Albion head coach Graham Potter called for a change in culture and mentality, and Albion deputy chairman and chief executive Barber’s views echo those. He argues that fans have to accept that some decision making remains subjective — even with VAR.
He wrote, following the weekend fixture with Bournemouth, “We’re just about halfway through VAR’s first season of use in the Premier League.
“The statistics show that it is helping match officials get more key match decisions right, but we all know that, as a consequence, it is changing the game a little.
“We remain supportive of VAR — and we don’t subscribe to the “it’s not football anymore” rhetoric. It’s not football if a player handles the ball into the net, and it’s not football if a player is offside ahead of scoring a goal, either.
“We celebrate wildly when the VAR’s decisions go for us, so we must also accept them when they go against us, however hard that is at the time.”
Barber has been a long-term advocate of a better system of relaying decisions to fans in stadia, long before VAR was brought into play at the start of the current season.
He added, “[The club has] consistently argued for better communication for fans in the stadium, and recent changes which identify what the VAR is checking for is helping — at least they do when both of our big stadium screens are working.
“We also know there is still a way to go before VAR becomes a better understood and accepted part of the game — in any case, VAR is very unlikely to be going away!
“In countries like Germany, where VAR is in its third season of operation in the Bundesliga, there is a better appreciation of the value it can it bring, but with human decision making still paramount, we must all accept there will be a degree of subjectivity, and therefore error, to some decisions.”
Now read Albion head coach Graham Potter’s view on VAR.