The English Premier League’s consistent ability to attract international investment and keep overseas fans engaged underpins its status as the world’s richest football league and one of the most-watched sporting competitions.
Yet, as with all entities with great financial and cultural power, the top tier of English football, too, faces regular challenges from within and beyond.
One such challenge pertains to the existence of Video Assistant Referees – or VARs – which has been the subject of heated debates among fans ever since they were introduced to the Premier League in the 2019-20 season. Even the most neutral of spectators have sometimes been left baffled, infuriated and frustrated by their often-consequential decisions.
A VAR is a match official who assists the on-field referee by reviewing decisions using video footage and providing advice based on those reviews. While the system was put in place to eliminate, or at least mitigate, erroneous decisions made by on-field referees, errors continue to be made by these officials. It is, therefore, helpful to understand the root of the problem, which then needs addressing in order for the system to thrive and help sustain the beautiful game.
Essentially, the problem lies with the governance structure around officiating in the Premier League. VAR is an oversight mechanism for on-field decisions, but it works effectively only if VAR officials are independent of on-field referees. At present, that independence is lacking, turning VAR into an echo chamber for on-field decisions rather than tool of accountability.
Last month’s Premier League game between Arsenal and Wolverhampton is a case in point. Midway through the match, Arsenal’s Myles Lewis-Skelly tripped up a Wolverhampton player – a routine tactic players use to prevent their team’s defence from being exposed. While Lewis-Skelly should have received no more than a yellow card for his foul, the referee Michael Oliver deemed it to be a violent conduct and sent him off the pitch with a red card.
Given the breakneck pace of a professional football match, it is not uncommon for officials to make mistakes; however, what left fans stunned was that the VAR team chose to support the decision. Multiple replays showed that the foul did not merit a dismissal, especially when compared to the dozens of comparable infractions committed every weekend in England’s top league.
Arsenal’s appeal against the decision did end up getting upheld, but this was far from the first time that Premier League spectators were frustrated by the VAR’s refusal to alert a referee about a rudimentary error.
To understand the cause of these troubles, we have to go back to the research of the Nobel Prize-winning economist George Stigler, who coined the term “regulatory capture” to describe how government oversight bodies could gradually mutate into servants of the businesses they regulate.
Modern production systems have become very complex, meaning that regulating an economic sector such as telecommunications or pharmaceuticals requires plenty of technical expertise that only people who have long worked in that sector possess. Accordingly, when seeking to hire people to lead a regulatory agency, the government usually has little choice but to hire people from within the sector.
This creates a two-fold problem.
The first is that the people hired could have personal affinity for their former colleagues whose work they are now required to oversee because they are part of the same professional and personal networks. This sometimes makes them less likely to act in the public interest, and more likely to sympathise with the needs of the sector being regulated.
This emotional conflict of interest is sometimes exacerbated by a financial one: the leading businesses in the sector can offer the regulator lucrative future board positions and other economic benefits in exchange for sympathetic regulatory oversight during the regulator’s term. Governments try to fight back by imposing constraints on a regulator’s ability to work in the sector following the completion of their contract, but they are often unable to close all the loopholes.
One of the most famous examples of regulatory capture occurred during the 2008 global financial crisis, when the US government hired current and former banking executives to oversee its Troubled Asset Relief Programme, with the purpose of stabilising the country’s financial system. There were serious questions about conflicts of interest when hiring bankers to price the toxic financial assets held by bankers, and American citizens were left stunned by the size of the bailouts that these regulators rubber-stamped.
In the case of the Premier League, the personnel structure creates the problems that Stigler highlighted in his work in the 1970s. VAR officials operate as de facto regulators for on-field referees, since they evaluate their decisions and have the power to overturn them, with tangible consequences for the career progression of the on-field referees. Notably, it is the Professional Game Match Officials Limited – or PGMOL, a body responsible for refereeing games in English football – that appoints both on-field referees and VAR officials.
The critical design error is that PGMOL has yet to turn VAR officiating into a dedicated profession, instead cycling on-field and VAR referees, inadvertently creating an echo chamber. This problem is accentuated by the limited number of people who have elite-level experience at officiating Premier League games, severely blurring the lines between the regulator and regulated.
Unsurprisingly, a VAR official might lean towards affirming the on-field decision made by a referee to avoid making their friend and colleague look bad, rather than operating as an independent source of accountability. The tendency for all types of referees to stick together is reinforced by an unforgiving public’s proclivity to criticise – sometimes harshly – match officials.
Errors such as the Lewis-Skelly dismissal are worryingly common and make the game less enjoyable to watch, harming league revenues. Notably, other European leagues have achieved better separation between on-field and VAR referees, yielding fewer officiating controversies. However, the conflicts of interest within PGMOL mean that the system is incapable of reforming itself from within, and an external party such as the Premier League needs to act.
As US sports leagues – particularly the National Football League – clearly demonstrate, when oversight systems are structured well, the technological advantages of video replay can be used to yield better outcomes and make fans more accepting of final decisions.
