Last April, the English Premier League clubs voted unanimously to reject the use of the Video Assistant Referee for the 2018-19 season. Less than a year later, they’re already seeing the folly of their ways.
The 20 Premier League clubs agreed in principle to the use of VAR starting in the 2019-20 season at a shareholder’s meeting on Thursday. However, the league will continue testing VAR throughout the remainder of the current season.
Video Assistant Referee is the future, whether old people (read: the English Premier League) want to admit it or not. Thankfully, Mexico is finally jumping on the train, as we’ll see VAR in Liga MX for the first time this weekend.
IFAB, the International Football Association Board, has approved Liga MX to use VAR in nine upcoming matches, starting Friday with Atlas hosting Veracuz.
Dear football enthusiasts and aficionados,
There has been some controversy following VAR this past weekend, and there has been ever since it was implemented so I think it's time to finally address all the controversies surrounding it and discuss it openly.
I don’t know how we got here.
I mean, there’s no denying the popularity of eSports games like Overwatch, Dota 2 and League of Legends, but a Swiss league match between Young Boys and FC Basel was halted in the 16th minute yesterday while fans threw tennis balls onto the pitch, a PS4 controller (damn, that’s like $50) and unfurled massive banners in protest of eSports . . . things have escalated so quickly.
You can take Cristiano Ronaldo out of LaLiga, but you can’t take out the brilliant symmetry that’s conjoined the fortunes of Ronaldo and Lionel Messi since the day they were born. Days after Ronaldo saw red in the UCL, Messi’s Barcelona will have felt hard done by a red issued to defender Clement Lenglet — this one coming after the referee had gone to the monitor on the advice of the VAR (something still missing from the UCL).
If you follow college football, you’ve probably heard of 37-year-old University of Minnesota head coach P.J. Fleck. He rose to prominence at Western Michigan after leading the unfancied program to a 13-1 record in 2016 and a trip to the Cotton Bowl, but it was his approach to coaching (hyper energy, hyper millennial-approved, hyper “elite”) that won him both fans and detractors in equal measure.
If you’ve seen famous footballers training at top clubs or perhaps taking their jerseys off after a match, a question may have popped into your head: “Why is he wearing a bra?”
Lionel Messi, Zlatan Ibrahimovic and a host of others have been spotted wearing what looks to be your typical female athlete undergarment. Well, no, you might not be surprised to hear that this isn’t anything like what Brandi Chastain flashed the world in 1999.
Oops, VAR did it again. There's no denying VAR got it right, but wow. Portugal had all but wrapped up first place in Group B, but two VAR decisions in stoppage time from both the Portugal vs Iran match and the Spain vs Morocco match put Spain on top.
In Portugal vs Iran, referee Enrique Caceres initially allowed play to continue after what seemed like an unintentional handball in the box by Portugal right back Cedric Soares. After being prompted to consult VAR, Caceres reversed his decision and pointed to the spot.
For the first time ever, the FIFA World Cup will utilize video replays after voting unanimously to adopt the system back in March. The Video Assistant Referee (VAR) is most prominently used in Italy’s Serie A, Germany’s Bundesliga and MLS, but a World Cup debut is a different animal entirely. So how does VAR work in soccer and at the 2018 World Cup? Can you get sick from VAR?