The video assistant referee (VAR) is the technology used to help check on-field referee’s decisions and minimise man-made errors that have great influence on the results of the matches, based on the video footage and headset for communication (Wikipedia, 2018). VAR is mainly projected onto the football field with multiple cameras and angles to capture every small action of the players on the field.
At its core, VAR is to serve 2 major functions: (1) to alert the clear and obvious errors, and (2) remind serious missed incidents. VAR could only be applied to the following 4 scenarios: (no) Goal, (no) Penalty, Straight red card, and Mistaken identity (IFAB, 2018). When there is a dispute of the decision on the court, the on-field head referee would come to technician video assistant referees for a recode of reviewable incidents and call the corresponding playback node, so as to get a fairer match decision.
In 2014, the Royal Netherlands Football Association (KNVB) proposed VAR to the International Football Association Board (IFAB) and 2 years later, full implementation is approved. The IFAB secretary, Lukas Brud (IFAB, 2016) said that with all the 4G and Wi-Fi in stadia nowadays, it is necessary to protect referees from ignoring obvious mistakes.
With the gradual universal adoption of VAR, the most common challenge of VAR would be reviewing incidents without disrupting the fast-paced end-to-end flow of the game. Close communication is the key to avoid the need for a pitch side review which on average takes around 90 seconds. Further criticism falls on VAR for creating as much confusion as clarity. For instance, in a Portuguese match, a fan’s flag obscured the VAR camera which prevented the assistance referee to review the replay. Also, Nakrani (2018) from The Guardian stated that VAR has been effective for factual decisions like offsides and mistaken identities, while penalties or the disciplining of players have been worse. Another criticism accuses VAR of its system effectiveness when achieving the goal. VAR still fails to modify human errors and the final judgement is still dependant on human’s side. Others point out the game-changing essence of VAR. Jonathan Liew (The Independent, 2018), compares Cricket’s Decision Review System with the VAR in Football field. Chances are that the VAR would very likely to change the nature in football game just as the cricket. Personal beliefs are to exploit the advantages brought by VAR further whereas keep an eye on how to apply other technologies like Nature Learning to help determine and improve the human-made decisions and thus avoid changing the football game’s nature.
References:
International Football Association Board. 2018. ‘Historic step for greater fairness in football’, Viewed at 2 Oct 2020,
Liew, J. 2018, “VAR is going to change football as we know it – but we have no idea if that’s a good thing or not”. The Independent. Viewed at 3 Oct 2020, .
Masters, J. 2019, ‘Has football gone too VAR?’, CNN Sports, viewed at 4 Oct 2020,
Nakrani, S. 2018, “VAR: The World Cup verdict so far – some success but more clarity needed”. The Guardian, viewed at 4 Oct 2020, viewed at 4 Oct 2020,
Stevens G. 2020, ‘By tring to fix the game, VAR is ruining it’, GQ-Magazine, viewed at 4 Oct 2020,
Video Assistant Referee, Wikipedia, viewed at 4 Oct 2020,
Dear Jiayun, thanks for introducing this topic. I really think this is an interesting one. I often hear people around me complain about the VAR. Two main problems with the VAR is that it reduces the pace of the game (by constantly checking decisions with the VAR), and causing unfair VAR decisions when it comes to arbitrary (non-factual) cases, such as fouls. I think most of this can be attributed to the fact that VAR has not been around for very long in football. When you look at field hockey, for instance, the VAR actually makes the game a lot more fair, and it works well. It is just going to take some time for the players and referees to adjust to the Video Assisted Referee, but when they do, the sport will be a lot more fair. I would not be surprised if we see adjustments to the rules of the use of a Video Assisted Referee, to keep the pace up in a game and to make it more fair.
Hi Lars!
Thank you for your feedback! The theme of this post comes to my mind actually when I was watching the UK Premier League. Indeed I totally agree with what you have said, though for the hockey part I might need a further check (not a fan). I would say in UK and China, the steps seem still on-going and ya we’ll see, it takes time. Would also check how is the case of VAR in other European countries now:)
Best,
Jiayun
Dear Jiayun Zhao,
I enjoyed reading your blog posts as this is a topic of special interest to me as a football enthusiast. When reading your post, I noticed the aspect that when using VAR, the final judgement will still be with football referees, which made me reflect on this. Although VAR is currently being used to indicate offside or fouls with millimeter precision, the technology is still bounded by the VAR referee’s human rationality. Therefore, as the technology seems to be objective, there is still subjective bias present which will be difficult to reduce.
An additional point is if the technology which is currently in use is advanced enough. Although separate frames are used to detect the movements of the ball, the football can still be kicked between these frames and lead to incorrect decisions by the referee (Atos, 2019). It is clear that there is a cost-benefit between the cost of the advanced technology and the benefit of completely accurate decisions.
References:
Atos.net. ‘Technology In Football – VAR And The Data It Creates’. Viewed on October 5, 2020 from: https://atos.net/en/blog/technology-in-football-var-and-the-data-it-creates
Hi Kristian!
Thank you for your feedback and the link! Glad to see we two both criticize the point:’VAR helps, though the final judgement is still dependent on referee’s side.’ Also, the grey area you mentioned indeed occurred several times during all kinds of matches worldwide. Probably in the future we can witness more advanced technology (so improve the 3D technology mentioned in the link) and better manipulation for more angles of camera to help making the final decisions.
Maybe you are interested: A snapshot of 2020-21 Premier League VAR improvements:
https://www.sportco.io/article/var-improvements-2020-21-season-721219
Best,
Jiayun
Dear Jiayun Zhao,
Thanks for the topic. It was clear and nice to read. However, the title focuses on if the VAR is ruining the football matches. The main source of fun does come from the pace of the game indeed, like your blog says. What I missed in your writing is the part where a supporter cannot fully enjoy a goal the way he/she could before. When your team scored, you might look at the ref or his assitants and know if it’s a valid goal instantly. Nowawdays, what bothers supporters for a big part as well is that you never know if a goal is valid. It could be that you’re cheering and half a minute you find out the referee is communicating with the VAR. If this happens a few times, supporters don’t fully cheer until the referee approves the goal. Kind off killing the momentum.
What could also be interesting are the implications of the newest addition: offside technology. In England, technology will detect with a very high accuracy whether someones offside. In the Netherlands this tech is also used, however in a different way. When the referee takes a decision, and the player is offside or not, within a margin, the decision of the ref could be wrong but withing that margin. I thought the margin was about 10cm. This technology is already openly critized in the FC Twente – FC Groningen match, when Vaclav Cerny scored a goal that was almost offside but not truely, so within the margin. However the rules dictated that the ref’s decision was leading due to this margin, causing the legitimate goal to be rejected.
First of all, interesting topic and nice blog post!
In principle, I think the VAR has brought great things to football matches. Humans can’t always oversee everything happening on the football field, and the use of technology can fill in this gap. Take for example the offside rule in football. Before the VAR, a lot of mistakes were made on this aspect, since it requires a lot of human effort and concentration to determine whether a player stood offside or not. Having the technology to assist and check whether the right decision was made, brought more Fairplay to this aspect of the game. As now the same situations, in other matches, will now be assessed in the same way. However, when in doubt if rules have been broken, the VAR needs to be checked. This takes a lot of time and momentum out of the game.
Besides, the human aspect, which in my opinion has room for making mistakes, gets minimized and even criticized. Even the VAR isn’t always right as described in your post. The VAR aims to be so precise that even when a player is 1mm offside, the referee needs to check whether this player was really offside. So this includes a human factor since lines are so close to each other. One referee would say it is offside in this case and the other one would say it isn’t. This creates a separation in judgments and this is exactly what the VAR wasn’t put into practice for. Discussions about these very small mistakes are, in my opinion, poisonous to the game. Therefore I think the VAR needs to be optimized, and better rules need to be made. I think that when you decide to implement technology in order to make a game fair and don’t want to leave room for interpretation, the technology should have a very high right of making the right decision. And nowadays, there is still some human judgment, which ignites discussions. In my opinion, VAR definitely made the game fairer. But as said before, needs to be improved.
Dear Jiayun,
I find this an extremely interesting topic and it was very nice to read as well. As a footballer and football enthusiast myself, I have to be honest and say that I absolutely hated the implementation of VAR at first. As you mentioned, it disrupts the pace of the game and I think almost any footballer can agree with me that any time that is spent waiting on the pitch, leads to loss of concentration and focus during the game. Also, I think that the VAR has been making too many mistakes, whereas it should have led to no/less human errors. It seems impossible to me that even with VAR, a referee is unable to correctly identify an offside goal, which unfortunately has happened multiple times. I do think, that in a general sense the VAR created a game thats relatively fair as it does correct for a lot of other human errors such as missed fouls or handballs. However, sometimes it just seems too much, which can clearly be seen by the number of penalties given away this season in the premier league for example. The VAR has created so many penalties, that the 2020/2021 season is projected to end with 292 awarded penalties in 380 total games. If you compare this to numbers before the VAR, such as the 2017/2018 season, in 380 games there were 80 penalties awarded. This can ofcourse also be due to other reasons such as the new handball rule, however I think the VAR also leads to this inflated amount of penalties. For me this remains a difficult dilemma, as I want the game to be as fair as possible without removing or diminishing any of the important aspects of football. I hope that the communication between the VAR referees and the referee on pitch indeed becomes better, which in turn will hopefully lead to a fairer game with less interruptions.