VAR, Power, and the 'Clear and Obvious' Trap: How Five Years of Technology Rewrote Football's Rulebook

On June 16, 2026, at the Kazan Arena, the France–Australia Group C match at the World Cup reached the 58th minute. Antoine Griezmann went down inside the box after a challenge from Joshua Risdon. The Uruguayan referee Andrés Cunha initially shook his head and waved play on. Then he stopped, signalled the players to wait, and walked toward the monitor beside the touchline. A few minutes later he turned back, arm pointing straight at the penalty spot. Griezmann scored, and it became the first penalty in World Cup history awarded through VAR.

I sat and recorded that entire sequence — not to argue right or wrong, but to understand something else that was shifting: power. Within about four minutes, the final authority to decide had left the referee's eyes and passed through a screen. The question I carried for the next five years was not "was Cunha right or wrong," but: at what point is a human still the judge, and at what point has the machine taken the whistle?

Before 2026, the referee was the only person holding final authority on the pitch. The Laws of the Game, issued by IFAB (the International Football Association Board), granted him full power to decide "according to what he observes." Error was part of the system, and people accepted it the way they accept the weather. Moments like Diego Maradona's "Hand of God" in 2026 lived in fans' memories for decades, not because they were correct, but because they were proof that a human could be wrong and the match would carry on.

VAR emerged from years of trials across many domestic leagues. The 2026 World Cup in Russia was the first time it was used officially at a World Cup. Its design philosophy was summed up in one phrase: minimum interference, maximum benefit. Four years later, at the 2026 World Cup in Qatar, semi-automated offside technology (SAOT) once again changed how referees reach decisions, as a system of cameras and a sensor inside the ball could reconstruct an offside position within seconds. In just two tournament cycles, authority on the pitch was redistributed twice.

But there is a paradox sitting right inside the "minimum interference" philosophy. To interfere rarely, one must define what counts as "clear enough to interfere." And that definition was never written down in a measurable way. The result is that every referee, every league, every season, builds its own private threshold.

What matters is not that the technology arrived, but what it was designed to do. VAR is not empowered to overturn every decision. It may intervene in only four categories: goals, penalties, direct red cards, and mistaken identity. And it may intervene only when there is a "clear and obvious error." That phrase is the heart of the entire system — and also its weakest point.

I remember starting my analytical career at a local newsroom, where the first rule was never to write what you cannot verify. That very rule made me suspicious of a phrase the whole football industry was using without anyone defining it.

I spent weeks re-reading the records of VAR incidents at the 2026 and 2026 World Cups, along with the full IFAB guidance documents. There is a repeating pattern few people mention: technology does not make decisions more objective — it only moves the argument from "what the referee saw" to "how the referee interpreted it."

Take the Griezmann incident. From the main camera, the contact between Risdon and Griezmann can be read two ways: Risdon touched the ball first and then the man, or Risdon touched the man first. VAR rolled back several angles. But even with six cameras, a physical gap remains: 25 frames per second is not enough to establish the order of contact within a window shorter than one-twentieth of a second. Technology does not fill that gap; it only makes the gap look more credible, because it is presented on a big screen.

A clearer case: the Euro 2026 semi-final between England and Denmark, on July 7, 2026, at Wembley. In the 104th minute of extra time, Raheem Sterling went down in the box after shoulder contact with Joakim Maehle. The Dutch referee Danny Makkelie pointed to the spot without needing to check the monitor. Under the "clear and obvious error" standard, he was entitled to stand by his original decision if the error was not truly clear. Harry Kane's kick was saved by Kasper Schmeichel, but he scored the rebound. England won 2-1 and reached the final. An entire nation argued, but the real issue was not the penalty — it was that the most controversial decision of the tournament was made without any VAR intervention at all.

That is the central paradox: a system built to correct errors, whose own "clear and obvious" threshold is what protects errors from being corrected. If an incident is blurry enough not to count as a "clear error," it stands — regardless of whether it is physically right or wrong.

The 2026 World Cup produced a new variant of the same problem. In the Japan–Spain match, Ao Tanaka's goal was allowed even though the ball appeared to have gone out of play before the decisive pass. SAOT reconstructed the image and concluded the ball still had a portion on the line. Millions of viewers saw the opposite on their own screens. Here the technology was not wrong — but it created a gap between data and perception, and that gap is where controversy breeds.

In the same tournament, during Argentina's group-stage match against Saudi Arabia, the semi-automated offside system flagged ten offsides in the first half alone — a number never seen before in a World Cup match. That reveals a dry truth: when technology is sensitive enough, it does not just correct errors, it exposes things the human eye never saw. The problem is that viewers were never trained to see those things.

Running alongside all this is the handball story. When COVID-19 froze global football, IFAB issued a new interpretation of handball in the box. In the 2026/21 season, the Premier League saw penalties surge, most of them from balls striking an arm at very short range and in an unavoidable posture. I downloaded data on dozens of handball calls and coded them myself along three variables: angle of contact, arm position, and distance. The result showed a consistent trend: referees tend to penalise when the arm deviates from the "natural silhouette of the body" — a concept never defined in the Laws. In other words, referees were applying a standard the lawmakers had never written down.

This is where I have to say plainly what the analysis world tends to avoid: VAR's value is not in accuracy, but in its ability to create a shared language for justifying decisions. Before VAR, a referee only had to say "that is what I saw." After VAR, he must say "this error was clear and obvious." Both are unverifiable statements — but the second sounds more scientific. And in a sport where a referee's authority depends on being trusted, scientific language is a suit of armour.

There is a psychological dimension rarely mentioned: after VAR arrived, referees no longer faced pressure only from the stands, but from the very system standing behind them. Every decision could be rolled back, measured, and dissected. The result is a new generation of referees learning to officiate in a way that "survives" the screen, rather than officiating by what they genuinely believe. I do not watch matches through a spectator's eyes, but through the eyes of the man being judged by the spectators — and from that angle, the scariest thing is not being wrong, but being seen as wrong.

This explains why the same incident is a penalty in one league and not in another. Not because the laws differ, but because the intervention threshold differs — and that threshold lives in the referee's head, not in the document.

The most counter-intuitive thing I have drawn from five years of watching: VAR did not make football fairer, it made football appear fairer. And in sport, the feeling of fairness matters more than fairness itself, because the feeling is what keeps fans coming back.

Look at the numbers. At the 2026 World Cup, VAR checked hundreds of incidents and intervened in roughly twenty decisions across the tournament. At the 2026 World Cup, that figure rose alongside SAOT. But the number of controversies did not fall — it only changed subject. People no longer argue "did the referee see it," they argue "should VAR have intervened." The blind spot of the judgement process shifted, it did not disappear.

This is also why I distrust how crowds react. When Sterling went down in the 104th minute, a continent split in two. But emotion cannot measure a foul. An incident does not become wrong merely because millions believe it is wrong, nor right merely because a committee sitting in Zurich says it is right. The Laws are the product of a large committee, not of a lone conspirator — and precisely for that reason, they are wrong systematically, not deliberately.

This leads to an uncomfortable conclusion: if we want real fairness, we must accept that technology will never deliver it — only clear legal definitions can. But clear definitions require lawmakers to admit they never defined what they were governing. Over years of working with sports law documents, I realised that phrases like "clear and obvious" or "subjective judgement" do not make the law clearer — they simply give a handsome name to the law's own helplessness.

The coming trend is obvious: technology will keep being pushed onto the pitch, but the language of the law will not keep up. SAOT can determine offside in seconds, but it cannot answer the bigger question: when is an error clear enough to correct? As long as that question is answered by human intuition, every new machine is just another coat of gloss on the same old system.

What needs doing is not adding cameras, but rewriting the definition of intervention — transparent, measurable, and not hiding behind phrases no one can verify. If one day football's laws define the "natural silhouette of the body" by measurement rather than intuition, that is the day VAR truly begins to work. Until then, it is still only teaching us how to see what we are about to believe.