The Empty Box in the VAR File: The Trap of a Template With No 'Insufficient Data' Button

The file reached me on a Tuesday morning. A small data package, JSON format, and every field blank.

The title field was empty. The source field was empty. The one-sentence summary was empty. The article-type field read "unclassified". There was no author stance and no stated purpose. The time-sensitivity field said, in plain words, "not assessed". The source-quality field said the same. The information-points list was an empty array, which is to say there was not a single fact to hold on to. Only the "entities involved" field contained any text at all, and it was an instruction: "identify from the information points above." Above it, there were no information points.

Attached to that package was a template with nine analytical dimensions. Each demanded a minimum of three conclusions and two hidden-information items. None of the nine had a box for the sentence "insufficient information to assess."

I have sat in a VAR review room with six camera angles on the monitor, three of them blocked by an assistant referee's back. The referee still had to decide. There is no button marked "abandon due to lack of footage."

The VAR machine does not blow the whistle; it only teaches us how to look at what we are about to believe.

1. Football built an architecture of evidence, then asked why it wobbles

On 16 June 2026, at Kazan, France played Australia in Group C of the World Cup. In the 58th minute, Uruguayan referee Andrés Cunha walked from the touchline to the monitor, reviewed a handball, and reversed his decision. Antoine Griezmann took the penalty. It was the first penalty in World Cup history to be awarded by VAR.

I was twenty that year, a sociology student in Nagoya, and I recorded the entire consultation sequence. Not to argue right or wrong. I wanted to know where power had moved from and to. The authority to decide no longer sat wholly in the referee's eye; it sat in a protocol, a sequence of steps, a set of camera angles, and an English phrase: "clear and obvious error."

Three years later, on 7 July 2026, the Euro 2026 semi-final at Wembley. In the 104th minute, Raheem Sterling went down in the box after a shoulder challenge from Joakim Maehle. Dutch referee Danny Makkelie pointed to the spot without walking to the monitor. Harry Kane missed, then scored the rebound. A nation argued. I wrote a lonely piece defending the position that under the "clear and obvious" standard, a referee may keep his original decision when the error is not clear enough.

Then came the 2026/21 season, when world football contracted under the pandemic and the Premier League set a record for penalties awarded, most of them flowing from IFAB's new handball law. During that long stretch without matchdays, I downloaded the full Opta dataset on 47 handball incidents and coded them by hand: contact angle, arm posture, distance, body position. The pattern showed referees tending to penalise when the arm departed from the "natural silhouette of the body" — a concept the law never defined.

Those three events combine into one question. Football spent six years building an architecture of evidence: more angles, clearer protocols, a higher intervention threshold. So why is it that every time technology opens a blank box, people fill it with something else?

2. Football's default action, and the template's missing default

Football law has a property that analysts rarely notice: it always has a default action for uncertainty. When a referee sees no foul, he does not stop play. When VAR finds no clear error, the on-field decision stands. When the ball crosses the line and nobody is certain, the goal is given. "Play on" is a valid ruling, written into the law, and nobody treats it as a failure.

The analytical template I received had no default action at all.

It had nine dimensions. Tactical and technical. Club finance and the transfer market. Results and the public-opinion cycle. League landscape and team positioning. Rules and governance compliance. Management and dressing room. Risk profile. Media and expectations. Industry transmission.

Each dimension had a table. The table had cells. Empty cells must be filled.

The template had no cell named "insufficient data". It had only "conclusion", "evidence", "risk level". A structure like that is not neutral. It creates pressure to generate content, regardless of whether that content is anchored anywhere.

The core insight sits here: when a template has no default action, the blank gets filled with the thing that sounds most plausible, not the thing that is most true. In football, that is called fabrication. In analysis, it is called professional judgement.

3. Nine dimensions collapse, seen through a referee's lens

Walk through them, the way I walk through incidents on a tape.

In the tactical dimension, the template asks about system, shape, style. But no team is named. No coach, no player, no match, no metric. In football terms, this is a VAR team asked to judge a collision when nobody can identify which player committed the foul. Without a subject there is no analysis. Only judgement.

I hold an old position: xG has been abused, and possession share is the most deceptive index this industry produces. A team that grinds out 60 percent of the ball with meaningless sideways passes is still described as controlling the game. But even to argue against xG, I need an xG figure. Here there is none.

In the results and public-opinion dimension, the template asks about league position, recent form, fixture congestion, pressure on the manager. No table was provided. No form line. No competition name. The opinion cycle is bound tightly to time: a Saturday defeat carries a different weight from a defeat on the following Wednesday. Erase the timestamp and you erase the ability to measure pressure.

In the financial dimension, the template asks about revenue mix, wage bill, net debt, and, for a deal, about the fee, about amortising the transfer across the contract term, about the late-window panic premium. Not a single figure was given. No club was named. No contract length existed to amortise over. No market benchmark existed to call a price expensive or cheap.

In the rules and governance dimension, the template asks which rule system applies: FIFA, a confederation, a national association, or a league's own regulations. No competition was mentioned. No party was charged. No accounting period existed to test a loss threshold against. So the most honest answer remains the one I have used throughout my career: insufficient information to assess.

Clear and obvious — the name sports law gives to its own helplessness.

The phrase was created to limit VAR's power to intervene. It works like a valve: it opens only when the error is large enough. But the law never defines how large. There is no unit of measure. There is no threshold. The result is that the same collision is penalised in one league and waved away in another, and both are correct under the text. The protocol turns ambiguity into authority.

In the media dimension, the template asks about the credibility of transfer rumours, about source tier, about agent motive. To grade a rumour, I need to know where it came from. Without a source there is no tier. A reporter chasing leads in Brazil and an anonymous account on social media produce two different credibility figures, and that gap is my entire profession.

In the time dimension, the sensitivity field states outright that it was never assessed. In football, that is equivalent to an offside incident where the timestamp has been wiped from the frame. You can still draw the line, but the line is anchored to no moment at all.

4. A broken chain and the lesson of the missing link

One detail stands out: a failure in one dimension drags down others.

The "entities involved" field returned an instruction instead of a result. The list was empty. Because the list was empty, the league-landscape dimension could not compare resources between this team and its direct rivals. Because no comparison was possible, the industry-transmission dimension — which rests entirely on entity and landscape mapping — collapsed with it.

In football I have seen the same broken chains. An incident is reviewed for offside, but the camera angle does not show the last defender's foot. Without the foot, there is no offside line. Without the offside line, there is no conclusion about the goal. An entire major decision hangs on a small detail nobody captured.

The difference between football and that analytical template is this: a referee is allowed to say "I did not see it". A semi-automated offside system is allowed to return an undetermined result. Those systems were designed with an escape route.

The template I received had no escape route. It had nine rooms and no doors.

5. The only identifiable risk

In the risk-profile table, every row concerning sporting, financial, personnel, rules or public-opinion risk was blank. Only one row could be filled, and it did not belong to football.

That risk is downstream fabrication.

When an empty data package enters a complete template, the probability of producing highly convincing content is at its highest. The template itself invites filling. The table structure creates the impression that a blank is a defect to be corrected, not a conclusion to be published.

For someone who reads law for a living, this is a familiar failure. When the law leaves a definition blank, the person applying it writes that definition in his own head, then applies it so consistently that it appears to sit in the original text. The 47 handball incidents I coded showed exactly that. Nobody in a VAR room re-reads the law before each incident. They read a version of the law that has been whittled down in their own collective memory.

Another signal worth tracking: this class of error tends to repeat silently. An empty data package accepted once will be accepted a second and third time, until it becomes operational habit. The only way to stop it is to place a validation gate at the handoff point: if the information-points list is empty, halt and return the payload upstream. Without that gate, the system cannot tell the difference between an article with no content and an article dropped in transit.

6. The contrarian view: do not blame the blank page

The easiest reading is to blame the empty package. A pipeline fault, an extraction module that did not run, a transmission stage that dropped the content. Done. Fix the pipe, re-run, everything returns to normal.

I do not believe that is the whole story.

What deserves scrutiny is the design. A template demanding a minimum of three conclusions per dimension, across every dimension, with no cell for a null answer, is itself a design fault. It assumes data are always sufficient. It has no concept of "cannot assess". And because it has no such concept, it forces the operator to choose between two bad options: lie, or breach the format.

This is precisely the logic accident of the pandemic-era handball law. The pandemic-era handball law is a logic accident, and the people who designed it did not notice.

IFAB wanted to remove arbitrariness. They wrote a criterion based on the body silhouette. But they never defined that silhouette, never drew it, never measured it. The result is that the new criterion replaced individual arbitrariness with collective arbitrariness, and a whole season set a penalty record while nobody could explain why one arm was an offence and another was not.

I do not watch a match through a spectator's eyes, but through the eyes of the man the spectators are judging.

And from that position, the clearest thing I see is this: a system with no default action will always choose action over silence. In football, silence has a name. It is called play on. In analysis, silence has no name, so people fill it with speech.

I have also applied a private rule to myself for years: every major controversy must sit overnight. A shocking incident at ten in the evening will have a different shape at seven the next morning, once the data tables have been cross-checked. My most rushed pieces were always the ones that could not survive the night.

7. What must change, and one question left behind

Three proposals, drawn from my own trade of reading law.

The VAR protocol needs an official outcome called "no conclusive camera angle", and that outcome must be published in the match report. At present, when there is no footage, the referee must still say something, and that something is usually logged as an ordinary decision. Publishing the shortfall would be more transparent than publishing a judgement constructed to satisfy procedure.

Every analytical template, inside sport or outside it, needs a mandatory cell for the sentence "insufficient information to assess", and that cell must be treated as a valid result rather than a system error.

And every conclusion needs two attachments: an absolute timestamp and a source tier. Without those two, any analysis resembles an offside frame with the clock erased.

Football learned this lesson over six years, painfully. The sports-analysis industry has not.

If a system is designed to always have an answer, then whose answer is it — when there is nothing at all to answer?