Referees acknowledge “difficult season” but complain about “media noise”

With the end of the season, marked by controversy over the VAR in its last stretch, the referees admit that it was a “difficult and atypical” campaign, in which they spent three months off the pitch and ” with more media noise “than they would like and in the opinion of Carlos Velasco Carballo,” is good for competition. ” Consider the president of the Technical Committee of Referees (CTA) that “the members have carried out their work in a climate of tension and criticism far above what the reality of each day justified.”

Despite this, “objectively the success rates of our referees have been very high, better than last season, and specifically in the case of our assistants, whose work would qualify as spectacular”, according to the president of the CTA, who recalled that the VAR has solved this season more errors than the previous campaign, that of his debut in Primera.

“In 2020 there are fewer mistakes than ever in the history of soccer in our country. This Technical Referees Committee firmly believes that the VAR is a tool that helps football, objectively, and that we all have to improve, “said Velasco Carballó, who said that” where before hundreds of errors remained on the field, they are now solved ” from the VOR of Las Rozas.

Despite the criticism, the CTA puts out chest for what it considers VAR’s strengths, as he recalls that “there are no longer any offside goals, there are no legal goals annulled, serious rough game actions and violent behavior have been reduced, there are no goals after touching the ball or leaving the ball off the field, simulations have dropped and there are no confusions of identity ».

Despite these assessments of the arbitration collective, the truth is that the controversy It even seems to have increased in recent times, something that the CTA attributes to the initial conception of the VAR as “the panacea of ​​arbitration”, since in its opinion, it was erroneously interpreted as the arrival of “zero error” and the truth is that «can’t go into all the mistakes, but only in those that are clear and manifest ». “The VAR is a human person, it is not a machine, and although it seems very obvious, we must deepen that we all assimilate it, recognizing that it is wrong,” added Velasco Carballo.

In numbers, the highest authority of the arbitrators highlighted the professionalism of the group, with the supervision of 4,442 video clips by the Technical Commission and 946 with the arbitrators to “reach common conclusions, continue to search for zero error and unify criteria ».

From the CTA they value as “historical milestones” the difficulty of implementing the VAR in two categories, because this season the video arbitration system was released in Segunda, in 52 days, as well as the challenge of supervising ten simultaneous games.