How VAR Decisions Are Made, and Why They Still Cause Arguments

Video assistance was introduced to eliminate clear officiating errors in football. It has done so, and it has also generated a volume of controversy that suggests something other than accuracy is at stake. Much of that gap comes down to a protocol that is considerably more restrictive than casual viewers realise.

Four categories, and nothing else

The video assistant referee may intervene in exactly four situations: goals and the immediately preceding phase of play, penalty decisions, direct red card incidents, and cases of mistaken identity when a card is shown to the wrong player.

Everything else is outside scope. A second yellow card cannot be reviewed. A foul in midfield cannot be reviewed. A corner awarded incorrectly cannot be reviewed unless a goal results directly from the attacking phase that follows. This alone accounts for a substantial share of complaints about VAR failing to act — in many of those cases it had no authority to.

The clear and obvious threshold

The second constraint is the intervention standard. VAR is instructed to recommend review only for a clear and obvious error. It is explicitly not a mechanism for re-refereeing the match or for substituting the video official’s judgement for the on-field referee’s on a marginal call.

This is where most of the perceived inconsistency originates. Whether an error is clear and obvious is itself a judgement, and different officials draw the line differently. A borderline foul that one video official regards as within the referee’s discretion, another regards as a clear miss. The threshold was designed to protect the flow of the game and the authority of the on-field referee, and it inevitably produces a band of incidents where intervention appears arbitrary.

Factual versus subjective decisions

The protocol distinguishes between the two, and the distinction determines the process. Factual decisions — whether the ball crossed the line, whether an offence occurred inside or outside the penalty area, offside position — are determined by the video official and communicated directly. No on-field review takes place, which is why these decisions are relatively quick.

Subjective decisions — whether contact constituted a foul, whether a challenge merits a red card, whether a handball was an offence — require the referee to view the footage at the pitchside monitor and make the final call personally. The referee is never overruled on a subjective matter; they are shown footage and asked to reconsider.

Offside, and why it feels different

Offside is treated as factual and binary. There is no clear and obvious threshold for it: a player is offside or is not, and a margin of a few centimetres is decisive.

This produces outcomes that many find unsatisfying, and the objections are reasonable. The kick point must be identified to a specific video frame, and at standard frame rates each frame covers a meaningful slice of time during which the ball is in motion. Semi-automated systems using multiple tracking cameras and a sensor in the ball have substantially improved both consistency and speed, but they have not changed the fundamental point — a binary rule applied at high precision will produce decisions that feel disproportionate to the margin involved.

Why it takes so long

Delay comes from several sources. The video team must first identify the correct incident and the correct restart point, since the review covers the whole attacking phase. Camera angles must be assessed for whether any offers a conclusive view. For offside, lines must be constructed. Then, for subjective calls, the referee walks to the monitor and reviews.

Announcing decisions and displaying footage in the stadium — practices adopted in several competitions — has improved the experience considerably without shortening it, which suggests the frustration was as much about opacity as about duration.

What the data shows

Studies across leagues consistently find that decision accuracy has improved by a meaningful margin since introduction, with correct outcomes on reviewable incidents rising into the high nineties from a materially lower baseline. Penalty awards rose initially and then settled. Offside goals being disallowed rose, straightforwardly because marginal offsides that were previously missed are now detected.

The controversy has not fallen with the error rate, which is the central paradox. When errors were the product of a human official’s real-time judgement, they were accepted as part of the game. When they survive a video review, they are read as an institutional failure — a shift in expectation that technology created and cannot resolve.