Notes from the VAR Room: The Boundary Between Human Eye and Machine Eye in a Major Tournament Season

Seventeen Seconds That Split a Stadium in Two

The moment lasted only seventeen seconds, but it was enough to divide a sixty-thousand-seat stadium in half. The referee stood at the centre circle, hand pressed to his earpiece, eyes fixed on the grass as if reading a verdict that had not yet been written. The stand behind the goal roared. The opposite stand went silent. The ball was still in the net, but nobody remembered how it got there. All that remained was the dry voice of the video assistant in the earpiece: "Checking the goal. Possible offence in the build-up."

I have heard that sentence more often than I care to admit. Not the shout of a coach, not the roar of a crowd. The voice of a person the audience never sees, sitting in a dark room a few kilometres from the pitch, watching seven camera angles at once. That person decides whether a goal exists, while the crowd only decides whether to cheer or to rage. The distance between those two decisions is where I work.

From the press row, I learned something no classroom ever taught me: emotion in the stands spreads faster than any pass. A sigh in the east stand can become a roar in the west stand within three seconds. But inside the referee's earpiece, those three seconds are a four-step verification process, and every step has someone accountable. Football has no VAR, only shadows waiting to be exposed. And my job is to record the moment those shadows take shape, before public opinion slaps a label on them.

Context: From One Match to an Entire System

On 16 June 2026, at the Kazan stadium, an Iranian referee named Alireza Faghani entered history in a way he probably never wanted. In the match between France and Australia, he became the first person at a World Cup finals to overturn his own decision after reviewing a pitch-side monitor. Defender Joshua Risdon's challenge on Antoine Griezmann inside the box was judged a foul, and Griezmann opened the scoring from the penalty spot. I remember sitting over that footage for hours, measuring foot speed, measuring the contact angle, comparing frame by frame.

That moment was not an isolated event. It was the starting point of a decade in which football accepted a trade-off: sacrificing the flow of the match for the accuracy of the decision. Earlier, in 2026, the International Football Association Board (IFAB) — the only body with the power to amend the Laws of the Game — approved VAR trials in non-FIFA competitions. By 2026 it had stepped onto the biggest stage. From 2026, semi-automated offside technology (SAOT) arrived in Qatar, turning arguments about a few centimetres into data measurable by algorithm.

But every time technology advances a step, the number of questions grows rather than shrinks. The law never stands outside the match; it is the second match played in parallel. That second match has its own rules, its own referees, and sometimes its own audience — the people in the control room, watching football through monitors, where emotion is removed from the equation from the outset.

With a major tournament season approaching — the 2026 World Cup with forty-eight teams, co-hosted by three countries — the pressure on the refereeing system will be greater than in any previous cycle. More matches, more decisions, more cameras, and more opportunities to err. This is the right moment to look directly at the mechanism we have grown used to calling by three letters: VAR.

The Mechanism: Four Doors and One Invisible Threshold

The first thing most spectators do not know: VAR is not permitted to intervene in every situation. It can open only four doors, and only four. First, goal or no goal. Second, penalty or no penalty. Third, direct red card. Fourth, mistaken identity — when the referee punishes the right offence against the wrong player. Outside those four doors, VAR has no right to speak, even if everyone on the pitch can plainly see something.

The second thing spectators rarely notice: VAR does not make decisions on its own. It can intervene only when it detects a "clear and obvious error" or a serious missed incident. This threshold is the heart of the whole system, and also its fatal weakness, because "clear" and "obvious" are two adjectives with no arithmetic definition. No formula states that a contact off by three centimetres is clear while one off by two centimetres is not.

The operational procedure works as follows. In the VAR room, a lead video assistant referee assesses, supported by three assistants: one monitoring the main camera, one monitoring offside, one monitoring the broadcast feed. When one of the four doors opens, the lead video assistant checks. If a clear error is found, that person contacts the on-field referee through a closed earpiece system. There are two outcomes: either the on-field referee accepts and corrects the decision immediately, or the on-field referee is invited to the pitch-side monitor to review it personally — an operation the trade calls an "on-field review".

The final decision always belongs to the on-field referee. This is the principle IFAB has reaffirmed many times in its guidance documents: VAR assists, it does not replace. But in practice, when a referee is invited to the monitor, the probability of overturning the original decision is very high. I have tracked hundreds of such situations, and the pattern repeats: the referee walks out, watches two or three times at real speed, watches once more in slow motion, then changes the decision. Being called to the monitor is almost already a verdict.

Every foul is a question about intent; data only gives us the answer about consequence. This is the sentence I have written and rewritten in my professional notebook, because it explains precisely the limits of technology. The camera records whose foot touched whose, at what moment, with how much force. The camera does not record what was in that player's mind. The Laws of the Game draw a very clear line between careless, reckless and excessive-force offences — three degrees leading to three different sanctions. But all three depend on an assessment of intent, and intent is the one thing no camera can film.

The Invisible Threshold: When "Clear" Becomes a Political Word

In the 2026-2026 Premier League season, I spent almost all my time logging VAR decisions. The results cost me sleep. The same type of situation — a handball inside the box — was handled in different ways on different matchdays, even within the same matchday. Some handballs as clear as daylight went unpunished. Some contacts on the shoulder, near the armpit, were given as penalties. The intervention threshold was unstable, and that instability did not come from technology — it came from the people operating it.

This is what I call the paradox of consistency. VAR was built to remove the arbitrariness of the on-field referee. But by placing the decision in the hands of a different group, in a different place, with a different view, the system created a new layer of arbitrariness. The on-field referee errs because he is limited by angle and speed. The video referee errs because he is limited by interpretative threshold. Two different kinds of error, but both are errors.

I remember a winter evening in Manchester, watching a replay of a match where the referee took nearly four minutes to decide an offside. Those four minutes, in the stands, were four minutes of confusion. Fans did not know whether to celebrate. Players stood in half-poses, not daring to return to position. Both coaches stood near the touchline, arms folded, eyes on the big screen. An entire stadium hung suspended in a state of waiting, and that state lasted longer than any passage of play in the match.

After the match, I wrote in my notes: "The problem is not whether the decision was right or wrong. The problem is that those four minutes did not belong to football." Football is a sport of continuous flow, where emotion is built second by second. When you cut that flow into discrete segments for inspection, you do not merely change the decision — you change the feeling of the entire match.

Semi-Automated Offside: When Error Becomes Data

In 2026, in Qatar, SAOT arrived and changed how we think about offside. Before that, the video referee had to draw the offside line by hand on the screen, choose the point of contact with the ball, choose the highest body part of the defender. Every choice was a chance to err. SAOT introduced twelve dedicated cameras tracking the ball and twenty-nine data points on each player's body, computing positions accurate to the millimetre and sending a signal to the referee within seconds.

Technically, this was a leap. But philosophically, it raised a new question nobody has answered satisfactorily: when you can measure to the millimetre, are you still defending the spirit of the offside law? The offside law was created to stop players "goal-hanging" in front of goal, to encourage attacking play. When a toe, a boot tip, a strand of hair is elevated into proof of an offence, that spirit was left behind long ago.

I once argued about this with an English colleague in a café near Old Trafford. He said: "If you can measure it precisely, why not measure it?" I replied: "Because the law was not written for a measuring device. The law was written for people playing football." That argument had no conclusion, and perhaps never will, because we were both right from a certain angle.

What I am certain of is this: VAR does not fix mistakes, it only changes who carries the blame. Before VAR, when a wrong decision was made, people blamed the referee. After VAR, people blame the video referee, then the on-field referee for not daring to keep his own decision, then IFAB for writing an ambiguous law, then the organisers for choosing a camera system that was not good enough. Responsibility does not disappear — it merely spreads.

What Cameras Do Not See: The Moment and the Process

In my trade there is a sentence I always carry: The spectator sees the situation, the referee sees the moment, I see the whole process. Those three layers of perception never align. The spectator at home watches a passage at real speed, from one broadcast angle, and reaches a conclusion in a second. The on-field referee watches that passage from a few metres away, at real speed, from a single angle, and must decide within a fraction of a second. And I, sitting in the press row, watch both of those people, knowing that both are missing information.

This is why I never conclude that a referee was wrong based on a single angle. To understand a decision, you must reconstruct the decision-maker's sequence of actions: where that person stood, which way they looked, how many players blocked the view, and most importantly — what information they received through the earpiece before making the final call. A decision that looks absurd can become reasonable once you know the referee had been flagged by the assistant, and the footage confirmed it.

I have built my own recording method over the years, based on referee reports and the IFAB Laws of the Game. For each controversial situation, I log five items: the minute, where the referee stood, whether the assistant raised a signal, whether VAR intervened, and the time from the incident to the announcement of the decision. Those five items form a "fingerprint" of the decision, and over the years I have found that the most controversial decisions share one trait: a long processing time.

When a decision takes more than two minutes to complete, the probability it becomes controversial rises sharply, regardless of whether the final outcome is right or wrong. Because the wait is not just a technical gap — it is an emotional gap, and emotional gaps are always filled with assumptions. When nobody explains to the crowd what is happening, the crowd writes its own script, and that script is usually the worst one.

Emotion as a Kind of Data

There is a mistake that people who write about refereeing often make: removing emotion entirely from the analysis. I understand why. The referee is the only person on the pitch not allowed to be led by emotion, and those who write about referees often force themselves into the same mould. But after many years, I realised that emotion is not something to be erased. It is a kind of data, just harder to measure.

A player's emotion tells you about the tension of a passage. A referee's emotion tells you about the confidence of a decision. A crowd's emotion tells you about the transparency of a system. These three kinds of data do not replace technical figures — they complement them. A decision that is technically correct but provokes outrage across the stadium is still a problem to be analysed, not an incident to be ignored.

In the Euro 2026 final, played in 2026, I was assigned to analyse the penalty shootout between Italy and England. Three young English players — Bukayo Saka, Jadon Sancho and Marcus Rashford — missed in succession. The whole country talked about psychology. I dug into the mechanism. The distance from the penalty spot to the goal is eleven metres. The average ball flight time is about three-tenths of a second. Goalkeeper Gianluigi Donnarumma chose the right direction five times out of seven, thanks to studying opponents' habits in advance.

I wrote a three-thousand-word analysis on the subject. The editor cut it to five hundred words, judging it too technical. But what I learned that time still holds: when everyone talks about psychology, there is usually a mechanism behind it that few bother to look at. Donnarumma did not win by luck. He won with data, gathered over hundreds of hours of video, and applied in a moment shorter than a breath.

When the Human Eye Is No Longer the Final Standard

There is a paradox I have never seen anyone resolve satisfactorily. The Laws of the Game were written for humans, by humans, and enforced by humans. But today's technology measures at a precision the human eye can never reach. The result is two parallel standards: the standard of the human eye and the standard of the measuring device. When those two conflict, which standard does the system choose?

In practice, the system always chooses the device, because that is the provable standard. But in doing so, it accidentally creates a gap between what spectators see and what is announced. Spectators see two players level. The device says one was ahead by two centimetres. The decision rests on the device. Spectators feel cheated, even though nobody cheated them.

That gap is not technology's fault. It is the fault of the media, including me and my colleagues. We have not done well enough at explaining to audiences that modern football is governed by two parallel layers of law: the layer on the pitch, where referees observe and judge, and the layer in the VAR room, where data is processed and intervention thresholds are applied. These two layers do not always speak the same language.

I once witnessed a situation where the on-field referee was right to keep his original decision, yet was criticised for weeks, simply because he could not explain his reasoning. He could not explain because the protocol does not permit him to speak publicly while the match is running. This is a systemic communication gap, not a personal failure. The referee is the only person on the pitch not allowed to be led by emotion. But he is also the only person on the pitch forbidden from explaining his decision to the crowd.

The Counter-Intuitive Angle: More Transparency Does Not Mean More Comfort

There is an assumption that almost the entire football media has quietly accepted: if we make the VAR process more transparent — broadcasting the audio dialogue between the on-field referee and the video referee, explaining decisions on the big screen — then controversy will diminish. I do not believe it. I think, in the early phase, it will do the opposite.

The reason is simple. When you publish the entire decision-making process, you also publish every hesitation, every disagreement between referees, every tense pause. Audiences will hear sentences like "I'm not sure", "Show me another angle", "This could be a light foul". And they will use those very sentences as evidence that the system is wobbling.

What football's administrators have not realised is that transparency is not a solution to the problem of trust. It is only a tool for moving trust from one place to another. Trust in the individual referee has been replaced by trust in the system. If the system is also laid bare, where do we go? I have no answer. But I believe that is the question professional football will have to face in the coming years, and perhaps at the 2026 World Cup itself.

This does not mean I oppose transparency. I only oppose the belief that transparency by itself produces consensus. Football is a sport in which two sides always have opposing interests. No process can make both sides happy with a decision that harms one of them. The only thing a good process can do is make both sides understand why the decision was reached, even if they may still disagree.

A Lesson About Process: From Individual Error to System Error

Throughout my career, I have always tried to distinguish two kinds of error: individual error and process error. Individual error is when a referee stands in the wrong place, or picks the wrong angle, or decides while blocked. This kind can be trained, corrected, and reduced over time. Process error is when a system is designed to produce a wrong result, regardless of who operates it. This kind cannot be fixed by training individuals — it demands changing how the system itself is built.

Most of the great VAR controversies of the past decade have been arguments about process error, yet they were presented as arguments about individual error. When a referee is criticised for not going to the monitor, people are talking about an individual. When the same type of situation is handled two different ways on two matchdays, people are talking about a system. And the system is the thing the public is least able to see, because a system has no face.

I once had an experience that shaped this view. In 2026, early in my career, I mispronounced a defender's name three times in a row at a match at Wembley, and was reprimanded by the editor-in-chief. That night, I reopened the footage and watched it over and over to understand how referees determine offside, just to reassure myself that I was not the only one making mistakes on the pitch. That very moment led me into writing about law and process. I realised that analysing a referee's mistake is not about pointing out who was wrong, but about pointing out which mechanism allowed the mistake to happen.

Data as a Shield: When Insecurity Drives Us Back to Numbers

There is a habit I have noticed in myself, and I am not entirely proud of it. When my environment becomes unstable — schedules change, editors become more demanding, public opinion starts shouting — I retreat into data. I count cards, count VAR interventions, count the average seconds per review. Numbers are a safe refuge, because numbers do not argue with me, do not criticise me, and do not demand that I have feelings.

But I have also learned that this refuge has limits. Data can answer the question "what happened", but cannot answer the question "what does it mean". When the 2026 pandemic suspended the Premier League and there were no matches left to report on, I rewatched all three hundred and eighty matches of the 2026-2026 season, focusing on Liverpool's tactical fouls under Jurgen Klopp. I logged that the team committed around ten fouls per match on average, mostly in midfield, to stop counter-attacks before they formed.

I sent the analysis to an editor. He rejected it, saying nobody wanted to read about football when there was no football. I still wrote twenty pages of notes, because I noticed something interesting: how Klopp used tactical fouls as a language for controlling space. A foul in the right place can be worth as much tactically as a decisive pass. From then on, I began writing reports on defending from a referee's perspective, describing fouls as a tool rather than a condemnable act. Those notes later became the foundation for an e-book on law and tactics that I published in 2026.

A Major Tournament Season and the Compression of Emotion

When a major tournament season approaches, everything changes. Pressure rises exponentially, not only for players but for referees too. A mistake in qualifying can be forgotten in days. A mistake at the finals can be recalled for years. I once sat beside a referee who had officiated at a World Cup, and he told me something I recorded verbatim: "At a major tournament, you are not allowed to err. Not because you are better, but because the world is watching."

That pressure does not affect referees alone. It affects how decisions are made. At major tournaments, organisers tend to want referees to intervene more, because a wrong decision discovered on review causes greater damage than a correct one delivered late. This creates an implicit incentive: referees tend to call VAR more often than necessary, purely to protect themselves from later criticism.

I call this "decision-risk hedging". It is not wrongdoing. It is a rational response to an environment where the cost of missing an offence is higher than the cost of reviewing too much. But its consequence is that the match is chopped into segments, the emotional flow is broken, and audiences begin to tire of the very technology they once demanded.

The Intervention Threshold and the Question of Fairness

There is an aspect I consider the most important yet the least discussed: the VAR intervention threshold was not designed to maximise fairness. It was designed to minimise the number of interventions. These are two different goals, and in many cases they conflict. If you want to maximise fairness, you review every doubtful situation, however small. If you want to minimise interventions, you intervene only when the error is large enough for everyone to see.

IFAB chose the second path, for a reasonable reason: football needs to be played, not adjudicated. But that choice has a consequence few admit: it creates a system in which small errors are forgiven and large errors are punished. An offside two centimetres ahead is penalised, while a light contact inside the box may go unexamined. Spectators feel wronged, not because a specific decision is wrong, but because two consecutive decisions were reached on two different logics.

This is why I always tell younger colleagues: never judge a VAR decision by its outcome alone. Judge it by the threshold applied. If that threshold is not applied consistently across matches, then the problem is not the decision — the problem is the threshold. And the threshold is something only IFAB has the power to change, not the on-field referee.

The Writer's Angle: Describe the Mechanism, Do Not Play Referee

There is a line I always try to hold in my work: I describe the mechanism, I do not play referee. I have no right to declare a decision right or wrong on behalf of the person who made it. I only have the right to point out which process led to that decision, and whether that process was applied consistently. This is a voluntary limit, and I consider it necessary to keep the craft neutral.

That line often gets me criticised as cold, even unfeeling. Some say I write about football the way one writes a report. I do not dispute that. Football is a game of emotion, but football administration is a system of process. If I wrote only about emotion, I could say nothing about the system. If I wrote only about the system, I would forget the people. The only way to write about both is to keep just enough distance to see both at once.

That distance is not indifference. It is a professional choice. When a player goes down in the box and the whole stadium roars, I do not roar with them. I log: the minute, who was nearby, who saw it, where the referee stood, whether the flag went up. Later, when the match is over and everyone has gone home, I reopen the footage and reconstruct the sequence. That is when I begin to understand what actually happened.

Takeaway: Refereeing Trends and What to Prepare For

The 2026 World Cup will be the biggest test yet for the modern refereeing system. With forty-eight teams, the number of matches rises sharply, and the number of decisions rises with it. Technology will be better — more cameras, faster algorithms, shorter processing times. But the intervention threshold will still be a threshold drawn by humans, and humans will still be the ones interpreting it.

What I want to see in the coming years is not a more perfect system, but a system more honest about its own limits. A system that states clearly that it can err, and explains why it can err. A system that does not promise to eliminate controversy, but only promises to make controversy better grounded. That is the standard I consider appropriate for professional football in this decade.

In the dark room a few kilometres from the pitch, the video assistant referees are still working. They do not see the stands, do not hear the roars, do not feel the heat of a goal in the ninetieth minute. They see only frames, lines and numbers. And in those seventeen seconds, between two worlds — the world of emotion and the world of process — a decision is born, carrying both the accuracy it can reach and the shadows it can never touch. Football has no VAR, only shadows waiting to be exposed.