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Zurich, Switzerland | AFP | Football’s lawmakers on Saturday approved video assistant referee technology (VAR) for this summer’s World Cup, in one of the biggest changes to the sport in years.
The International Football Association Board (IFAB, meeting in Zurich, rubber-stamped a move already backed by FIFA’s top brass, including president Gianni Infantino.
“We came to the conclusion that VAR is good for football”, Infantino told reporters shortly after IFAB announced the decision.
He added that the final decision to use the technology at the World Cup in Russia will be made when the FIFA Council — world football’s top decision-making body — meets in Colombia later this month.
“We will hope and encourage the council to take a favourable decision,” Infantino said, voicing confidence that VAR will secure final approval.
IFAB said in a press release that the decision “represents a new era for football with video assistance for referees helping to increase fairness in the game”.
VAR can only be used when there is doubt surrounding any of four key game-changing situations: goals, penalty decisions, straight red cards or mistaken identity.
It has already been implemented in top European leagues including the German Bundesliga and Italy’s Serie A — along with tests in multiple other leagues.
Spain’s La Liga on Friday began training officials ahead of the technology’s expected introduction next season.
– Critics persist –
But opinion is still divided, players and managers have complained of referees being too eager to defer to technology, while fans in stadiums have been left in the dark as to why decisions are being made.
UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin said this week that European football’s governing body would not introduce VAR in next season’s Champions League due to ongoing “confusion” surrounding its use.
Others have voiced concern about video assistance slowing down the game and possibly breaking a team’s momentum.
That is an issue confronting major North American sports like baseball and American football, where different forms of video replay have been in use for several years leading to renewed calls to shorten the length of games.
Some sceptics also have reservations about implementing such a significant change at the World Cup, before all the kinks have been resolved at lower-profile competition.
