Matt Maher: Football stories that are wearing rather thin very fast with fans

Was it the latest inevitable furore caused by VAR? Or was it the revelations over the latest plans for a European Premier League?

It’s a close-run thing, for sure. Let’s address them one at a time.

First VAR which, as was argued ad nauseam in this space and is now being proven with every passing controversy, was always going to cause a bigger problem than the one it was designed to solve.

Far from ending the debate over refereeing decisions, it has simply moved it, away from the official on the field to one watching on a TV monitor. One man’s interpretation of the laws to another.

Those laws, admittedly, do not help, particularly when it comes to things like determining offside. Yet whichever way round you work it, handing rulings often determined by fractions to technology was always going to cause chaos in a sport with so many moving parts.

An obvious question to ask, when assessing Liverpool’s disallowed ‘winner’ in the Merseyside derby, was how the officials could be certain the freeze frame used to show Sadio Mane was just ahead of the last man was captured at the exact moment the ball left Thiago Alcantara’s foot?

The short answer is they can’t, yet football has allowed itself no margin for error and so the head-scratching decisions will continue weekend-after-weekend. Only the players and the teams involved will change.

What can also be guaranteed will continue is talks about a breakaway European Premier League. For more than two decades now they have barely stopped. Every so often something brings them bubbling to the surface.

This week it was the revelation banking giant JP Morgan asked to provide funding for the new competitions. Interesting, perhaps, yet in all reality just sabre-rattling ahead of negotiations over an expansion of the current Champions League.

The biggest barrier against a breakaway league is the Premier League.

English football’s ‘big six’ would have nothing to gain financially from jumping ship and know this, in the same way Paris St Germain, Bayern Munich and Real Madrid know their own domestic leagues will never get close to matching the Premier League’s revenue. They also know a European Premier League, shorn of relegation, has the potential to become very dull, very quickly.

History suggests this latest development probably isn’t one to get too excited about.