You might not be shocked to learn that Daniele De Rossi thinks football has gone soft. Since retiring and moving into management, the man with the “beware the sliding tackle” tattoo has acknowledged he sometimes misses getting to stick the boot in. But would the stick figure seen flying into an opponent on the back of his right calf even stand a chance in this era of VAR?

“I don’t know what to say any more,” lamented De Rossi after his Genoa team lost 3-2 to Napoli on Saturday. “The football we played no longer exists. We were naïve, but it seems I don’t know anything. I don’t know what sport I am coaching.”

The sentiment was activated by a penalty award in second-half injury time. Maxwel Cornet, who only entered the game moments earlier, was clumsy as he challenged Antonio Vergara, catching the forward’s standing boot. Vergara made the most of the contact, but it was certainly there.

That was the conclusion reached, too, by the referee Davide Massa after the VAR booth told him to take a second look. Rasmus Højlund converted the eventual penalty, barely, denying Genoa what could have been an important point in their fight against relegation.

He is hardly the first to air such frustrations. The application of VAR has been a divisive topic in every place it has ever been introduced. De Rossi insisted that he used to be its “first supporter” since “it would have saved me from being robbed a few times in my playing days”, but argued that the notion of clear and obvious errors had been lost. For one reason or another, his lament seemed to resonate this weekend.

Gian Piero Gasperini picked up the thread before Roma’s game against Cagliari, saying: “I think we managers need to get together and make our voices heard. I think exactly the same as Daniele and so does every other coach I speak to.

“This kind of football is unpopular with us, it’s unpopular with the public, it’s confusing and ugly to see matches with strange cards and penalties that the fans never see. With obvious simulations, everyone on the bench jumping in the air, provoking the referee. Maybe we managers need to do something useful.”

On Sunday the baton passed to Luciano Spalletti, who had frustrations of his own after Juventus’s 2-2 draw at home to Lazio. The Bianconeri had a pair of goals disallowed for offside, with the first – when the game was still goalless – preceded by strong appeals for a penalty. Mario Gila was late with his challenge on Juan Cabal, an offence that seemed to get lost in the review of Khéphren Thuram’s positioning for Teun Koopmeiners’s subsequent strike into the bottom corner.

Spalletti almost moved the topic on from a conversation about contact into one about consent. Speaking to Dazn’s Federica Zille at full time, he was monologuing on the need for more nuance in the interpretation of footballing laws. To illustrate his argument, he asked: “Can I give you a kiss?” Then, without waiting for a reply, leaned in to give her one on the shoulder.

“I gave you a kiss, and that’s a form of contact,” said Spalletti. “I touched you, that’s a form of contact. You need to see what kind of contact it is. The difficulty always comes when people think they can make rules that say: ‘A handball is always a penalty, a step on a foot is always a penalty.’”

Zille was visibly caught off guard but laughed as she turned back to the camera. Diletta Leotta in the studio checked in on her colleague, asking “everything OK?” and Zille replied: “I needed to reassure everyone at home.”

Much like the fouls Spalletti was discussing, this felt like a moment to interpret with nuance. These were not the actions of Luis Rubiales, grabbing Jenni Hermoso and forcing a kiss on her lips. Spalletti was deliberate in avoiding Zille’s face, to make his gesture more innocuous.

Still, we can wonder if he would have used the same analogy with a male reporter. Asking Zille for permission to kiss her was an unfair position to put her in live on air and if you are going to seek consent then you should give the other person time to respond.

On the substance of his argument, many Serie A managers are agreed. Spalletti extended his point by calling for professionalisation of refereeing in Italy. Although match officials are paid at a comparable rate to other top leagues, they have lacked a professional body. Moves are under way to form one, along the lines of England’s PGMO, though not without resistance.

Then again, complaints about refereeing are nothing new. As much as they became the hot topic this week, perhaps this column has done the actual football a disservice by joining that discussion. De Rossi’s underlying frustration doubtless grew from seeing his team throw away points at the end of another spirited performance.

Genoa have been transformed since his appointment to replace Patrick Vieira last November. Winless, and bottom of the table, under the Frenchman, they scored more goals in De Rossi’s first three games than they had in the opening 10 without him.

Three months later, they remain an imperfect team, but a competitive one. De Rossi’s formation change to a 3-5-2 has been vindicated. Vieira mostly used a back-four and a lone striker, but the current forward pairing of Lorenzo Colombo and Vitinha have gone from zero goal contributions in that opening part of the campaign to now having nine strikes and two assists between them.

They got some help from a catastrophic Alessandro Buongiorno. Within 10 seconds of kick-off, the Napoli centre-back had played his team into trouble with an ill-judged back-pass that resulted in the goalkeeper Alex Meret bringing down Vitinha for a penalty. Ruslan Malinovskyi buried it.

It took another Scott McTominay masterclass to drag Napoli out of trouble. His shot after 20 minutes was spilled into the path of Højlund for an easy finish. Then the Scotland international scored a 25-yard screamer of his own.

But Genoa pulled level in the second half when Colombo stole the ball from a lackadaisical Buongiorno in the middle of the pitch, sprinting away and scoring into the bottom corner. At 23, striker Colombo is starting to show the sort of form that could capture the attention of Italy’s manager Gennaro Gattuso. His six goals in this brief chapter under De Rossi are as many as he managed in 37 Serie A appearances for Empoli last season, and more than he got in full seasons at Monza and Lecce before that.

When Juan Jesus was sent off with a quarter of an hour to go, Genoa looked the more likely team to go on and win. They have shown tremendous battling spirit in recent weeks, fighting back from 2-0 down to beat Bologna, then almost repeating the trick against Lazio, only to lose to a goal scored from a penalty awarded after a VAR check and converted in the 10th minute of second-half injury time.

That context makes it easier to understand why De Rossi’s frustrations boiled over, the replay booth once again coming to the rescue of Genoa’s opponents. “We’re giving [the technology] a dangerous power,” he reflected. “But there’s no turning back now. The game will change, and that will be a loss for everyone.”