Var also has a price (too high): Juve loses two points for the Scudetto

Costs must be cut: some Serie A matches are filmed by 18 cameras, others by 16, the less important by 12. By doing so, the League saves from 10 to 20 thousand euros per match

The Var also comes with a price. And, for our impoverished football, it is too high to be paid anytime, every week, in every match. You need to save, so you have to cut costs: some Serie A matches are filmed by 18 cameras, others by 16, the less important by 12. By doing so, the League saves from 10 to 20 thousand euros per match. Few for a billionaire world like that of football? Not true. Multiply those thousands of euros by six, seven or eight games for each matchday, and then by the 38 rounds of the championship, and you will see that a good sum will come out. Considering the objective economic difficulties of our societies, which now have to pay attention to even the small change, the reduction of costs becomes precious. Also for the Var.

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The bitterness

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That Var has a price, and that this can affect the regularity of the championship, we learned with bitterness in a Turin night full of chaos, at the height of a match that Juve would have deserved to lose but which – regulation in hand – would have had to win. It is now clear: the goal scored by Milik at Salernitana while the recovery was running out was, to all intents and purposes, regular. It is not a question of interpretation, as it might have seemed in the heat, when the debate was about Bonucci’s attempted aerial intervention: does the Juventus player affect the action or not? For Banti, the Var, that movement of the defender deserved to be punished; the young referee Marcenaro, who had initially validated the goal, had been convinced by his colleague in an instant and had canceled. The doubts would still remain. A criminal photo deleted them, a still image entered on TVs (and smartphones) of anyone a few minutes after the match, ended up at 2-2 instead of 3-2: Candreva, near the corner flag, held in Bonucci game.

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Who was wrong?

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Hunting for the culprit, immediate. The Var Banti? He did not have the fatal image available: it came from a tactical camera, not used and not usable for slow motion on the field (if anything, he could have been less hasty in calling Marcenaro to the on field review). The referee? Least of all: it was impossible for him to notice Candreva, hidden there in a corner of the field. The linesman? He had validated the goal, from his view Bonucci was in a regular position; when the network was canceled, he did not even remotely imagine that the cameras had not taken into account the player from Salernitana. Among the suspects, even some cameramen. The reality is different: although Juve played, and therefore the match was in all respects very popular, it was considered category C, therefore taken by the smallest possible number of cameras: just 12. A question of costs, in short.

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An Italian problem

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It is a very Italian problem, that of the economic accounts: in the Premier, for example, they don’t even think about saving; they do not do it for players of dubious value, let alone for the Var. It is still incredible that in a top league like ours what happened on Sunday in Turin can happen. An episode that obviously affects the ranking of Juve and Salernitana. And if the Bianconeri were to lose the Scudetto or the Champions League by two points, who could they blame? Attacking the referee class after a failure, a failed goal, is a well-known and ancient fashion in our football. This time we should change targets: not referees and Var, but the cameras that are not there. There has never been a more original culprit. To try to solve the problem definitively, the League will soon introduce semi-automatic offside: Serie A will be the first in the world to use it. A step forward, a way to make certain decisions more and more objective (but in certain situations the judgment of the referees will remain indispensable). At that point there should no longer be the risk of a Candreva mockingly hiding near the corner flag.

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