UEFA slam VAR and want 20cm tolerance on offside

UEFA will ask football's lawmakers to introduce a margin error for offside calls in a bid to clean up the VAR "mess", Aleksander Ceferin has confirmed. The Slovenian confirmed that he is very against VAR, but that UEFA use it to prevent complaints from angry clubs. 

Players, coaches and supporters have criticised the implementation of technology since its infiltration of the Premier League for the 2019-20 season. Disallowed goals for extremely marginal offside decisions have proved particularly contentious, with controversial incidents arising on a regular basis. UEFA president Ceferin said he understood the frustration of fans and would take up the issue with the International Football Association Board (IFAB), the body responsible for the Laws of the Game.

"If you have a long nose, you are in an offside position these days. Also, the lines are drawn by the VARs. So it's subjective drawing of objective criteria. So our proposal will be that it is a tolerance of 10-20 centimetres. It’s okay if you don’t rule someone offside if it’s one centimetre. The meaning of offside is that I have to have some kind of advantage," opined the UEFA head in an interview with 'Daily Mirror'. 

"At UEFA, we had the top coaches two weeks ago, in Nyon. There was Jurgen Klopp, Pep Guardiola, Max Allegri, Carlo Ancelotti, Zinedine Zidane. Our referee officer, Roberto Rossetti, shows a handball. He says: 'Handball or not?' Half the room said yes. Half said no. So tell me how clear the rule is. We don't know anything! What is intentional? The referee is not a psychiatrist to know if you did it on purpose or not!”

The UEFA president also criticised how linesman defer to the man in the van in order not to make a decision themselves. "Now these days you see that linesmen don’t even bother to lift the flag anymore. They wait, wait, wait." The head of European football also claimed players do not celebrate goals as they are wary the goal could be chalked off by VAR. 

Another reason for the president's anti-VAR stance is because the system is used differently in each country and due to the confusion over some of the laws of the game. "Some referees in England, they don’t even check,” said Ceferin, “In Italy they check for half an hour. You know, it’s a mess." 

If the UEFA president had his way, football would remain VAR-free as he made clear that he prefers football as it used to be. "Referees mistakes are like players’ mistakes. We were discussing about referees mistakes for a week. It was interesting. Round tables this, that," Ceferin argued. "Now it’s some kind of technology. Nobody knows who is deciding," he told the British paper.

Ceferin admitted he is "not a big fan" of VAR but confirmed it would be in operation at Euro 2020.  "Look, we simply have to, because the teams will all complain when there’s a mistake against them. If we say we don’t use it anymore, we are killed. They will say: ‘We want VAR."

Finally, the 52 year-old talked about a personal experience while watchng his country Slovenia live at the Euro 2020 qualifiers, matches which did not use VAR. "My national team Slovenia was put out. There’s a clear handball and I was at the stadium. I was so mad! It was a clear handball! I was so mad!! But the referee didn’t see it. We would have qualified for the Euros.” 

"People were looking at me like: ‘Who the hell are you if you don’t have any influence?’ Somebody started to shout: ‘Shame on UEFA!’ It’s okay. I’m used to that. But it’s not so simple. At the end of the day, I said, every bad thing has something good and the good thing is that now everybody knows I don’t interfere," he concluded.