Much of football’s appeal is that it is easy to understand, and even easier to play. Or at least it should be. Anyone with a bit of land, something small to kick, and a few coats for goalposts, can at least aspire to be the next Bobby Moore or Maradona. Perhaps it is because of this global reach that the sport has become so resistant to change, and as this clever, succinct, and remarkably far-reaching book by educationalist Daisy Christodoulou shows, once it does accept the need to modernise itself it frequently makes it more difficult to play and harder to understand. Even cricket, seen by most as a rather conservative sport, adopted slow-motion TV replays to decide on controversial decisions twenty years before something similar was trialled in football, and unlike Video Assistant Referee (VAR), the technology was well-received and undoubtedly improved the game, for spectators and players.

VAR was introduced to the English Premier League ,(EPL) in the 2020/21 season and it is widely loathed by fans, players and commentators. It interrupts the flow of the game, and forces officials to make ridiculous judgements (such as a player’s armpit being offside). So what? you might ask: who cares if a game played by multimillionaires ends 1-1, rather than 1-0? And why write a whole book about something so technical that anything other than a five minute debate about a dodgy decision over a pint might be perceived as being, well, worryingly nerdy? But the fact is that VAR does matter, and perhaps, in financial terms, nowhere more than in the EPL where television rights alone are worth £6.7bn. The decision to disallow Coventry City’s goal against Manchester United in last year’s FA Cup semi-final because Haji Wright was millimetres offside not only resulted in United going on to win the Cup itself, but denied Coventry valuable funds, and their fans (who haven’t had much to celebrate in recent years) with a moment of unalloyed joy. For many, VAR is the destroyer of dreams.

Christodoulou is herself a football fan (she is a West Ham season ticket holder), and has a vested interest in seeing the game succeed in both retaining its appeal, but also adapting to a world that increasingly wants to scrutinise every movement a player makes. For a football fan this alone would make this book interesting. But Christodolou goes beyond a simple analysis (if that’s possible) of the off-side rule: she looks at associated themes, including how much reality human beings are prepared to accept, and what is the nature of authority when “transparency” is demanded at all levels of rule making. Tellingly, the book, and each chapter, begins with (usually a literary) epigraph, and it is Tennyson, that poet of loss and hope, of the passing of time, who features most often. 

Tennyson wrote that “the old order changeth, yielding place to new”, but, Christodoulou asks, how much of this new order can we bear? “The problem isn’t that VAR is inaccurate”, she writes, “it is that it is too accurate…and its accuracy is revealing things about reality we don’t like”. In other words, there has to be a line somewhere no matter how fine: just as there has to be a grade boundary in an examination which will result in one student getting an A and his equally bright friend, who is one mark below, getting a B. We have created tools to measure something which was not designed to be measured and when these decisions are analysed from multiple angles with experts poring over imaginary lines, then the game itself, paused for unnaturally long periods, is changed, its energy dissipated. Football takes us out of ourselves, for a short while at least, VAR reduces moments of poetry to something tediously arithmetical. 

The result seems to be that nobody is happy with what we have now, and if that was Christodoulou’s conclusion then this would be an enjoyable contribution to the vast libraries of books dedicated to the world’s most popular sport. But what marks this out as different — and mandatory reading for football’s rule-makers — is that she puts forward a short, but persuasive, list of possible solutions (beginning with a two-year pause of VAR). She accepts that “change is inevitable [but] perfection is impossible”, and in doing so she hopes that a game she clearly loves, and which, more than many human activities, has brought people together, rather than divided them, will be able to flourish. As she writes in her conclusion, “Modern sport is mad. Arguing over offside is mad [and] we worship what we should use and we use what we should worship.” Squaring this circle, and solving something that makes no sense to so many may seem inconsequential, but it will only be so to somebody who has not already fallen in love with the beautiful game.