Ten Years of VAR: When Football Was Forced to Redefine Mistake

On June 16, 2026, at Kazan Arena, the Group C opener between France and Australia reached the 58th minute. Referee Andrés Cunha of Uruguay put his hand to his earpiece, then left the centre of the pitch and walked straight to the small monitor by the touchline. He stood there alone, in front of the screen, while 45,000 spectators in the stands and millions of television viewers had no idea what was happening. Ten seconds. Twenty seconds. Thirty seconds. Then he turned, pointed to the penalty spot. Antoine Griezmann stepped up, scored, and world football entered an era in which a referee's decision no longer belonged to him alone.

That penalty was the first in World Cup history to be awarded through VAR. It was also the moment I understood that the refereeing profession had changed forever — not because technology made referees more correct, but because technology forced football to answer a question it had never been obliged to answer in nearly a hundred and fifty years of existence: what is a mistake?

To understand why the moment at Kazan mattered so much, we need to go back two years. In March 2026, at the annual meeting in Cardiff, the International Football Association Board (IFAB) — the body created in 1886 that holds the power to change the laws of football — formally approved the trial of the video assistant referee system. This was not an initiative from national leagues, but from the very machinery that governs the laws, long considered the most conservative institution in the game. VAR first appeared at senior national-team level at the 2026 Confederations Cup in Russia, and a year later, in Russia itself, it was present at the World Cup.

That coincidence haunted me. Russia was where I once mispronounced a player's name on air, and it was also where world football first let technology into the decision room. There was a strange symmetry between the two events: one was a human who erred and was corrected, the other was a human who erred and was assisted by machines. Both spoke of the same thing — the gap between what we think we see and what actually happens.

Before VAR, the referee was the sole and final decision-maker. He had three assistants, a network of observation by the naked eye, and a window measured in thousandths of a second to judge a passage of play unfolding at a speed the human eye cannot follow. When he erred, he bore the responsibility alone. There was no evidence to defend him, and no evidence to convict him. A referee's mistake, in a sense, was a mistake that could not be verified — and precisely for that reason, it became the endless subject of every argument in the stands, in the pubs, in the newspapers.

VAR changed the roots of that structure. It did not make the referee correct. It made the referee a person who could be challenged with images. And when a decision can be challenged with images, what is challenged is no longer the person — it is the very definition of the decision.

Before discussing consequences, we need to understand how VAR operates, because most arguments about it stem from viewers not understanding the mechanism. VAR is not a second referee sitting in a closed room. It is a combination of the video match official and assistants, tasked with intervening in only four categories of situation: goals, penalties, direct red cards, and cases of mistaken identity. Four categories, no more. A foul leading to a corner, a missed second yellow, a wrong throw-in — all lie beyond VAR's reach, even though they can decide the fate of a match.

The central principle of VAR is the "clear and obvious error". This is the most misunderstood phrase in modern football. It does not mean "a mistake". It means a mistake that any reasonable observer, on review, must agree the referee got wrong. The line between "wrong" and "clearly wrong" is exactly where every controversy is born. A contact in the box may be a foul to one person and a fair challenge to another — and in that case, VAR does not intervene, because the error is not clear enough. But to the viewer, a passage of play that is "not clear" means the referee has dodged responsibility.

This is the point where I, as someone who once stood on the pitch, want to say it plainly: VAR does not correct the match — it exposes how we define a mistake. Technology does not create truth; it creates a frame into which we place truth. And that frame is written by people, in the language of law, not in the language of emotion.

In 2026, at the World Cup in Qatar, IFAB brought semi-automated offside technology into operation. The system consists of twelve cameras tracking the ball and thirty cameras tracking players, recording the position of every body part that can score — everything except hands and arms — at a rate of fifty times per second. When the ball is played, the system automatically determines the moment and draws the offside line within seconds, sending an alert to the referee. What once took minutes and dozens of manual line-drawings now happens almost instantly.

But the more accurate the technology, the more philosophical the question becomes. A toe, a shoulder, a strand of hair protruding beyond the offside line — is that the advantage the offside law was created to prevent? The offside law was born in 1863 to stop players "goal-hanging" in front of the net, not to measure the human body in millimetres. When we turn a rule created to protect fairness into a geometry problem, we inadvertently turn football into something else. There is one thing the offside trap can never catch: the intention of the player. No camera can measure whether a striker deliberately stood beyond or was merely pushed there.

What is interesting is that referees themselves changed their behaviour before the law changed. Since VAR appeared, assistant referees have been instructed not to raise the flag immediately on tight offsides, but to wait for the phase to end before confirming — so that if a goal is scored, VAR can review it. This is a small change with large consequences: it reverses the logic of the match. Previously, a raised flag meant stop. Now, a raised flag means... possibly not. Players must learn to keep playing amid uncertainty, goalkeepers must learn to save passages of play that should have been whistled, and spectators must learn to wait for something they never had to wait for before.

I remember the early days of VAR, when I sat in the newsroom watching a match with no crowd. When the stands are empty, I hear the ball hitting the boot clearly — something ten years of refereeing had never let me hear. In that silence, I realised VAR had brought a new sound: the silence of waiting. A match halted mid-flow, not because the ball went out, but because someone in a closed room was checking. It is a different kind of silence — the silence of a decision being dissected.

The data shows the scale of the change. The 2026 World Cup in Russia saw 29 penalties taken, the highest number in World Cup history up to that point — a large share coming from VAR interventions. At the 2026 World Cup, average stoppage time soared, with some matches exceeding ten minutes per half, as IFAB instructed referees to compensate precisely for dead time. These numbers are not only about law; they are about football trying to become more transparent by admitting that it had previously hidden too much under the name of "the natural flow of the game".

But here is the paradox: the more transparent, the more controversy. Before VAR, a mistake was accepted as part of football — "lucky", "unlucky", "the referee is human too". After VAR, every mistake becomes a question of competence and responsibility. Fans no longer say "the referee was wrong"; they say "why didn't VAR correct it". That shift pushes referees into a new position: no longer the final judge, but the interpreter of a ruling produced by a collective and by technology.

There is one thing statistics never record, and it is precisely the key to understanding why technology cannot fully replace the human. I still remember how I learned the trade: not by learning to catch errors, but by learning to stand in the right place. A good referee is not the one who runs the most, but the one who reads where the ball will go. Just as when I analysed Pedri — Pedri does not chase the ball, Pedri chases where the ball will arrive — and that is the entire difference. An assistant referee is the same. He does not wait for the phase to happen in order to react; he positions himself where, when the phase arrives, he has already seen it in advance. That is the invisible talent — the thing that appears on no report, yet is the boundary between a correct decision and a late one.

VAR can redraw the offside line, but it cannot teach an assistant referee how to read space. It can show that a player was in an offside position, but it cannot explain why another referee, in another match, let a similar phase go. Because between two phases identical in geometry lies a difference only someone on the pitch can feel: context. What minute the match is in, which way the game is tilting, whether the player already has a yellow card. The law does not write those things down, but the referee must live with them every day.

In ten years in the trade, I learned that refereeing is not a profession of being right. It is a profession of being responsible for what you cannot fully see. The mistake in Russia that year did not teach me how to call it right — it taught me how to live with my own whistle. VAR did not change that. It only added another layer of people who must live with that whistle.

And this is the part least spoken of: VAR changed not only referees, it changed players too. A striker now has to calculate whether his phase of play might be reviewed. A defender must weigh pulling an opponent's shirt in the box, knowing every action can be watched again from eight camera angles. Football has become more self-conscious, and in that self-consciousness, it has lost some of its instinct. It is no coincidence that many players say they no longer dare to celebrate a goal immediately, for fear VAR will snatch away the emotion that has just erupted.

That is the price of accuracy. Football traded the moment for fairness. The moment when the ball is in the net and no one has to wait. The moment when a raised flag is the end, not the beginning of a review. I am not saying that is good or bad — I am only saying that we made a trade, and many have not realised what they traded away.

The 2026 World Cup final between France and Croatia is an example of how VAR operates in the heaviest moment. In the 38th minute, after reviewing the situation, the referee determined that Ivan Perišić had handled the ball in the box, and France were awarded a penalty. Griezmann scored, lifting the score to 2-1, and the match turned. What is notable is not whether the decision was right or wrong, but that a World Cup final was partly decided by a moment reviewed on a screen. The emotion of a final had to queue behind a technical check.

Here, I want to talk about what the media usually ignores. Media outlets tend to favour controversial phases because they generate traffic — an argument is shared more than a correct decision. But only by following a team, a referee, a league across an entire season can one understand the true cost of each ruling. A referee is not judged by a single moment replayed on television, but by hundreds of matches in which he maintained consistency. That consistency has no highlight, no viral clip, and therefore it is invisible to the crowd.

In governance terms, VAR raises a question of responsibility that football has not resolved. When a decision is made through the coordination of the on-field referee and the video referee, who bears ultimate responsibility? IFAB tried to answer by stressing that the final decision remains with the on-field referee. But in practice, when a referee is asked to go outside and review the monitor, he rarely upholds his original decision. The pressure of being called out — in front of tens of thousands of spectators — is a pressure no legal text fully describes.

From a financial and operational standpoint, VAR also created a new market. Leagues must invest in camera systems, central control rooms, video referee training, and operating personnel. This is a cost that smaller leagues struggle to bear, and that raises a question of fairness between leagues: does a match in a lower division carry the same standard of adjudication as a match in a top division? Technology, when it becomes a factor in the game, also becomes a factor in inequality.

The counterintuitive angle lies here: we usually believe technology exists to eliminate mistakes. But VAR does not eliminate mistakes — it classifies them. Previously, a mistake was a vague mass, impossible to measure, and therefore forgivable. Now, a mistake is measured in millimetres, in frames, in algorithms, and therefore it becomes unforgivable. When you can prove someone wrong, you find it hard to let it go.

The second paradox: VAR was designed to reduce controversy, but it makes controversy more sophisticated. An old argument needed only two people and one opinion. A new argument needs a legal framework, a definition of "clear and obvious", a discussion of whether the images were slowed down too much. We no longer argue about whether the referee was right or wrong; we argue about whether the referee has the right to be wrong.

This leads to a question I consider central to every VAR argument: does football want absolute fairness, or acceptable fairness? If it chooses absolute fairness, we must accept that every phase can be dissected, that a match can stretch on endlessly, that emotion must give way to precision. If it chooses acceptable fairness, we must accept that sometimes the wrong still wins, and we must learn to live with that.

Football has not chosen. It stands between two paths, and VAR is precisely the mirror reflecting that hesitation. Every time a referee walks to the monitor, every time a goal is taken away for a toe, football asks itself once more: what do I want to become?

What I hope for in the next ten years is not a more perfect VAR, but a more honest debate about what we want football to become. Technology will keep advancing — semi-automated offside will become fully automated, referees will have more data, and viewers will have more images. But no algorithm can answer the question football has dodged for a century: is fairness worth trading for the moment?

And perhaps that question does not belong to the referee. It belongs to all of us — those who still sit before the screen, wait for a whistle, and wonder whether we are watching a match, or watching a trial.