The idea was simple. A video assistant referee would eliminate the howlers — the goal that wasn’t, the penalty that should never have been awarded, the red card that changed a season. Football would finally be fair. The technology exists. The sport just needed the courage to use it.
It has not worked out that way.
In the 2025-26 Premier League season, VAR has intervened in 847 situations. It has reversed 61 on-field decisions. And it has produced, by the estimation of most neutral observers, approximately twelve outcomes that feel definitively correct. The remaining forty-nine reversals — and the seven hundred and eighty-six interventions that did not produce reversals — have generated a kind of low-grade discontent that has, since the technology was introduced in 2019, become the default sentiment around English football’s officiating regime.
I have written variants of this complaint before, in ** and in two pieces for The Athletic before they went behind a paywall I am not willing to subscribe to. The complaint has, broadly, been ignored. The institutional position — VAR is here to stay, the implementation can be improved, atmosphere concerns are sentimental — has been the unmoved consensus for half a decade. I think the consensus is wrong, and I think the evidence for its wrongness has accumulated to a point where the institutional position deserves to be revisited.
This is, I want to be clear, not an argument against video review in football. The technology has produced genuine, valuable outcomes — the goal-line technology that has eliminated phantom-goal disputes, the explicit ball-out-of-play reviews that resolve corner-versus-goal-kick decisions cleanly, the unambiguous offside calls where the daylight is clear. Those are good. They are also a small subset of what VAR currently does. The argument is about the rest.
What Went Wrong, Specifically
The fundamental error was in the mandate. VAR was designed to correct “clear and obvious errors.” The threshold was meant to be high. The intervention was meant to be rare. The on-field referee’s authority was meant to be preserved except in cases where the referee had visibly missed something the camera had captured.
Within two seasons of its introduction, that threshold had quietly shifted to anything that can be checked, will be. The culture of certainty-seeking — the assumption that, given a tool capable of producing definitive answers, every decision should be subjected to it — overtook the original principle. The on-field referee’s authority eroded. The pace of the game became hostage to the booth’s willingness to spend three minutes drawing lines on a frozen frame.
The offside problem is the worst symptom of the broader malaise. A technology designed for centimetres is being applied to a law that was originally designed for human eyes. You cannot have a rule requiring subjective interpretation — is this player interfering with play? — and then measure its trigger condition to the millimetre. The two philosophies are incompatible. The result is the kind of offside decision that disallows a goal because a striker’s collarbone, frozen at the moment of a backwards-played pass, was three centimetres beyond a defender’s hip. The rule’s spirit is being violated by the rule’s enforcement.
The handball problem is its close cousin. The current handball law contains, in its full IFAB definition, no fewer than seven situational tests — was the arm in a natural position, did it make the body bigger, was the ball deflected onto the arm from a short distance, did the contact immediately precede a goal-scoring opportunity. These tests were designed to be applied in real time, by a human referee, on a play that resolved in seconds. They are now applied by a video assistant who has the leisure to consider all seven, frame by frame, and produce a judgement that the on-field referee — having had no such leisure — could never have rendered. The result is the proliferation of handball decisions that the football audience perceives as marginal, capricious, or technically correct in a way that violates the spirit of the game.
The Decisions That Still Get Wrong
The institutional case for VAR rests on the claim that, while the implementation may be imperfect, the technology produces outcomes more often correct than the pre-VAR baseline. The evidence for this is contested.
What is clearly true is that VAR has eliminated certain categories of error that previously occurred. The goal that was clearly across the line but not given. The penalty that was clearly outside the box but awarded. The red card that was clearly mistaken identity. These cases occur, now, almost never; before VAR, they occurred several times per Premier League season.
What is less clearly true is that VAR has reduced the overall rate of incorrect officiating outcomes. The current Premier League season has produced at least four high-profile match-altering decisions that VAR specifically reviewed and confirmed wrong. Liverpool’s disallowed goal at Tottenham in October. Manchester City’s penalty award against Newcastle in December. Arsenal’s red card against Brentford in February. Chelsea’s onside-but-given-as-offside winner against Aston Villa in March. The on-field referee in each case made an initial judgement; VAR reviewed; VAR confirmed the on-field judgement; the post-match analysis universally concluded that the decision was wrong.
This is not VAR producing correct outcomes that referees would otherwise miss. This is VAR producing the institutional veneer of correctness on outcomes that remain incorrect. The technology’s value-add, in those four cases, has been to make the original errors harder to dispute — because the system has, formally, considered and approved them.
The deeper problem is that the cases I just listed are not unusual. They are, by my rough count from following the Premier League closely this season, perhaps one per fortnight. The rate of clearly-wrong officiating outcomes has not visibly declined since VAR was introduced. The sport’s tolerance for them has, however, declined sharply, because the existence of the review system creates the expectation that the outcome should now be reliably correct. The expectation is not being met.
The Atmosphere Question
Walk into any Premier League ground today and watch what happens when the ball hits the net. There is a pause. A held breath. Eyes go to the giant screen behind the goal. Celebrations begin tentatively, or not at all, until the on-field referee has touched his ear, listened to the booth, and either pointed to the centre circle or held up his hand to indicate that the goal is being checked.
The pause is now, in 2025-26, an average of eleven seconds. Eleven seconds is the median check-time for goal celebrations in the current Premier League season. Some checks resolve in three or four seconds; some, particularly for offside reviews, take eighty or ninety. The fan experience of a goal has been transformed from an instantaneous communal release into a multi-stage process that begins with cautious hope and resolves, in the booth’s time, into either delayed celebration or anti-climactic non-celebration.
The spontaneous collective joy of a goal — one of the rarest and most human experiences in sport — has been replaced by a bureaucratic waiting period.
That is not a small thing. That is the product being dismantled.
The institutional response to this complaint, when it is raised in football’s regulatory rooms, has been some version of: fans will adjust, the integrity of the result is more important than the atmosphere of celebration, we are optimising for fairness. The response misses the point. The atmosphere of celebration is the product. Football’s commercial value, its cultural reach, its emotional weight in the lives of the people who follow it — all of these are downstream of the moment-by-moment experience of being in or watching a match. Sterilising that experience, in pursuit of a fairness gain that is itself contested, is a trade-off that the institutional class has under-priced for half a decade.
What Other Sports Have Learned
Football is not the first sport to introduce video review. Cricket has had it since 2008. Rugby Union has had it since the early 2000s. American football has had it for decades. Tennis has had Hawk-Eye for fifteen years. Each sport has learned, through often painful experience, that the technology requires careful constraint to avoid degrading the on-field experience.
Cricket’s umpire’s-call protocol — the principle that, where a video review’s outcome is genuinely marginal, the on-field decision is preserved — is the most thoughtful application of video review in elite sport. The principle accepts that not every decision can be definitively resolved by technology, that human judgement at the moment of play deserves institutional preference where the technological evidence is genuinely close, and that the cost of every call being subject to potential reversal is greater than the benefit of catching the small subset of marginal calls that go the wrong way.
Rugby Union’s Television Match Official protocol — interventions only on specifically-defined situations (try-scoring foul play, try-grounding, in-goal touch) and within a tightly-bounded time limit — is similarly disciplined. The TMO is not asked to second-guess every refereeing decision. It is asked to resolve a specific, narrow set of moments where television evidence is necessary.
American football’s coach-challenge model — the on-field decision can be reviewed only if the head coach explicitly throws a flag, and only twice per game — limits review interventions to the moments coaching staff are willing to spend their finite challenges on. The economy of challenges produces a discipline of usage that football’s open-ended VAR protocol entirely lacks.
Football has, despite the precedent of these sports, chosen the most permissive review structure of any major team sport. There is no umpire’s-call principle. There is no narrow protocol of reviewable moments. There is no challenge limit. The booth can intervene at any time on any play, and the threshold for intervention has, in practice, drifted to whenever the booth thinks an intervention is warranted. The architecture is uniquely permissive among elite sports, and the consequences are uniquely visible.
A Path Forward
The solution is not to remove VAR. It is to restrict it to a narrow set of unambiguous situations: is the ball in or out? Did this incident occur inside or outside the penalty area? Is this clearly a red card offence or clearly not? Is the goal-line breach unambiguous?
Offside should revert to the human eye, with a clear daylight standard applied. Not a toe. Not a shoulder. A player visibly in front of the last defender at the moment the ball is played. The sport managed for 130 years with this standard. It can manage again. The cost of returning to it is the small number of marginal offside calls that were previously decided by referees and would now be resolved by them again. The benefit is the elimination of the most visible and most-resented category of VAR intervention in the modern game.
Handball should be redefined entirely. The current seven-test framework is unworkable in real time, and a system that requires video review to apply correctly is a system that should not exist as currently written. The replacement should be the standard the law operated under for most of the twentieth century: deliberate handball is an offence; accidental contact is not. The replacement is binary, applicable in real time, and would eliminate roughly 80% of the current handball-related VAR interventions.
The challenge model — borrowing from the NFL — is the more radical reform. Each manager gets two challenges per match. The booth cannot intervene unless a challenge is invoked. The discipline of finite resource forces managers to spend their challenges on the moments that genuinely matter, eliminates the trivial frame-by-frame interventions that currently produce most of the unhappiness, and restores the on-field referee’s authority as the default decision-maker.
I do not expect any of this to be implemented. The institutional weight behind the current VAR architecture — the broadcasters who have built infrastructure around the long checks, the federations who have invested in officiating training built around the technology, the rights-holders who do not want to be the first to admit that an expensive innovation is producing more harm than good — is enormous. The reform path has constituencies that fear it more than they fear the status quo.
But the conversation should be had. Six years into the VAR era, the technology is producing a worse fan experience than the pre-VAR baseline, while not producing the gains in officiating accuracy that were promised. The institutional argument that the implementation will improve over time has now had six years to work, and the implementation has, on most measures, not improved. At some point, the failure of the trajectory should provoke a re-examination of the design. We are at that point. The football world has been there for two or three years already, in honest moments, and has chosen not to act on the recognition.
The sport that managed without VAR for one hundred and thirty years is, on the current trajectory, going to spend the next thirty years convincing itself that the technology has been worth the trade-offs it has produced. I am not convinced. The case for the prosecution, on the evidence of the last six seasons, is overwhelming. The case for the defence rests almost entirely on the institutional sunk cost that nobody who matters wants to acknowledge.
That is not a sporting argument. It is a sunk-cost argument. Football, on this question, has chosen to be governed by the latter. The fans, the players, the managers, and — increasingly — the on-field referees themselves are asking the institutional class to revisit the decision. The institutional class, six years on, is still pretending the question hasn’t been raised.
There is, I want to acknowledge, a generational dimension to this argument that deserves its own paragraph. The football journalists writing the most full-throated defences of the current VAR regime are, on average, twenty years younger than the journalists writing the most pointed critiques. The younger cohort came of age in a world where instant-replay technology was the default; the assumption that decisions can and should be reviewed against video evidence is, for them, the natural state of officiating. The older cohort — and I include myself in it — remembers football matches in which the on-field decision was the decision, full stop, and the fan experience was correspondingly more compressed and more immediate. The argument I have been making in this piece is, in part, a generational argument, and the football conversation about VAR will not resolve while the generational disagreement remains unspoken. The younger journalists will, eventually, look up from their slow-motion review software and notice that the experience of being in the stadium has become measurably worse. The older journalists will, eventually, accept that the technology is not going away. Somewhere in the middle of the two perspectives is the regulatory regime that football should actually be running. We are not yet at that compromise. We will, on the current trajectory, take another decade to reach it. The cost, in atmosphere and immediacy, of that decade of additional misallocated review minutes will be, in cultural terms, larger than the institutional class has, to date, allowed itself to weigh.