Chief referee Lutz-Michael Fröhlich is anything but satisfied with the use of video evidence in the current Bundesliga season.
“Too many missing interventions and a few incorrect interventions,” was the interim conclusion of the 65-year-old, which he expressed in the “kicker”: “You can’t be satisfied with that, even if in the end 56 wrong decisions have been prevented in the Bundesliga so far.”
Fröhlich admitted that in the VAR area for which Jochen Drees is responsible, “the existing guidelines for evaluating game processes” would have to be “intensively presented and specified” internally again. He stated that ten video evidence interventions were missing and five were incorrect. In the 2nd Bundesliga, on the other hand, the rate is better.
With regard to the overall referee performance, Fröhlich stated “many successful referees, many correct decisions, even in complex situations”: “But there were also some referees in which the decisions did not correspond to expectations or the guidelines for interpreting the rules.” Work has to be done on that “so that it gets better again in 2023,” said Fröhlich.