In the third and final chat about the psychology of football – read the first about players here and then managers here – Johnny sits down with former F365 warhorse and now top London psychotherapist Al Tyers to tackle the thorny issue of VAR and what it says about the world we live in today…
JN: Okay Al. VAR. Fair to say that neither of us have felt it was necessary so why does it even exist? What’s driving this psychologically?
AT: I think there are some governing factors. Life is uncertain. Football is uncertain. It’s an unpleasant truth, but we are vulnerable to events way beyond our individual control. So many advances in human history – medicine, technology, democracy – have been about trying to remove some of the caprice and uncertainty from our lives but there’s only so much you can do. VAR is an attempt to reduce unfairness, which sounds fine on the surface because unfairness is surely bad and wrong. But what if being unlucky sometimes is just part of the sport, as it is of life?
JN: My take has always been that in sport, you try your best to do whatever you’ve been tasked to do, to the maximum of your ability, in the full knowledge that you will sometimes fail. To err is human, right? That doesn’t bother me, but it clearly makes some people really anxious and hence VAR was brought in to reduce that anxiety at perceived unfairness.
AT: Yeah, in my experience, anxiety is strongly related to our capacity to tolerate uncertainty, and people who have grown up in an anxious or insecure environment might be predisposed to be less robust at tolerating that. Which isn’t to say that you cannot work on that, build up your tolerance for uncertainty by understanding more about yourself and why you feel anxious, for instance.
JN: That really interests me, because if true, bringing in VAR as a sop to the anxiety will not relieve the anxiety, it panders to it, rather than dealing with it as a psychological response. And that’s why everyone is still up in arms about it. Still stressing. Those who wanted it to resolve their anxiety that things were wrong, still feel anxious.
AT: I agree. It’s like an attempt to distract: for instance if you have underlying anxiety but rather than trying to work on that, you end up obsessing over details of behaviour, like checking the oven five times before you go out, to give you an illusion of control when life feels scary and ungovernable. Ultimately you’re not addressing the underlying cause, just creating more noise. The irony is uncertainty can be joyful, like Leicester winning the Premier League, a cup upset. But it can also seem unfair, unlucky, cruel.
However, businesses, which is what clubs are among other things, want things to be more certain not less. If VAR reduces the random factor in football then that’s better for the bigger teams over the long run.
JN: Well, yes, this is what the proposed European Super League notion is all about. A sealed league where Nothing Can Go Wrong, if you know what I mean. Clearly, it’s madness because jeopardy is football’s money shot.
AT: For some fans and managers, the idea that something unfair has happened seems quite impossible to bear. It’s almost like the individual gets overloaded by it: it doesn’t compute, so they suspect bias, corruption, when things don’t go their way. It seems easier to hold onto the thought that there is some conspiracy against you rather than just accept that sometimes things are bad. Conspiracy seems easier to tolerate than uncertainty. VAR is a product of those feelings.
JN: I understand that, at least in principle, but to me life is obviously more chaos than conspiracy and I totally accept that. Is fear of chaos another of the governing fears in the VAR world?
AT: Humans are amazingly good at solving problems that are in front of us but we are not well designed for dealing with future problems that have yet to fully impact on us. Climate change would be an example. We just don’t delve into chaotic and difficult problems unless we have to: we are predisposed to seek pleasure and avoid pain where we can. It’s hard to embrace chaos. Earlier in human history, we came up with religion: we want to know that someone, something, somewhere is in control, even if that god was a total bastard. Seems to me that there’s a religious, belief-system element to VAR. Someone, although you cannot see them, is in charge.
Obviously the biggest uncertainty of the lot is that we know we are going to die, but we don’t know when. So we have to push uncertainty to the back of our minds as an evolutionary defence mechanism: we wouldn’t have been very successful mammals if we were wandering around going “Arrrgh I might die at any moment”. You’d never leave the cave.
JN: Does that mean that VAR is actually fundamentally deleterious to us? It’s taking away – or trying to take away – something really important about sport: that exploration of uncertainty. Therefore it makes the sport less enjoyable.
AT: I think that’s very plausible. Like Greek tragic theory: you explore the tragic emotions without having to actually suffer them, and I think sport partly works as a safe space to explore being uncertain. But some people cannot seem to tolerate uncertainty and unfairness, even in sport.
JN: And they’re destined to always feel like that. VAR won’t be the cure. It will always fail to deliver the peace they’re seeking. So why do they even bother?
AT: We do live in an uncertain time, as the cliche goes. Since the 1960s life for most people in the west has been on an upward curve of progress, more or less. But over the last few years that doesn’t seem to be a given anymore. Global finances, public health, liberal values being under assault, environmental calamity. Will life be better for most people in the UK in 2036 than it was in 2006? I don’t think anyone’s as sure of that as they’d like to be and that does feel like a new thing. VAR may be a symptom of wanting to impose certainty in a period that feels really unpredictable.
JN: Again, intellectually, I understand that. But of course, life has always been uncertain for the poor. You live for today when you’re impoverished, there’s no guarantee about tomorrow so all you have is the here and now. I’ve always used that Jim Morrison line from ‘Roadhouse Blues’ – ‘the future is uncertain and the end is always near’ – because it seems so fundamentally true. It speaks to my lived experience. So are we saying the VAR is a symptom of the undermining of the comfortable lower-middle and middle-class?
AT: That is interesting. I would say there has been an erosion of certainty over the last few years, yeah: in-work poverty, declining social mobility, the gig economy. I think the current situation in Britain does remind us that the ‘do your bit for society and society will do its bit for you’ social contract isn’t paying off for people in the way we were told it would.
JN: And on top of all these psychological pressures comes the devil dog that is social media.
AT: The ability on social media to yell at strangers is both a cause and a symptom of something else that is going on: our inability to tolerate failings in others. It has literally never been easier to criticise. We are all familiar with the pile-on, the public shaming and football works well for that: instant emotion, obvious baddie like a referee, and everyone can go to town.
People use social media and referees, players, decisions as a way to vent their anger. I think it’s also a convenient way to feel better about ourselves. Certain branches of psychotherapy are very big on this: basically we all have parts of ourselves we don’t like or cannot tolerate, so rather than thinking about them, we project those qualities onto other people in our thinking. Racism would be your classic example: a person or group worries that they are lazy, thuggish, brutish, dishonest, whatever negative quality it might be. Rather than accepting that we all have the capacity to be lazy, brutal, etc, those qualities are projected onto and ascribed to another person or group. Maybe people who demand VAR and accuracy in football feel powerless, out of control, indecisive, persecuted on some level so they want that outsourced to something else. The scapegoat, basically: one person has been accused of ruining everything and is humiliated, and then everyone else can feel better about themselves.
JN: I feel a bit weird because it seems to me that being anti-VAR, which I am, has become part of my brand or identity as a writer. It’s that powerful a thing. It’s as big a character trait as being a vegetarian or being religious. In fact, it does feel a bit like a religion. No other change to football has been like this.
AT: It’s a time when it is important not just to be right but to be seen to be right, and there’s little currency in nuance. We have societal rewards in the form of attention and popularity for having nasty, extreme opinions and directing them at people. I see the clips of those Arsenal guys who all watch the match together and find it fascinating. There’s something very performative about it: who can be the most irate and out of control about something beyond all proportion. That’s the era in which VAR exists.
JN: So in summary VAR exists in this era because we are trying to find certainty in an uncertain time, in order to relieve our innate anxiety at the chaos of the world. It is an attempt to ameliorate fear of the unknown and it plugs into the need to be seen to be right in the court of public opinion? Wow, that’s a powerful brew. All that’s missing is sex.
AT: True, but who can really say for sure what goes on in the Stockley Park tactics truck?
Al Tyers is a psychotherapist and counsellor in London, and online, with a focus on anxiety and self-esteem issues in adults who might have had difficult experiences earlier in life. He was talking to John Nicholson.
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