VAR, 'Clear and Obvious' and the Gaps Between Two Laws

Minute 58 in Kazan

On 16 June 2026, at the Kazan Arena, the 58th minute of the Group C opener between France and Australia, referee Andrés Cunha of Uruguay put his hand to his earpiece, stepped back three paces from the edge of the penalty area, and pointed to the spot. Antoine Griezmann placed the ball, took a breath, and struck it low to the left. The 0-0 broke open. It was the first penalty in World Cup history awarded after video review.

I was four thousand kilometres from Kazan, in a small flat in Liverpool, seventeen years old, fresh out of A-levels, with a notebook divided into four columns: minute, referee, law involved, and an empty column for my first reaction while watching live. The last column was the one I erased most often. That night I wrote, in the reaction column: clearly wrong. The next morning, replaying the frame at 0.25 speed, I crossed the line out and wrote instead: Josh Risdon committed his leg before making contact with the ball, Griezmann had already gone past him, and the distance between those two facts is the entire story.

People see an incident. I see a gap between two laws.

Across two months that summer I watched all 64 matches of the 2026 World Cup, pulled event data from FIFA's published systems, reconstructed every video intervention, and checked each one against the Laws of the Game issued by IFAB. My own tracking sheet logged 21 interventions. Of those, 13 times I concluded the final decision matched the language of the law. In the remaining 8, I could not reach a conclusion — not because the referee was wrong, but because the law itself was not tight enough to say who was right.

Those eight are why I am writing this.

Context: a standard written so that nobody has to define it

VAR was not born from a match. It was born from a meeting. In March 2026, the International Football Association Board approved a two-year trial of video assistant referees, on the condition that participating competitions report data back. The early adopters were the A-League in Australia, Major League Soccer in the United States, the Bundesliga in Germany and Serie A in Italy. Each tried its own version, understood it in its own way, and that is where the trouble started.

The central phrase of the whole system is four words long: clear and obvious error. It is not a measurement. It is a threshold of perception. Two experienced referees, watching the same passage, can stand on opposite sides of that threshold with the same clip in front of them, and neither has broken the law.

Four categories can be reviewed: goals and incidents leading to goals, penalty decisions and non-decisions, direct red cards, and mistaken identity. There is no category for corners, throw-ins or indirect free kicks. That was a deliberate design choice, and it produced a consequence few noticed: the decisions that get reviewed are not the most important ones, but the ones most easily reduced to a single frame.

The two laws that dominated my 21 logged incidents were Law 11 (offside) and Law 12 (fouls and misconduct). Both share one feature: they do not describe physical states, they describe intent. Law 11 is about position when a teammate plays the ball, but also about whether a defender deliberately played it. Law 12 is about whether a player made the body unnaturally bigger, and whether an act merits dismissal. Intent has no coordinates on a screen.

That is why VAR solves a great deal and leaves a great deal behind. It is excellent at the question of where the ball was. It is poor at the question of what a player was thinking.

The anatomy, in data

Three camera angles, one question

My method is boringly simple. For every incident I watch at least three feeds: the main broadcast angle, the behind-goal angle, and the high angle. The point is not resolution. The point is to test whether the conclusion changes with the vantage point. If a decision reads the same from all three, it is a decision the law is holding up. If the conclusion flips when the angle changes, it is a decision that the eyesight is holding up.

Of the eight contentious incidents in 2026, six flipped at least once as I changed angles. That number matters more than any count of correct or incorrect interventions, because it places the problem in interpretation, not in technology.

Kirkby, 2026: the first verification exercise

A year before Russia, I sat in the stand at the Kirkby academy watching Liverpool U18 play Everton U18. In the 67th minute, striker Paul Glatzel received the ball in a position that made everyone around me shout: offside. The referee allowed the goal.

That evening I went home, reopened the match footage, and stepped through the frames before the pass was played. An Everton defender had deliberately swung a leg and touched the ball before Glatzel received it. Under Law 11, a player in an offside position is penalised only if, at the moment a teammate plays the ball, he becomes involved in active play. A deliberate touch by an opposing defender resets offside. The goal was good.

I wrote a three-thousand-word breakdown, posted it to a supporter forum, and it was shared widely. That was the first time I understood that what angers people is not the law but the distance between the law and what they saw from the stand. From that day on, I stopped starting with the question of who was right. I start with the question of which law is speaking in this passage of play.

The personal ledger: 21 and 8

My 2026 World Cup sheet was updated weekly and split by incident type. The final count: 21 interventions, grouped into penalties, offsides and red cards. Of those, eight could not be resolved conclusively from the language of the law.

| Category | Interventions | Contentious | |---|---|---| | Penalties | 10 | 3 | | Offsides | 7 | 4 | | Direct red cards | 4 | 1 | | Total | 21 | 8 |

The interesting column is the third. Offside carries the highest controversy rate despite having the most technical support. Offside is not a purely geometric problem. It is geometry plus a question of intent, and no machine measures the second part.

Based on my experience tracking matches across several seasons, this pattern repeats: the most disputed decisions are never the most obviously wrong ones. They are the ones sitting exactly on the edge of the threshold.

2026-24, and a number worth pausing on

The Premier League's key match incidents panel recorded roughly 31 VAR-related errors across the 2026-24 season, far above previous campaigns. It is worth being precise: an error here does not mean the on-field referee was wrong. Most belong to process — the video team failing to intervene when it should, or intervening when it should not. That distinction matters enormously, because it moves the problem from professional ethics to system design. A system that lets people decide when to check themselves is a system with a structural flaw.

30 September 2026: when the process collapsed on itself

At the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium on 30 September 2026, Luis Díaz put the ball in the net. The assistant raised the flag. The video team reviewed, concluded Díaz was onside, but communicated the outcome incorrectly to the on-field referee, so the original decision stood. Díaz lost his goal. The league body later described it as a significant human error.

I spent hours reconstructing that sequence, and it is the cleanest illustration of this article's argument. In the 21 incidents of 2026, the failure was interpretation. Here, the failure was communication. In both cases, the law did not move. Under Law 11, Díaz was onside. The law was correct. Justice still did not arrive.

Fairness does not live in a correct law; it lives in a reader of the law willing to look deeper.

A wrongly disallowed goal in a single match affects the table, and the table affects revenue. The transfer market is where numbers wear emotion and the law stands outside refereeing. A club that misses European qualification by a point prices that gap into next summer's budget, and the market value of its squad adjusts accordingly. The cost of a slow-motion replay does not stop at one player.

Empty stands and 18.7 per cent

In June 2026 the Premier League returned behind closed doors. When the stands are empty, I can hear the breathing of a match: studs, a referee calling a player by name, a ball bouncing on grass with no crowd layered over it.

I spent six weeks collecting data from 45 post-restart matches and compared them with 45 pre-lockdown matches from the same season. Average yellow cards per match rose from 3.2 to 3.8, a jump of 18.7 per cent. At the same time, visible player confrontation with referees fell sharply.

Those two numbers move in opposite directions, and the opposition is the interesting part. With no crowd, referees no longer feel watched, so they book more for identical offences. With no crowd, players lose their audience for theatrics, so they stop theatrics. The conclusion I drew: referee behaviour responds to stadium atmosphere far more than any IFAB guidance admits.

Inverted wingers and the price of a new grey zone

One technical detail I think is undervalued in every VAR debate: inverted wingers have changed the structure of the incidents that need judging.

Fifteen years ago a winger received the ball on the touchline, where the line itself is a reference point. Today he receives it in the half-space, between the lines, where the only reference is the opposing defender — who is also moving. The number of passages in which an offside call depends on two players moving simultaneously has risen, and so has the share of incidents falling into the grey zone.

The homogenisation of football towards the inverted winger did not merely erase a type of player. It made the judging system systematically harder, while the judging tools were written for a match with an older structure. No IFAB meeting discusses this, because it does not sit inside the law. It sits inside how football is played.

The contrarian angle: the hunger for absolute fairness is the problem

The Russian summer taught me this: VAR did not take away innocence, it took away the right to be wrong.

Before 2026, a referee who got it wrong simply got it wrong. People shouted, people forgot, and the next match started fresh. After 2026, a referee who gets it wrong still gets it wrong — but the error is recorded, replayed, measured, counted and filed into a table the league publishes on a schedule. Error became an operating metric.

That sounds progressive. It also creates pressure nobody designed for: pressure to reach absolute correctness in a sport whose laws are written in non-absolute language. When supporters demand that VAR be right in every incident, they are demanding something IFAB never promised. IFAB promised to fix clear and obvious errors. That is a far narrower promise than the one the stands hear.

The genuinely counter-intuitive part is this: the most disputed incidents are not the ones where VAR failed. They are the ones where VAR succeeded according to process, and the outcome still felt unjust. When a decision follows the letter of the law but contradicts a shared sense of fairness, the system is not broken. It is working exactly as designed, and it is the design that needs the argument.

I am not against technology in football, but I always ask what it changes in human behaviour. Before VAR, a referee decided in two seconds and owned those two seconds. After VAR, a referee decides in two seconds, then is asked to re-evaluate those two seconds against a standard with no numerical definition. The pressure has not fallen. It has changed shape.

The more important blind spot is that the people in the stadium never see the replay. Television viewers get three angles, an offside line, semi-automated graphics. The people in the stand get one vantage point, one shout, and a big screen that usually just says a check is in progress. Those two groups are watching two different matches, and every argument afterwards is an argument between two versions of reality. Announcing decisions over the PA is a step in the right direction, but it still does not give the stand what the video room can see.

Takeaway: the fix is not in the technology

If I had to choose one change, I would not choose another camera or another algorithm. I would require the reason to be announced in the language of law, in the stadium, within thirty seconds, to both teams and the crowd together. Not a feeling — a statute: Law 11, a player in an offside position becoming involved in active play; or Law 12, contact not sufficient to constitute a foul.

Semi-automated offside narrows geometric error, and that is good. But it does not touch the grey zone of Law 12, and it does not close the gap between the television viewer and the person in the stand. The grey zone does not vanish when the picture gets sharper. It simply moves.

The question I leave is not whether VAR is right or wrong. It is this: if the laws of football are written in language that cannot be quantified, does measuring them more precisely actually make the game fairer — or does it only make the unfairness easier to see?