For Newcastle United fans, this international break feels particularly long.
Maybe because it is! Three weeks, or to be more precise, twenty-three days from the win over Hull to the away encounter at Coventry. An eternity in football terms.
The week before the break, we had another dose of VAR controversy. This time it went Manchester City’s way, which was irritating enough. The fact that Manchester United were on the receiving end made it slightly easier to swallow.
It got me thinking about that phrase we hear more and more these days, “The game is gone.”
I normally hate it. Especially when it comes from that bloke who runs Royal Oak FC.
But perhaps, just this once, he and others have got a point.
Football used to be simple.
For more than a hundred years, the game’s greatest strength was its simplicity. You didn’t need much. A ball, a bit of grass, some goalposts and a few basic rules.
You could play it in a park, on a street, in a school playground or at St James’ Park. You didn’t need to understand statistics or watch a replay from twelve different camera angles.
You watched the game. You saw what happened. You cheered when your team scored. You argued with your mates about the referee. Simple, and that’s a huge part of why football became the world’s game. It had its roots in working class culture and was accessible to everybody.
But somewhere along the way, a technocratic elite has decided that football needs to be made more and more complicated.
Welcome to the world of VAR, technology that was supposed to make football fairer.
And I can understand the argument. Qualification for Europe, promotion or relegation can have huge financial consequences, so if a referee makes a mistake, surely we should be able to correct it?
The problem is that football isn’t played on a spreadsheet. Take a goal. When the ball hits the net, what are you supposed to do? You jump up. You scream. You hug the person next to you. You don’t care who’s sitting beside you. For those few seconds, you’re completely caught up in the moment.
Now, increasingly, there’s a pause, “VAR CHECK”. Was there a handball? Was someone’s toe offside? Was there a foul thirty seconds earlier? And suddenly you’re standing there wondering whether you’re actually allowed to celebrate.
By the time the goal is eventually given, the moment has gone. And the people who know least are often the ones in the ground.
Here’s another strange thing about modern football. The person sitting at home can see almost everything. They get replays. Slow motion. Different camera angles. Offside lines. Expert analysis. They can watch the referee examining the incident from practically every possible angle.
Meanwhile, those who’ve paid £50, £60 or £70 to stand in the stadium? They get, “VAR CHECK – POSSIBLE HANDBALL.” And that’s it.
So the matchgoing fan, so long the lifeblood of the game, is standing there looking at a big screen wondering what’s happening, often spending several minutes waiting for a decision without having any idea what the officials are actually looking at.
And they call that progress?
What happened to the eye test? This is another change that’s crept into football.
The match going fan is increasingly being told that what they see isn’t necessarily what matters.
Instead, we’ve got expected goals, possession statistics, passing maps, heat maps and enough numbers to fill a tax return. Don’t get me wrong. Statistics can be useful. But anyone who’s watched football for decades knows that numbers don’t tell the whole story. You can watch a player have a brilliant game without knowing his expected assists. You can see that a team is getting battered without needing a possession statistic to prove it. You can know that a striker is causing chaos simply by watching the defenders trying to deal with him.
That’s the eye test.
Football supporters have been doing it for generations. Now they’re told that the spreadsheet knows better, when it doesn’t.
Football is supposed to be emotional. This is maybe the biggest problem. Football isn’t supposed to be tidy. It’s noisy. It’s tribal. It’s emotional. It’s irrational. It’s why thousands of people can spend ninety minutes screaming at a referee they’ve never met. It’s why grown men hug complete strangers when a last-minute winner goes in.
It’s why an away goal can turn an entire stadium into bedlam. It’s why we still talk about matches from 20, 30 or 40 years ago.
Those moments matter because we were there. We felt them. We didn’t need a graph explaining why we should have enjoyed them.
And yet modern football sometimes seems determined to regulate the emotion out of the game. Players get booked for celebrating with their own supporters. Managers are punished for getting carried away. Supporters are increasingly treated as customers rather than participants. Everything has to be controlled. Everything has to be explained. Everything has to be measurable. Football isn’t a computer game
Of course, nobody wants blatant refereeing mistakes. Nobody wants their team relegated because an official makes an obvious error. Nobody is seriously suggesting we should abandon every piece of technology and return to referees hoping for the best. But perhaps we’ve gone too far in the other direction.
Football will never be perfect. And maybe it isn’t supposed to be. Human beings make mistakes. Referees make mistakes. Players make mistakes. Managers make mistakes. Supporters certainly make mistakes.
That’s football. The controversy is part of it.
The arguments are part of it. The debates that carry on in pubs, living rooms and workplaces for years afterwards are part of it.
“He was offside.”
“He wasn’t.”
“It was never a penalty.”
“You’re talking rubbish.”
That’s football.
Those arguments become memories.
They become stories that get passed down from one generation of supporters to the next.
Who is football actually for?
That’s the question we should be asking.
Modern football has enormous amounts of money invested in it. Television companies, sponsors, billionaires, private equity and international audiences all have a stake in the game and it is because of that that the match going supporter is being forced to suffer.
These are the folk who go through the turnstiles. The kids wearing their first Newcastle United shirt. The dad taking his son to his first match. The mates who have stood on the same terrace or sat in the same stand for decades. They’re not watching football because they want a perfectly calculated sporting product, they’re there because they love football.
So, has the game gone? I believe we’re on a very slippery slope and there’s a danger we forget what made it special in the first place.
Football doesn’t need to be perfect. It doesn’t need every decision to be correct to the nearest millimetre. It doesn’t need a computer to explain every pass, tackle or missed chance, because football isn’t meant to be a laboratory, it’s meant to be ours.