The Premier League’s head of refereeing, Mike Riley disclosed that there is going to be a new Video Assistant Referee (VAR) rule for the 2021/2022 season.
The aim of the new criteria is to encourage a more “free-flowing game” and as well discourage players from exaggerating contact for penalties and cut out controversial offside.
According to him, the new criteria will give players the liberty to express themselves more.
“That means that the referee team – both referees and VAR – don’t intervene for trivial offences. It’s really going: ‘Let’s create a free-flowing game, where the threshold for intervention both for referees and VAR is slightly higher than it was last season.”
“The clear message through the survey was football is about contact. So, the principles we’ve established are referees should look for contact, and establish clear contact, then ask themselves the does question: ‘Does that contact have a consequence?’. And then ask themselves the question: ‘Has the player used that contact to actually try and win a penalty?’
“So it’s not sufficient just to say: ‘Yes, there’s contact’. I think, partly, we got into that frame of mind by the forensic analysis that went on to VAR. So, contact on its own is only part of what the referee should look for.
“Consider consequence, consider motivation of player as well. If you’ve got clear contact that has a consequence, then that’s what you got to penalise. If you’ve any doubt in those elements you’re less likely to be penalised.
“We made a mistake again last season where there was clear contact, a player stayed on his feet, went wide, lost possession. We should go back and give him a penalty. I think had we done so that would have reassured players, that’s our approach.
“I think it moves the dial back towards where we probably were in a pre-VAR world.”
Speaking on changes made for the offside VAR rules, he added that: “We’ve now effectively reintroduced the benefit of doubt to the attacking player.
“So, where you have a really close offside situation, we carry on following the same process that we did last year with VAR. So you’ll apply the one-pixel lines, you’ll place the attacking line and the defending line.
“You’ll then put on the thicker broadcast lines and, where they overlap, those situations will now be deemed as onside. So effectively what we give back to the game is 20 goals that were disallowed last season, by using quite forensic scrutiny. So it’s the toenails, the noses…. They might have been offside last year, next season they’re on.”