Getty Image / Uli Deck / picture alliance
It’s unclear if there is a single soccer fan on planet earth who thinks that VAR is flawless but the biggest complaints about Video Assisted Referee (VAR) technology come when the tech backfires spectacularly or ruins the competitive nature of the game.
Perhaps the most egregious use of VAR we’ve ever seen came in a Venezuelan soccer match on Monday evening between Puerto Cabello vs Portuguesa where the TV broadcast bent over backward to make it seem as if a goal wasn’t offside when anyone with two eyes could clearly see it was incredibly offside.
The video has exploded on the popular r/soccer subreddit overnight and just hit X, formerly known as Twitter, with the entire soccer world ridiculing just how bad of a look this is from everyone involved. Look at these lines!
HILARIOUS VENEZUELAN TV VAR REPLAY 🥴
Puerto Cabello scored against Portuguesa, before linesman flagged. TV station then drew own incredibly inaccurate VAR line. PL must have used broadcaster for Luis Diaz disallowed goal vs Spurs. 🤣pic.twitter.com/XtFRkuAQZH
— Men in Blazers (@MenInBlazers) July 23, 2024
Based on my quick and rudimentary use of the iPhone compass app to measure the angle of those lines, they are at a whopping 39-degree slant! Whoever is running that broadcast needs to put out an explanation. Alas, this took place in Venezuela and not here in the United States so this egregious error will probably be swept under the rug in teh coming days.
Over on Reddit, the comments perfectly sum up just how bad this call was. Someone wrote “He was offside in the fourth dimension.” Another person chimed in with “That line went all the way to the 6th floor.”
The jokes about this are endless because this truly is the most spectacularly awful display of VAR that any soccer fan can ever recall, myself included.
On the flip side, at least there weren’t fans throwing smoke bombs for 2 minutes in protest of this bad use of VAR.