VAR, or the Video Assisted Referee, has endured a more troubling 2017 than many actual, human referees. Having become entangled in farce across much of the Confederations Cup, its most high-profile use to date, it is being trialled this season in Italy's Serie A and the German Bundesliga.
In the latter, the system has attracted scandal with today's revelations that Hellmut Krug, the head of the VAR system has been fired following a report by BILD claiming he was using his role to wrongly influence decisions. Krug denies the accusations.
The centre where all decisions are reviewed is in Cologne, and BILD claimed that Krug had acted twice to influence penalty decisions in favour of Schalke during last week's 1-1 draw with Wolfsburg. Krug lives near Schalke's stadium in Gelsenkirchen.
While Krug has strongly denied the allegations, he has been removed as the head of the VAR project by the DFB (the German football federation). He has been replaced by former referee Lutz Michael Froehlich.
There have been protests against the use of VAR in the stands at Bundesliga games, and this is the latest controversy to hit the use of the new system. Football magazine Kicker revealed in September that VARs were secretly instructed to intervene in more instances than initially advertised.
Instead of intervening only in cases of "a clearly incorrect decision" in four specific areas (goals, penalties, straight red cards and cases of mistaken identity), VARs were instructed to contact the referee on the field whenever they thought he or she might have got something wrong, even if they weren’t sure. This led to an increase in the number of decisions going to the VAR.
This change was only communicated to clubs on October 25th, via a letter signed by Krugg and Froehlich. The DFB president Reinhard Grindel denied knowledge of the letter, telling the media that "I am not happy. This letter was not authorized by me".
