From VAR to the Transfer Window: When Football Must Judge on Empty Data

In the 58th minute at Kazan Arena, on June 16, 2026, referee Andrés Cunha put his hand to his earpiece, stepped outside the penalty area, and pointed straight to the spot. It was the first penalty ever awarded by VAR in World Cup history, in the match between France and Australia. Antoine Griezmann stepped up and scored. But what I remember most is not the shot. It is the silence before it — the big screen did not replay the incident, the stands went quiet, and the referee stood alone in the middle of the pitch with a kind of data that nobody in the stadium could see. Justice was done. But it was done in silence. That silence began nearly a decade of my writing about football as a system of law.

That day I was in Moscow to follow refereeing decisions. I recorded every incident, every VAR intervention, every time the stands erupted. By the end of the tournament, my notebook held 18 penalties, 7 decisions overturned by VAR, and 4 goals disallowed. But those facts were not what troubled me. What troubled me was a question that seemed simple: what happens when a referee must rule while the data is still incomplete?

That question reaches beyond the pitch. It belongs to the whole of modern football.

When football switched to data mode

The 2026 World Cup was the first to apply VAR across every match. Two years earlier, IFAB — the body that governs the Laws of the Game — had approved trials, and by 2026 the technology had entered the sport's greatest temple. From then on, a match no longer had just one referee. It had an ensemble: the main referee, the assistants, and a sealed room hundreds of kilometres away lined with screens.

That tournament also saw 29 penalties awarded — more than any previous World Cup. The cause did not lie in defenders tackling worse. For the first time, every handball in the box could be reviewed, and the referees knew it before they walked out.

Football had reformed its laws many times before. But this was the first time football placed data on a par with the human eye. Having done so, it had to accept a consequence: decisions would now be examined in the light of data, no longer in the light of trust.

I had done this work before. In 2026, when I was 23, I was a sports data officer in Busan, assigned to review all 38 rounds of K League 1. I logged every foul by Ulsan Hyundai and found a paradox: across 214 fouls, referees issued 9 red cards but overlooked 6 challenges carrying a very high injury risk, stopping at yellow. It took me three weeks to write a 47-page report, trying to find a pattern in the inconsistency. My conclusion was dry: there was no pattern beyond crowd pressure.

Since then, I stopped writing things like “this player deserved a red card”. I cite Article 12 and Article 15 of the Laws of the Game, with error codes and statistics. Every judgement of mine must have a legal frame.

The two courts of football

There is something the pitch and the transfer window share that few are willing to look at directly: both are courts where a verdict cannot wait for complete data.

On the pitch, the referee has no right to postpone. He must whistle in that instant, with what his eyes see, his ears hear, and the screen he is permitted to trust. VAR gives him more angles, but not unlimited time. The crux of VAR is not that it finds the truth, but that it forces the referee to answer to evidence the stands themselves cannot see. That is why the Kazan moment of 2026 haunts me: justice was done, but justice was not explained.

Inside the VAR room, the referee sees more than the stands, but less than what he needs. He sees slow-motion angles, lines, frozen frames. He does not see the defender's intent, the force of the challenge, the striker's fear. The Laws of the Game are written for people, but they are enforced with fragments that people must stitch together themselves.

The paradox does not stop at the touchline. It repeats in a second paradox I logged in my K League report: referees treat big clubs and small clubs differently. That is not a conspiracy theory. It is crowd and media pressure — real, measurable, and repeating across seasons. When 60,000 people shout at once, the referee's ear hears it before his eye can look.

In the transfer window, the court is more closed still. The transfer window is a trial, the fee is the sentence, the player is evidence put on the scales. But unlike the pitch, this trial has no spectators in the courtroom. Nobody sees the medical report, the release clauses, the signing bonuses, or the percentage the agent takes. Fans see only the headline: “X joins Y for Z million euros”. The real part of the story sits in appendices nobody reads.

There is a ritual I have always found strange: the medical. It is presented as a step of objective verification, yet in practice it lasts a few hours for a player the club will pay for years. The data gathered is thin; the expectation placed on it is thick. It is a verdict legitimised by trust, not by evidence.

In many years of watching the transfer market, what worried me most was not the expensive deals. It was the deals closed in a state of missing information that both sides knew about. A player passes a medical, signs a five-year contract, and three months later the old injury recurs. Then people blame the doctor, the player, luck. The root lies elsewhere: a decision was made while the data was still empty.

And here the agent is the loudest variable. They are not wrong to defend their client. But every bit of noise they create distorts the market's signal: a player priced above his true value, a club pushed into buying at any cost, a contract signed while people listened to rumours instead of reading the deal.

I was born in Vietnam and work in South Korea, so I have had the chance to compare how the two football nations handle discipline and refereeing. The VFF and the KFA have different regulatory gaps, but they share one thing: neither has a mechanism for recording decisions made under incomplete information. Without that mechanism, every dispute returns to the starting point — trust in individuals, not in process.

In both courts, the most dangerous thing is not a wrong verdict. The most dangerous thing is a verdict issued while nobody records that the data was then insufficient.

More data does not mean more justice

There is a widespread belief that more technology will make football fairer. I do not believe in that simplicity.

VAR does not correct errors; it relocates them. When a referee misses an offside, the error lies in the human eye. When VAR confirms an offside the naked eye cannot see, the error — if any — lies in whoever drew the line. Technology does not erase subjectivity. It moves subjectivity from one place to another, then coats it in a shell of objectivity.

I call this the illusion of the line. Fans think a line thinner than a hair is proof. But anyone who has operated the system knows: which frame is chosen as the reference, which instant counts as “the ball leaving the foot” — those are human decisions. Technology only executes. It does not judge.

The 2026 World Cup added semi-automated offside technology, and the 2026 World Cup will push decision speed to a new level. But greater speed does not mean fewer disputes. It only means disputes will happen faster, and be harder to catch out.

Here is the most counter-intuitive part: absolute accuracy can be the enemy of football itself. Every time VAR drags on for three minutes, part of the match's narrative emotion is withdrawn. Fans no longer scream when the ball hits the net; they hold their breath for the screen. Football was once a sport of moments that could not be undone. Now it is a sport of moments that can be rewatched.

In esports, the law has no referee; it has code. Football is different. Football has people, and so it has grey zones. A grey zone does not need light; it needs a referee who knows how to stay silent — who knows that sometimes, not intervening is itself a verdict.

The price of absolute justice

Every foul is a precedent, and every precedent is a case law. Modern football is building a system of case law out of data — faster, denser, and colder than any era before it. I do not oppose that. I ask for only one thing: when a verdict is issued while the data is incomplete, record that the data was then incomplete. Transparency about the gap matters no less than transparency about the evidence.

Because if football learns one thing from the blanks, it is this: an honest system is not one that never errs, but one that speaks up when it does not know. And in a transfer window where hundreds of rumours surface every day, fans need exactly that — a filter brave enough to say: here, I do not have enough data to conclude.