VAR and the Referee: A Jurisdictional Line Declared Clear, Never Verified

In the 78th minute, the referee left the centre circle and walked towards the monitor beside the touchline. The distance was perhaps forty metres. The stand fell silent. Nobody shouted, nobody whistled, nobody raised a phone. The man sitting next to me began counting out loud: “one, two, three…” He reached forty-two when the referee put a hand on his assistant’s shoulder, bent down, and pressed the button.

Forty-two seconds. In those forty-two seconds nothing on the pitch changed: the ball lay exactly where it had stopped, the players still stood with arms spread, the grass stayed green, the floodlights still lit the same four corners. But authority changed hands three times. First when the assistant referee raised his flag. Second when the man in a dark room a few hundred metres away picked up his headset. And third — perhaps, not certainly — when the referee himself touched the screen.

I do not go to stadiums to watch football. I go to watch what people believe in. That night, twenty-eight thousand people believed that somewhere there was someone holding the final decision. Not one of them could say with certainty who that person was.

Football has built itself a judicial system running parallel to its administrative one. IFAB, the International Football Association Board founded in 1886, makes the law. FIFA executes it. Continental and national federations enforce it. The Court of Arbitration for Sport, established in 2026 in Lausanne, serves as the final court of appeal, where a federation’s verdict can be overturned. On the pitch, a miniature version of that system operates on identical logic: the referee is the court of first instance, the VAR team is the appeal court, and the phrase “clear and obvious error” is the constitutional clause defining when a higher court may overturn a lower one.

The boundary between those two levels has never been written out in full, and its history is a history of rewrites.

On 16 June 2026, in Kazan, the Uruguayan referee Andrés Cunha stopped the France–Australia match in the 58th minute, walked to the touchline, reviewed a handball by Josh Risdon, and pointed to the penalty spot. Antoine Griezmann converted. It was the first penalty in World Cup history awarded after a VAR review. From that moment, the decision on the pitch was no longer the final decision.

But the “clear and obvious error” threshold is not a straight line. It is a grey zone, and that grey zone is redrawn every season by the very people with a direct interest in how wide or narrow it is.

On 30 September 2026, at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, Luis Díaz put the ball in the net in a phase the assistant had already flagged for offside. The VAR team checked, concluded Díaz was onside, but the signal sent out was “check complete” rather than “goal awarded”. The goal was disallowed. On 3 October 2026, the refereeing body PGMOL released the audio of the VAR room conversation and admitted a significant human error. For the first time, supporters could hear directly the moment they had previously only been able to guess at.

In Vietnam, VAR was introduced to V.League 1 from the 2026 season, and arguments about the consistency of decisions appeared almost immediately. The problem does not lie in the quality of the equipment. It lies in who is allowed to speak the last word.

The pattern of football governance after every incident is always the same: a statement that the law is clear. On 28 March 2026, a law minister in South Asia declared that the powers of the federal constitutional court and the supreme court were “clearly defined”, and that “there is no need to further complicate this debate”. That sentence has nothing to do with football. Its structure does: here was a man who was both the author of the law and the only voice asserting that the law was clear.

The pitch is never silent. It is only that someone is sitting quietly, listening.

Look at the decision-making structure of a modern match and you see three layers stacked on one another. The first layer is direct observation: assistant referee, referee, human eyes, a few dozen metres, real time. The second layer is review: the VAR team in a sealed room, watching the phase again from multiple angles. The third layer is the verdict: a whistle, a pointing finger, a goal given or taken away.

What matters is that real power does not sit with the one who delivers the verdict, but with the one who calls for the review. On paper, VAR does not deliver verdicts. It only asks the referee to take another look. But the rate at which the original decision is overturned once a referee leaves the field to visit the monitor is so high that it has become the default. When the call comes in, most of the stand already knows the outcome before the decision-maker does. A mechanism designed to correct errors has become a mechanism for transferring authority.

The timeline makes this plain. In 2026 Australia’s A-League became the first professional league to adopt VAR; MLS and the Bundesliga followed the same year. In 2026, the World Cup in Russia and La Liga in 2026-19. In 2026-20, the Premier League. In 2026, semi-automated offside technology at the World Cup in Qatar. In 2026, V.League 1. In 2026, Premier League clubs approved semi-automated offside for the 2026-25 season.

Each time another layer of technology is added, the message is identical: the arguments will die down. They do not. They simply move. From arguments about the verdict to arguments about jurisdiction. Supporters today ask less often whether the man with the whistle was right, and more often a different question: who actually holds the power to decide.

A match is a broken mirror; each shard reflects a different fate.

The Luis Díaz phase shows more clearly than any statistic that the problem is not technical. The system had the right images, the right camera angles, the right signal. The only thing that failed was language. One short phrase, “check complete” instead of “on-field decision stands, goal”, wiped out a goal and opened three days of global argument. A process designed to eliminate ambiguity collapsed because its own language was not tight enough. And the language of a process is, in the end, a legal text.

There is a rule I have observed over many years: when an organisation cannot solve a problem through outcomes, it shifts to solving it through process. The drift from a back four to a back three is not a tactical advance. It is reputational self-insurance: breached with four defenders, a coach is called naive; breached with three centre-backs, he is called prudent. Referees are the same. A referee bold enough to decide a huge moment on his own is a man putting an entire career on a single instant. A referee who pushes the decision up to the VAR room is a man sharing the risk with a system. The two may be equally wrong, but only one of them carries the blame.

Based on my experience following matches, I have noticed a small detail that no statistics table ever records: once a referee walks towards the monitor, no player argues with him any more. They simply stand and wait. Years ago a defender might have surrounded the referee, put a hand on his shoulder, tried to persuade him. Not now. Arguing with a man means little when the man who really decides is sitting in a room nobody can see.

In every broken move, I see a poem that was never written.

This shift does not stop at football. In esports, where no IFAB exists, where no global arbitration court with binding authority exists, and where the betting market moves faster than any rulebook, the gap is far wider. Enormous sums move through youth tournaments, online matches and regional bookmakers, while the tools of investigation and sanctioning still depend on the goodwill of individual publishers. When the law runs slower than the money, every claim about competitive integrity becomes a claim about intent, not about fact. In football there is at least a court in Lausanne to overturn a decision. In esports, sometimes nobody knows where that court is.

But both share one thing: each is adding a layer of judgment without having finished building the layer of jurisdiction. Tools are added, technology is added, process is added, while the most basic question remains unanswered: who is last, and who is authorised to say that the last one was wrong.

There is a counterintuitive point I believe to be true: the more often clarity is proclaimed, the more likely it is that clarity does not yet exist. A boundary that is genuinely clear needs no defence. People only defend what is under suspicion. When a governing body says that powers are “clearly defined” and that “there is no need to further complicate this debate”, that is not a full stop. It is an attempt to close a debate before it is allowed to run its course.

And the claim of clarity almost always comes from a single side. The author of the law is the one saying the law has no gaps. Referees, players, supporters — the people who must live inside that boundary every week — have no equivalent voice in the same bulletin. Their silence looks like consensus, but it is only the silence of those who were not asked.

There is another hidden cost that few name. Every time a decision is pushed from the pitch up to the VAR room, the referee’s discretion narrows a little. Bit by bit, no document formally hands that discretion to technology, and no vote of players or supporters was ever taken on it. It simply happens, season after season, until nobody remembers there was once a time when the referee was the only one deciding.

The lines of authority on a football pitch will be redrawn many more times, with newer technology, with longer clauses. But football’s real precedent is not written in meeting rooms. It is written in the stands, in the memory of the person who stays seated longest, and in the story people tell each other the next day.

So I keep one question unanswered: if every party has already declared the law clear, who is authorised to say that it is not — and where are they permitted to say it?