Rooney's Verdict: How a Weekend Made the Case Against VAR
Wayne Rooney has used a single Premier League weekend to ask the question English football's establishment has been reluctant to confront: does VAR belong in the game at all?
Rooney's Verdict: How a Weekend Made the Case Against VAR
In a single Premier League weekend, Wayne Rooney has made the most pointed call yet for football to scrap VAR. First, a disputed Crystal Palace goal. Then, the Erling Haaland strike that survived a video review at Anfield. By Sunday evening, the former England captain was no longer asking whether the system needed reform. He was asking, openly, whether it belonged in the game at all.
He has never been a man to wait for the question to finish before reaching for an answer. Twenty years at the top of English football trained that into him. The boots are off now, the touchline is a studio seat, and the answers still come quickly — sometimes too quickly for the men in the VAR room.
His language, captured by the BBC and by ESPN in separate appearances, was unusually direct for a man who has learned to calibrate his punditry to a wider audience. Football should "call it a day with VAR", he said after the Crystal Palace incident, a phrase that will not have been easy to frame in production meetings. He was, by his own account, "baffled" by the decision to allow Haaland's goal. Two separate microphones, two separate moments, one conclusion.
This is not the Rooney of his playing prime, the one who would have stared at a linesman and saved his opinion for the dressing room. It is the Rooney of the second career, the one who has come to understand that the loudest voices in English football are now the ones who talk about it rather than play it. He is not, in this, alone. He is the most prominent of a generation of former professionals who have, over the past few seasons, drifted from scepticism about VAR into something closer to open opposition.
The argument has changed shape, too. The early defenders of the technology accepted its imperfections as the cost of a more honest game. The most consistent complaint — that VAR produced accuracy at the expense of celebration — was, for a while, treated as a reasonable trade. That trade has aged badly. The controversies have not reduced. They have, if anything, multiplied.
Consider the weekend itself. At Anfield, in the same stadium where City's 3-0 win was officially framed by the Premier League as a showcase of Jeremy Doku's brilliance and a tribute to Pep Guardiola's 1,000th match as a manager, Ryan Gravenberch was sent off. The dismissal itself was less interesting than the debate that followed. The Premier League's own coverage focused on Doku — "outstanding", the league called him — and on Guardiola's milestone. The punditry, including Rooney's, focused on the technology. The two versions of the weekend, told by the same set of matches, did not quite agree.
That is the gap Rooney is speaking into. It is not, strictly, an argument about offside lines or frame-by-frame reviews. It is an argument about trust. The Premier League, he is saying, has built its case for the technology on the promise that it works. The public, increasingly, is not buying it.
The phrase that has come to define City's broader season, in fact, has nothing to do with the technology at all. The phrase, as BBC Sport framed it in the aftermath of the Anfield win, is "a bad situation" — the verdict of a club whose football has not lost its authority but whose off-pitch reality has begun to cast a longer shadow. The on-field answer is no longer in doubt. The off-field one remains, in Alan Shearer's words to BBC Sport, the one that the league needs to clarify "now".
It is into that wider mood that Rooney has placed his weekend's work. He is not the first to argue for the technology's reform. He is, this weekend, the most prominent voice making the case for its outright removal. The argument has been allowed to drift, in part, because the game has been reluctant to confront it. Rooney has done the confronting. The Premier League, for the moment, has not answered.
The wider reading of the weekend is harder to escape. Manchester City can still play like the best team in the country. They can absorb a hostile Anfield, shrug off a red card to the opposition, and produce a forward performance worthy of the occasion. Doku's running and directness gave Guardiola's side the incision that a tighter game would have denied them. The 3-0 scoreline, on its own, is a statement. The mood around it, in studio after studio across the country, is something closer to a question.
That is what Rooney has put his finger on. The technology was sold as the thing that would end arguments. It has, instead, become the argument. Every weekend now produces a new controversy, a new round of studio debate, a new reason for a former professional to take to the airwaves and say what he has come to think. The accumulation is the story. The accumulation is what Rooney, with two interventions in 72 hours, has finally forced into the open.
The Premier League's own coverage this weekend described the football in triumphalist terms. The punditry, in studio after studio, has been markedly more combative. The gap between the two, widened by another weekend of contested moments, is the territory Rooney has chosen to occupy. It is, for a man who spent his playing career inside the game's most contested decisions, an unusually comfortable place to stand.