Video Assistant Referee (VAR) is now a well-established system used in many sports. The technology has been used at the FIFA World Cup, the Women’s World Cup, and many major football leagues. But what about futsal? Will VAR be used in professional futsal tournaments too? And if so, when will it happen? Currently, there have been some experiments with VAR in futsal competitions. However, could that change as the sport continues to grow around the world?
VAR and futsal – do they belong together
FIFA launched its Vision for Football at the end of October 2018, which included plans to introduce video assistant referees (VAR) in many major events. This followed years of testing and trialling in other competitions such as UEFA Champions League and UEFA Europa League matches.
There was speculation that the technology would be introduced into futsal competitions too – though there were still some concerns over whether it would work well with small-sided games like those found in futsal.
One thing for sure is that no matter what happens in soccer, futsal does not have to follow its lead at any cost.
What do you think? Will we have VAR in futsal too?
Futsal is a different sport to soccer and it has its own unique rules and regulations which set it apart from the world’s most popular game.
In my opinion, there is no need for us to use technology like VAR because we already get everything right on the pitch! This can be seen by the fact that FIFA only uses VAR for very important matches like World Cups or Champions Leagues—and even then only when they really need it. So why would anyone want something so slow as a Video Assistant Referee for a game that is as fast paced as futsal?
VAR in futsal world cup 2021 in Lithuania
The International Football Association Board (IFAB), the body that oversees football rules worldwide and decides which innovations will be adopted by FIFA, has already announced that VAR will be used in the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. It had already been used on such a big stage in 2018 in Russia. However, when it comes to futsal—which is played indoors on a smaller field with five players per side— it’s VAR implementation just recently happened in September 2021 in the World Cup held in Lithuania.
The advantage of this is that by this way, futsal will be upgraded from an entertainment point of view. The current time has been proved that the game is not able to meet the expectation or requirements of people. Even though it is played professionally, it can sometimes appear amateur like. The use of VAR in futsal can improve these matters and make it more exciting, fair and professional.
Pros and cons
One of the biggest perks of futsal is its compact nature—it’s easy to play anywhere with a small amount of space, which makes it accessible to people all over the world. It’s also much faster than traditional soccer and there are fewer players on each team.
These benefits make futsal a perfect candidate for VAR technology implementation; because there’s less time spent on dead balls and more time spent playing actual game action, it can be used effectively without slowing down play too much (or at all!).
However, there are also some drawbacks: VAR technology can be expensive (though cheaper than other forms of sports video replay) and requires new equipment—so far only FIFA has announced plans to introduce this kind of technology into their tournaments; but we hope that more organizations will follow suit soon!
After all, soccer has been trying to implement VAR for a long time, and it still fails. But futsal could get out of this failure by learning from the mistakes of other sports.