Mykola Nesenyuk: "What has happened in our football that it cannot survive without VAR?"

Well-known journalist Mykola Nesenyuk has commented on the use of the VAR video assistance system for referees in the Ukrainian championship.

"I was a little surprised to hear reports about the readiness of Ukrainian football clubs and other concerned citizens to make a massive purchase of mobile VAR stations (video assistants to referees) to ensure more objective refereeing of football matches.

This is not a cheap pleasure, and when you add the cost of servicing these miracle machines, the sums add up to quite a lot. It turns out that during the war, when people give the last or not the last of their money to buy weapons and other equipment for our army, it is imperative to spend a lot of money on VAR.

What has happened in our football that it cannot survive without VAR? Nothing special - football referees have once again gone on a rampage, performing miracles in front of the public in order to "help" a few teams win points that they are unable to win in a normal sporting contest.

About a decade ago, I heard from one of the owners of a Ukrainian brewery a simple recipe for making quality beer. According to the brewer, only two things are needed for good beer: barley and conscience. The same can be said about our football. Why hide behind some "technical problems" when the referees are openly "pulling" several well-known teams from the top and first leagues, whose owners are trying to "burn out the task" at all costs? This is evident without any VAR! Regular eleven-metre penalties in favour of a championship contender are no longer even funny! And what does VAR have to do with it when the referee is persistently looking for and finding reasons to "help"?

Interestingly, it is those teams that regularly receive referee "help" that are most vocal about the need for VAR. Everyone knows about it, and attempts to shift the blame from unscrupulous referees to imperfect technique only convince the same referees and the customers of their "help". It would seem that it could be easier than just judging according to one's conscience. But judging in this way is "not interesting". Otherwise, their children and even grandchildren would not have been among those arbitrators!

Is it possible to fight this and can VAR help? Unfortunately, no. Anyone who has invested, say, a hundred million in a football team will easily add a couple of million more to this amount "for referees". For reliability! So that the investment is not lost! And this is a problem not only for our football. In world football at the highest level, everything is the same, only the referees of this level "work" much more skilfully and sophisticatedly, not like ours. That's why they don't take ours there.

It's okay, ours won't be lost. Last autumn, I heard from one of the young referees that refereeing Ukrainian football is becoming "not interesting", that the effort spent on getting to the aforementioned referees is almost impossible to properly "recoup". It seems that the situation is changing before our eyes. Our football has once again got enough money to pay for VAR and referees, who will now "help" whoever they need not "manually" but with the help of very expensive equipment.

And what about conscience? Once upon a time, a foreman at a car repair plant told me as a kid that something else with three letters had long since replaced conscience. I didn't believe him at the time. I didn't know that three letters were VAR!" Neseniuk wrote on his Facebook page.