As an aside what do people think about Forest’s unique but now fairly consistent pattern of directly criticising referees/VAR after decisions don’t go their way (which to be fair does seemed to have happened extraordinarily frequently). A lot of commentators in the UK seem very critical of it, saying it’s not in the spirit of the game etc etc.
But to me it seems just a logical next step in the hyper commercialisation of the premier league. If they get relegated and can point to a few dodgy VAR calls as directly contributing to that, it will arguably have cost them tens of millions of dollars. Looking at the club like a business, spending say $50k on a high profile referring consultant is a no brainer, and pissing everyone off along the way is just the cost of doing business. In that sense, they’re just being innovative and business savvy. Not saying I support it, but I just find it an interesting consequence of the obscene amounts of money involved in the game these days.
But to me it seems just a logical next step in the hyper commercialisation of the premier league. If they get relegated and can point to a few dodgy VAR calls as directly contributing to that, it will arguably have cost them tens of millions of dollars. Looking at the club like a business, spending say $50k on a high profile referring consultant is a no brainer, and pissing everyone off along the way is just the cost of doing business. In that sense, they’re just being innovative and business savvy. Not saying I support it, but I just find it an interesting consequence of the obscene amounts of money involved in the game these days.
I thought about it before. If a player could prove that a decision or probably a string of decisions damaged their career and challenged it in court…It’d be game over for the game.
But with VAR having access to such an amount of information on review the window for honest mistakes grows narrower and narrower.
Most journos seem to be circling wagons after Forest’s direct response. Likely nothing good will come to Forest from it.
Still Everton kept Gibbs-White away from the ball and out of the game mostly, and got the result, despite wave after wave of Forest attack.