of the use they give him in La Liga. Against all logic, Spanish referees practically refuse to use the monitor on the VAR's court to review dubious plays first-hand, as suggested by FIFA's protocol. On the contrary, they practically leave all the decisions in what they say or stop telling them the arbitrators in charge of the VAR who check the repetitions minute by minute.
In all the leagues we see that when there is a controversial play, if the referees in charge of the VAR notice any possible error that could have escaped the referee, they suggest that he review the play on the monitor as the model was put on the World Cup. After this, the main referee makes a decision after seeing the repetition. This mode of operation has almost always worked well, except in Spain where they do not even give it any use. And not to mention the offside, where it is incompressible that there are errors with the help of the VAR. In a play where you do not have to interpret anything, but only see if one player is in front of another or not, it is ridiculous that they are wrong.
Such has been the brazenness that La Liga has had in the use of the VAR that FIFA was forced to issue a statement in which they recommended empirely to the referees to go personally review the controversial moves on the monitor and decide for them same. Obviously in Spain have decided to ignore all this and the result has been shown so far.
If we only took La Liga as an example to form an opinion on the use of VAR in football, we would conclude that it is useless. But the reality is that everything is the fault of the Spanish referees, who are capable of judging two identical moves using different criteria and with different verdicts. In Spain they must follow the guidelines established by FIFA regarding the use of the VAR, unify the criteria so that all are guided by the same regulation and educate the referee; because otherwise they will continue to be the mockery of all European football.
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