Evidence First, Verdict Later: VAR and the Standard of a Correct Decision

On June 16, 2026, at the Kazan Arena, referee Andrés Cunha stopped the match between France and Australia in the 58th minute. He put his hand to his earpiece, then left his position and walked toward the small monitor set beside the touchline. The whole stadium waited. In one corner of the stands, thousands of Australian fans had risen to their feet, arms raised, screaming for a penalty. In the opposite corner, French fans sat silent, holding their breath, eyes fixed on the big screen.

Cunha reviewed the incident three times. He saw the ball strike the arm of Josh Risdon inside the penalty area. He turned and pointed to the spot. It was the first penalty in World Cup history to be awarded through VAR. Antoine Griezmann stepped up, fired into the net, and the score of the match opened from a decision born of a small screen.

I sat in front of my screen in Shanghai, recording every second of that moment in my notebook. A decision on the pitch had been overturned, not by the roar of the stands, but by a single frame replayed in slow motion. For someone who works at observing the laws, that was a landmark.

Before VAR existed, the referee's decision on the pitch was final and irreversible. A mistake, however clear, still became part of history. A goal scored from an offside position was still allowed. A reckless tackle that escaped a red card still left its mark on a player's ankle. Football accepted this for more than a century and gave it a gentle name: human error.

IFAB — the International Football Association Board, the body that holds the authority to issue the Laws of the Game — changed its position in the early 2010s. VAR trials were conducted quietly in a few national leagues, then more openly at the 2026 Confederations Cup. By the 2026 World Cup in Russia, VAR appeared for the first time on the biggest stage on earth.

The core of the VAR law lies in the threshold for intervention, not in the technology. IFAB rules that a referee may change a decision only when there is a clear and obvious error, or when a serious incident has been missed. VAR does not decide in place of the referee. VAR supplies evidence so the referee can decide again. A small difference in wording, but it changes the entire way authority operates on the pitch.

Four categories of incidents may be reviewed: whether a goal is valid or not, whether a penalty should or should not be awarded, direct red cards, and mistaken identity. The remaining incidents fall outside VAR's scope, however loud the controversy. Most of the anger in the stands stems from fans not understanding this boundary.

At the 2026 World Cup, VAR operated on a closed-room model: a video referee team sat at the operations centre in Moscow, monitoring every match through dozens of cameras, and contacted the on-field referee only when it detected a clear error. This process opened a foundational question: when does a decision count as having enough grounds to be changed?

After the 2026 World Cup, VAR spread quickly through domestic leagues. The Premier League adopted it from the 2026-2026 season, La Liga from the 2026-2026 season, and many other leagues across Asia, South America, and Africa followed. Each league brought its own interpretation of the intervention threshold, and the differences between leagues became a new subject of debate.

Drawing on my experience observing and recording matches, I built my own data table for all 64 matches of the 2026 World Cup. The result: 335 VAR interventions, 20 overturned decisions, and 10 penalties originating directly from video review.

335 VAR interventions, 335 times the law was called by name in the middle of the pitch. Each time, the referee was forced back to the text of the law, to cross-check every frame, and to reach a conclusion that could be verified. No more room for feeling, for instinct, for the roar of the stands.

The more telling figure lies in the correction accuracy rate. In the group stage, this rate reached only 68.4%. Entering the knockout stage, it rose to 91.2%. A gap of nearly 23 percentage points between two phases of the same tournament, with the same set of laws, the same technology. What explains that distance?

The answer lies in people, not machines. The group stage was the learning phase. The video referees were working at World Cup scale for the first time, with hundreds of new incidents every day. They had to synchronise with the on-field referee, agree on how to read situations, and, above all, agree on the intervention threshold. In the knockout stage, with fewer matches, the team had found its rhythm, and each decision was weighed more carefully.

The intervention threshold is precisely where football law becomes hardest, and also where it is easiest to err. A tackle may be a foul in one league but not in another, depending on how the referee reads the intensity and direction of contact. VAR does not erase that difference. VAR only makes that difference visible, clearer to everyone.

The referee's eye — my name for my own work — forces me to look at the process before looking at the result.

In the course of my work, I set myself a principle and called it the information integrity gate. The principle is simple: a decision has value only when it is anchored to specific evidence. No frame, no verdict. No data, no conclusion. In data-management terms, a null input cannot produce a valid output. Football, though it does not use those words, has operated by exactly this principle since VAR appeared.

What is interesting is that the principle is symmetrical in both directions. It stops referees from ruling without evidence. It also stops the interested parties from concluding about referees without evidence. When a fan screams that a referee is biased, that person is issuing a verdict without a frame. When a commentator asserts a player deliberately dived, that person is concluding without evidence. Both violate the information integrity gate.

Another specific example comes from that same tournament. In the final between France and Croatia, in the 38th minute, referee Néstor Pitana consulted VAR and awarded France a penalty after the ball struck the arm of Ivan Perišić. Griezmann converted. The decision was fiercely disputed, because the distance between arm and ball was very small, and because the direction of the arm's movement was not entirely clear. Yet by the law, the referee followed the correct procedure: he reviewed the frame, cross-checked it against the law on handball, and reached a conclusion. The dispute lay in the interpretation, not in the process.

This is the fundamental difference between a wrong decision and a controversial decision. A wrong decision is one contrary to the evidence. A controversial decision is one consistent with the evidence but contrary to the expectations of one group of people. Throughout my career of observation, I have found that most controversies in the media belong to the second kind. And the second kind needs no fixing, only explaining.

Through a referee's eye, you cheer for no one. You only find who is right. An incident is either a foul or it is not. Either offside or not. But between those two states there exists a grey zone, where the evidence is not clear enough to conclude decisively. In that grey zone, the law sets an important principle: uphold the decision on the pitch. This is the rule many forget.

Here a curious paradox appears. The more powerful the technology, the higher the expectation of absolute accuracy. But football is not a problem with a single answer. A challenge may be seen from ten camera angles, and ten camera angles may yield ten different readings of the same moment. A camera at 240 frames per second does not replace human judgment; it merely supplies more data for that judgment.

By the 2026 World Cup in Qatar, football advanced another step with semi-automated offside technology. The system uses dozens of cameras to track the movement of the ball and points on the players' bodies, then sends a signal to the video referee team within seconds. With offside, the question is more geometric than judgmental, so the technology proved markedly effective. But with handball and the intensity of contact, human judgment still holds the decisive role.

Look to another field to see the parallel. In basketball, video review has become standard in the closing minutes, and there, too, people must accept that some situations cannot be absolutely resolved. In tennis, line technology has settled almost completely the question of in or out, because that is a problem of geometry. Football is not so fortunate. Most of football's most controversial incidents — handball, intensity of contact, a player's intent — are subjective. Technology does not erase subjectivity; it only makes that subjectivity more transparent.

One of the biggest lessons from the 2026 World Cup is that VAR changed how fans watch football, more than it changed the match itself. Previously, an awarded goal was the full stop to every argument. After VAR, an awarded goal is only the beginning of a review process. Fans must learn to wait, must learn to accept that their emotion is not evidence.

Here I want to offer a view contrary to the majority. Many believe that the more VAR intervenes, the fairer football becomes. I hold that the opposite is true. A VAR system that intervenes too often is a system setting its threshold in the wrong place. If the video referee intervened in every minor challenge, the match would shatter into hundreds of fragments, and the authority of the on-field referee would erode day by day.

The data support this view. 335 interventions across 64 matches amount to a little more than 5 per match. That frequency may sound like a lot, but most were silent checks that led to no change of decision. Only 20 decisions were overturned, meaning fewer than one match in three had a changed decision. If VAR intervened in every situation, the figure of 20 would multiply many times over, and football would lose the thing it has most of: continuity.

There is a blind spot that both fans and the media usually overlook. VAR was not designed to find absolute truth. VAR was designed to correct clear and obvious errors. This is a far lower standard than absolute accuracy, and it is a deliberate choice by IFAB. Those who criticise VAR for still making mistakes are judging it by a yardstick it never claimed to meet.

The emotion of the stands and the text of the law always stand on opposite sides. The stands want a verdict immediately, clearly, in their team's favour. The law wants a verdict slowly, grounded in evidence, regardless of which side the outcome leans toward. The two can hardly meet, and the role of one who observes the law is to stand with the text, even when that costs the favour of the majority.

Looking ahead, I believe the most important improvement lies not in camera technology, but in transparency. Publishing the audio exchanged between the on-field referee and the video referee, which has become the norm in some leagues, will be the next step. When people can hear the reasoning behind a decision, the information integrity gate opens for everyone.

Will football one day reach absolute consistency in applying the law? Perhaps not. But with each passing season, the gap between the roar of the stands and the text of the law narrows a little further. And that is already progress.