VAR: What’s Wrong and How to Fix It

Cardiff, last weekend. As delegates filed out of the International Football Association Board’s annual general meeting, technical director David Elleray delivered a line that felt like the starting whistle on football’s next great debate. “We have agreed today that we need to now look, after 10 years, at VAR,” the former Premier League referee said. “What do we want from VAR in the future? How do we develop it for the benefit of the game?”

The answer, Elleray admitted, will need two years of study. Yet even that may be optimistic. Ten seasons into the Video Assistant Referee era, the marriage between technology and the world’s most popular sport is strained. Pierluigi Collina, chairman of FIFA’s Referees Committee and Elleray’s IFAB colleague, invoked the seven-year-itch. “In every wonderful marriage, there is a crisis,” the 2002 World Cup final referee said. “People fell in love with VAR, and then after some years… you have a small crisis.”

Few inside stadiums would call it small. From Bournemouth to Barcelona, fans boo the delays, mock the marginal offsides and wave banners comparing VAR-riddled football to “horse racing with donkeys.” Burnley manager Scott Parker, denied two goals by razor-thin calls in a 4-3 defeat to Brentford, spoke for many: “I think football is better without VAR.”

The numbers tell a more nuanced story. FIFA claims accuracy rose from 95 per cent to 99.2 per cent at the 2018 World Cup. Red-card tackles and sly elbows have dwindled because players know every angle is covered. “We’ve lost the on-field elbow,” says Graham Scott, the retired Premier League official who helped launch VAR in England. “You don’t get free hits because you’re on the blind side of the ref.”

But each forensic dissection of a toenail offside erodes goodwill. The Champions League sees a VAR intervention every other game; Serie A is similar. Premier League reviews arrive once every four matches, yet an eight-minute stoppage during Bournemouth’s FA Cup tie with Wolves in March became a viral mockery. Semi-automated offside technology (SOAT) was meant to cure the wait; instead it has exposed the limits of geometry applied to human limbs.

Communication remains the loudest failure. Referees troop to the pitchside monitor, return, and offer a sentence over the tannoy. Fans inside the ground are left guessing until a league-produced TV show—England’s Mic’d Up, Spain’s Tiempo de Revisión—releases curated audio days later. Rugby union’s model, where officials narrate every replay in real time, was floated early. “We were told straight away that we couldn’t do that because FIFA wouldn’t let us,” Scott recalls.

Jon Moss, now head of referees for Football Australia, believes training is the bottleneck. “Not everyone is articulate. The Premier League were probably ready to do stadium announcements a year earlier than they did, but they couldn’t get the referees up to speed.”

IFAB is exploring a more radical escape hatch: Video Support (VS), a coach-challenge system already trialled in Malta and Australia. Each manager would receive two challenges per match, twirling a finger to trigger a monitor review. Successful appeals retain the challenge; failed ones burn it. Moss watched it work in the Australian Championship. “The clubs loved it. You’re giving the power back to the managers.”

Yet Elleray warns of a nightmare scenario: every challenge spent, a title-deciding error unseen. “If all the challenges have been used and there’s been a major error, which decides a match, that can’t be corrected.”

For now, incremental tweaks are the only certainty. A 5-centimetre offside grace, already used in the Premier League, may widen. Microscopic VAR interventions could be reined in, returning to the original mandate of “clear and obvious” error. Collina’s nightmare—Inter’s Pierre Kalulu sent off in the Derby d’Italia for a second yellow that would have been overturned under next season’s expanded VAR scope—shows how thin the margin has become.

The existential question remains: can a sport built on perpetual motion and subjective drama ever accept the freeze-frame absolutism of technology? “Football isn’t willing to accept what other sports have done,” Moss says. “VAR is following the laws of the game. The laws will have to change.”

Two years of IFAB study lie ahead. Stadiums will keep booing, broadcasters will keep zooming, and another World Cup will arrive before any overhaul is ratified. The honeymoon, if it ever existed, is long over. The counselling sessions have just begun.