I’ve been in football for decades — as a player, as a coach, in different continents, and in different competitions. And yet, I can’t help but feel like we’re slowly losing the very soul of this game. One of the biggest culprits? VAR.
I was an attacking player. There was nothing like the thrill of scoring a goal, glancing at the linesman, seeing no flag, and running off in celebration. That moment — the raw, pure emotion — that’s what fans live for. Now? We wait. Three, four, sometimes five minutes. That moment is dead. It’s embarrassing. We’ve taken the best part of the game and replaced it with sterile silence and confusion. And who’s making these decisions? Not the referees on the pitch, not the players who live and breathe the game — no.
It’s people in offices, sitting somewhere far away, who are telling us how to play, how to judge, and how to react. That’s wrong. That’s not football.
That’s why I think that the referees on the field have lost their authority. They don’t make strong decisions anymore; they wait for someone to tell them what to do. In a sense, they have become like messengers, not judges. And the linesmen? They are basically decorative at this point, being just there to signal throw-ins. They don’t even bother raising the flag for offsides.
And here is the irony: with all this power VAR has, there’s no responsibility. When it gets it wrong, no one answers for it. The human element — the instinct, the feel for the game — is being stripped away.
I’m not asking for chaos. I’m asking for fairness. For balance. For common sense.
I strongly believe that football was better when it was 50/50. When you won because you were better on the day — not because a decision came from a monitor thousands of miles away.
Without wanting to create controversy, I just wanted to share my personal thoughts on the VAR and how I think it is affecting football today (which I made public recently at the press conference ahead of our AFC Champions League Two clash with Sydney FC).
@10newsfirst