What could possibly have convinced Championship clubs to reject VAR?

The Championship has been offered video assistant referees for next ­season – and the Championship has said no.

Really, though? Nothing here for you, Championship people? You aren’t even slightly turned on by the thought of those crazy Professional Game Match Officials (PGMO) guys wrangling the screens in their Stockley Park bodega, just for you?

And seriously? You aren’t absolutely gagging to get your second-tier hands on those bleeding-edge ­analytics tools and to start hearing from an apologetic Howard Webb on a surprisingly frequent basis?

You’re saying you’re blithely passing up the chance to plumb in a system in which one person’s educated guess simply replaces another person’s educated guess, but following a lengthy and frequently baffling break in play, and with a patina of spurious science to make it seem worth the candle? That you aren’t actually crying out to get your hands on a routine which will instantly insert at least a scintilla of doubt into every fan’s goal celebration because, in the commentators’ deathly phrase, “VAR will have a look at it, of course”?

I mean, up here in the Premier League we talk of little else these days. How could the Championship and all who dwell there not want a bit of that VAR magic for themselves, and as soon as possible?

In fairness, though, it wasn’t the full-fat, all-the-trimmings, “as seen and admired in the Prem” kind of VAR that the Championship were being offered. Indeed, it was FVS – Football Video Support, a simpler system, better suited to less camera-infested grounds, bringing the ref a carefully curated selection of useful replays on a pitch-side monitor.

Some trestle table/car boot vibes here, possibly. Moreover, the idea seemed to be that, under FVS, coaches would get two challenges per match – the challenge rolling over, tennis-­style, if it was justified rather than just the product of the coach’s ­manifestly blinkered rage, which most ­challenges by football coaches tend to be. So, good idea? Hmm. At this juncture, I’m not sure football particularly needs to be finding new ways to set coaches off in the technical area.

So, yes, FVS didn’t look ideal. Then again, you’ve got to start somewhere. The game is moving on. VAR has soaked down into the lower divisions in Spain, Germany and Italy and, but for a collapsed TV rights deal, would already be delighting the second ­division in France, too. Clearly, in the global rush to make football less fun, the Championship is now in grave danger of getting left behind.

And where was the rest of the English game during this decision-­making process, to insist that they get over themselves and accept the system anyway? It’s what happened in Norway last year, after all. Norwegian clubs in the top two divisions had taken against VAR. They had seen the mostly tiresome impact that it was having on their game and the irritation, accelerating quickly to rancour, that it was generating. A protest in which fishcakes were thrown on to a pitch had made feelings on this ­matter emphatically clear.

And, accordingly, 19 of those 32 top clubs had asked the Norwegian Football Federation to abandon VAR, after which Norwegian football could happily resume without remote video adjudication, as Ebenezer Cobb Morley, the game’s founding father, intended, and without further fishcakes, which Morley probably didn’t intend.

Yet when the motion was put to a vote at the NFF’s general assembly, 129 clubs came out against VAR, but 321 clubs, including a large tranche from the amateur leagues, voted for it. In other words, the top clubs had VAR inflicted on them against their will by clubs from lower in the pyramid that don’t have VAR and are enormously unlikely ever to get it.

Extraordinary. Was it actual ­sabotage? Was it people secretly enjoying the business with the fishcakes? Hard to tell. But it was certainly democracy. Too much democracy, some would say.

Anyway, are we really going to let the Championship get off free like this? Maybe we should be putting it to a wider vote, like in Norway. People of Hackney Marshes, this is your moment. Hands up if you don’t see why the Championship shouldn’t have to suffer VAR as well.

Photograph by Carl Recine/Getty