The Premier League season opens with the match between Brentford and Arsenal on 13 August. On that occasion, the league has revised the rules and the use of the video judging tool VAR, writes Sky Sports.
One of the innovations is that thicker lines will be used when offside is to be checked with VAR. The hope is that one then avoids the most marginal offside decisions, where it is practically impossible to judge whether a player is offside or not.
As in the European Championships, the public will not see the process where the VAR judges set the lines when they check offside decisions. Before the change next season, the Premier League was the only major league to show this.
It also allows you to do something else you did in the European Championships. There they were left with the referee’s original decision if the offside was too marginal for VAR to find a conclusion.
Not as effective
On the other hand, there will most likely not be as quick offside decisions by VAR as in the European Championships, where you had your own VAR team to check offside.
Uefa employed twice as many referees as usual for each match in the European Championships. The Premier League will not have enough qualified referees to be able to complete.
Goals that come after an involuntary hand in the construction of the game will no longer be removed by VAR. Cancellation only occurs if the hand either leads directly to the goal or creates the chance that leads to the goal.
The interpretation of what is defined as criminal hands has also been rewritten. The change seems to mean that what can be defined as a natural position is expanded.
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More use of discretion
The whole rule reads as follows:
– A player is judged to have made the body unnaturally larger when the position of their hand / arm does not come as a consequence of, or can be defended with, the player’s body movement in the given situation. By having the hand in such a position, the player risks that the hand / arm is hit by the ball and is punished for it.
In short, it allows the players’ hands and arms to be judged to be in a natural position even when they are not straight down next to the body.
Sky Sports writes that there will still be gray areas around whether it is a natural position or not, but that the new interpretation will lead to the judges being able to use more discretion when judging hand situations.
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Three substitutes
The Premier League chose to return to allowing only three substitutes before last season, after it was allowed with five substitutions after the corona break in the contagious 2019/20 season.
The other top leagues continued to allow five substitutes, while the Premier League’s choice to return to just three was criticized by, among others, Liverpool coach Jürgen Klopp and Manchester City boss Pep Guardiola.
The Football International Law Committee (IFAB) will continue to allow the leagues that want it to continue with five substitutes, something the Bundesliga will do, according to The Athletic.
They do not do that in the English football system, where also the clubs at levels two, three and four now return to only three changes per game.
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