Am I wrong about VAR?

I have always been broadly in favour of VAR¹. That puts me in a diminishing minority of football fans. When Leicester was relegated to the Championship in 2023, many fans’ reaction was ‘at least we won’t have to put up with VAR any more’: it now seems to be an article of faith among fans that everyone dislikes VAR, and I suspect they are broadly right. And recognising this has made me question my instincts: a system that has so completely lost the support of fans might be unsustainable. If the point of the rules of a game is to make it fair, entertaining and competitive, and fans think that VAR has done the opposite, then something has gone badly wrong.

So I was pondering writing about VAR last year, and then Daisy Christodoulou published her book I Can’t Stop Thinking About VAR, which I would highly recommend. She also joined a good discussion about it on a recent episode of the It Was What It Was podcast.

DC is an educational writer and commentator who is also a West Ham fan, and she has thought about the issues around VAR much more than I have. Her book is a wide-ranging, eclectic, thoughtful, and at times philosophical exploration not only of VAR, but what it tells us about the rules and purposes of sport and the wider culture around it.

(I cannot resist mentioning that I posted on social media about the book on the day that DC’s team, West Ham, came to Leicester last December. Delightfully, within the first two minutes of that game - Ruud van Nistelrooy’s first as Leicester manager - Bilal El Khannouss on Leicester’s left wing made a pass that sliced open the high West Ham defence, and Jamie Vardy ran onto the ball in the channel, charged unopposed into the box and finished neatly with his right foot past Lukasz Fabianski in the Hammers goal, the ball neatly kissing the far side of the net. The flag went up for an offside but, after a VAR check, the offside was overturned and the goal was given, which felt - to me - nicely poetic. Leicester went on to win the game 3-1, but sadly that was a false dawn for van Nistelrooy’s stint as Leicester manager.)

In summary, DC’s view (with apologies to her if I have misrepresented it) is that if VAR is to work - and I don’t think she’s confident it can - it needs to be radically rethought, in the light of a more nuanced understanding of how football and its laws operate. The book therefore challenges my instincts and, as I write this, I’m not really sure what I think. So I decided to write this piece to try and find out whether I have changed my mind. I’m starting it without knowing where I will end up, which I recognise can be hazardous. But here goes.

My view of VAR has always been quite simple: refereeing is an almost impossibly difficult job, requiring fine judgements on the basis of brief and sometimes partial glimpses of incidents. Referees, with the support of their two assistants on the touchlines, have to be able to spot everything that happens and make immediate judgements about whether there has been some sort of infringement of the laws; for example, if there is a 50:50 tackle they need to decide who (if anyone) should be penalised for it. Given that football is a low-scoring game, some of these judgements can have a decisive impact on the outcome of a game: was that coming-together, in the lead-up to someone scoring, a foul which should rule the goal out? Was that push by an attacker while a last-minute corner was scored enough to warrant a free-kick? I genuinely have no idea how referees make those sorts of judgements.

It is worth noting that perhaps the single most important decision in football - did the ball cross the goal line? - was already, and I think uncontroversially, being checked automatically through goal-line technology, which was introduced in 2013, long before VAR. Ritchie de Laet’s goal against Villa in a famous comeback win in Leicester’s title-winning season was confirmed within seconds by this system.

Goal-line technology would have corrected a notorious refereeing error, when Frank Lampard’s ‘goal’ against Germany in the 2010 World Cup was not given despite TV pictures showing it clearly crossed the line.

Of course, for top-flight games, multiple cameras around the ground can instantly provide a range of different views of any incident, allowing commentators and sofa-fans to watch repeated replays of incidents that referees get to see fleetingly only once. Sometimes the world can see immediately that a referee has missed something, or made an error. So it seems perverse that the only people who are not allowed to view these pictures are the people who are responsible for making those fine judgements. That’s the point I keep coming back to: why would we actively choose to make refereeing even more difficult than it needs to be?

One argument against VAR might be that referees do a fine job anyway. But I don’t think anyone thinks that. Indeed, my sense is that there is a strong overlap between fans who don’t like VAR and fans who think that the quality of refereeing in the Premier League is appallingly bad, one of those casually asserted views that brooks no argument. (I may at times have joined in with chants of ‘you don’t know what you’re doing’, but secretly I have more sympathy with referees than many of my fellow fans seem to.) I know that one of the joys of being a football fan is being able to hold firm opinions without evidence or consequence, but it is - to put it politely - mildly contradictory to think that refereeing is unacceptably poor while at the same time advocating doing away with one of the few things that should help them do their jobs better, and mitigate at least some of their mistakes.

Over the years I have heard various unconvincing arguments made against VAR. One is that it stops people (fans and players) from celebrating. That may indeed be some people’s experience, though it’s not mine. Even in pre-VAR days, it was usually worth a glance at the assistant to check for a stray offside flag before cheering a goal. But having done that, I don’t remember ever restraining celebrations even knowing a goal may still be chalked off; and when we get the outcome of a VAR check, after tense seconds or minutes have ticked away, we either get to celebrate again, if the goal is confirmed, or grumblingly have to endure the jeers of celebrating opposition fans if it’s overturned².

Indeed, VAR can create additional layers of emotion and jeopardy: like when Kelechi Iheanacho scored a goal deep into injury time against Everton in December 2019, which was flagged offside but then awarded on review, leading to a Leicester win (we had been 1-0 down for much of the game); the cheers when the referee made the TV signal indicating an overturned decision to give the goal were among the loudest I can remember. Or when Ben Chilwell - an ex-player we’d been systematically booing since he came onto the pitch as a substitute - thought he’d scored a late goal for Chelsea in the 2021 FA Cup Final, which was ruled offside on review. There is footage of some Chelsea fans celebrating that goal and then suddenly realising it had been ruled out, and looking embarrassed and furious, which I’m afraid I enjoyed far too much³. Watch that video and then tell me VAR robs football of entertainment.

There’s also an argument that VAR has, in some ways, been badly implemented. I think that’s true. Because of the nature of the game it was bound to be harder to execute than for some other sports: in particular the fact that, in football, play sometimes continues uninterrupted for many minutes, rather than having regular pauses. By contrast, in cricket - which has a reputation for being old-fashioned but is often strikingly innovative - play stops every few seconds between balls, allowing reviews to happen where needed without interrupting the flow of the game. Over the last two decades, cricket has embraced the Decision Review System (DRS), which allows players to request reviews of umpires’ decisions: it’s not been perfect or entirely without controversy, but it has been given the time and space for the flaws to be ironed out, and the tactics around use of DRS have become part of the game. I don’t see any evidence that anyone wants to get rid of DRS now.

Yet the football authorities don’t seem to have learnt from successful implementation of technological aids in other sports, or from effective development of systems in other contexts⁴. This was shown during the Spurs v Liverpool game in September 2023, when Luis Diaz scored a goal that was incorrectly ruled offside on the field. The VAR, Darren England, should have overturned the decision, but - it later emerged - thought that the on-field decision had been to award the goal. Seeing that Diaz was onside, he therefore gave the on-field referee the nod, thinking he was confirming the goal should stand, but he inadvertently confirmed that the goal should be ruled out, which is what happened. Such a basic process design error (since tightened up, I assume) is completely indefensible, and speaks to an alarming lack of care in the design of the VAR system. This woeful incident is a good argument against badly-implemented VAR, but is not an argument against VAR in principle.

So what are the good arguments against VAR?

One is the uncertainty and awkwardness of what DC calls ‘ghost minutes’. If something was a foul or an offside, the game should have been stopped. If it wasn’t, the game should have been allowed to carry on. So what happens for the period of time after a possible incident has been waved away by the referee, but is being reviewed by the VAR, when we don’t know whether an offence has been committed, and therefore whether the game should be continuing⁵?

One example is when there’s a close offside decision (like before Vardy’s goal against West Ham): the assistant referee flags, the defenders momentarily pause, the attacker scores and then a check shows the attacker was onside; and then counterfactuals come into play - most obviously, if they hadn’t seen the raised flag in the corners of their eyes, would the defenders have been able to prevent the goal (unlikely in the Vardy case)? More significant is when there is a penalty shout dismissed by the referee, after which the game continues while it is being reviewed by the VAR (as happened in a February 2020 match between Manchester City and Spurs) - anything significant happening in that time, the ‘post-incident period’ as it is officially called, potentially including a goal, would be wiped out and deemed not to have happened if the VAR decided that the penalty should have been awarded. These examples highlight the general point that changes to a complex system will have unexpected and unintended consequences. Those consequences may be manageable, and in some cases may even be beneficial (like DRS in cricket improving the scope for spinners to get LBW decisions); but they can also create significant new risks and uncertainties, which in some cases may outweigh the benefits of the changes that led to them.

There is also a measurement problem: television frame rates (typically 50 per second) are not always quick enough to accurately determine whether a player is offside. If an attacker and a defender are both moving quickly, then a lot can change in the milliseconds between frames, so TV pictures cannot always tell us whether one was in front of the other at the precise moment the ball was kicked: in one frame the ball hadn’t been kicked and the attacker was onside; in the next the ball has been kicked and the attacker is offside, but the order of the intervening events is unknowable. And there is also some judgement involved (and a possibility of error) in deciding where to put the lines on a 2D screen that show where two players are relative to one another. Again these are not arguments against VAR in principle; but knowing that the costs and complexities of VAR will, in the case of close offside calls, not even always give us assurance that we have the right decision must be a factor when deciding how and when to use the system.

In considering the arguments for VAR, we could probably live with and mitigate the ‘ghost minute’ problem and the measurement problem if they were the only issues. But I have come to recognise that there is a more compelling argument against VAR: the fact that many of football’s laws are inherently approximate and subjective. These laws have evolved since the nineteenth century to reflect that any number of things can happen during a football match, which need to be managed and assessed for their compliance with the spirit of the game. The reliance on the judgements of the referee and their assistants is therefore part of football. The officials are human, of course, so sometimes these judgements will be inconsistent, but over the years we’ve learnt to live with that.

I think there is only one real, undisputed exception to the subjectivity of football: a goal is a goal. No one argues that a ball that hit the post, or one that didn’t cross the line even if it was only 11mm from doing so, should be counted as a goal, and that’s why goal-line technology is not seriously contested.

But everything else is more-or-less fuzzy, operating in a grey, contested zone. And trying to illuminate that fuzziness through additional detail in the laws - with the aim that they can be more objectively assessed by a VAR - only shines a harsher spotlight on the uncertainties, building in extra layers of complication and more opportunities for confusion⁶. And it means that the VAR - and indeed the on-field officials - find it hard to implement the new laws confidently and credibly. So we have lost the simple, intuitive laws that fans mostly understood, without gaining the consistency or confidence that the VAR system was aiming for.

As an example, in chapter 1 of her book DC lays out how the handball law has been expanded from 20 words long⁷ - with an implicit assumption that referees will be able to make sensible judgements about how to interpret it in whatever situation may arise - to one over eleven times as long, so it can be used by the VAR⁸. What is an arm? When should a handball be treated as accidental? When should it be treated as a serious infringement? The answers to these questions were left to referees’ judgement for a century and a half, but that doesn’t work if a VAR has to decide whether there has been an error serious enough for them to intervene. So we now have a much longer law, which tries to codify something the football world mostly already knew, but it has not noticeably improved the game. Instead, rather like a fractal, however much detail the laws go into - whatever level of magnification we use - we always find further complexities and ambiguities; and unlike fractals, the laws are not even pretty to look at: they are grey and turgid, confusing and frustrating.

One of the fascinating and challenging realities about the rules of sport is that players will try to find loopholes and ways to game and gain advantage from them. The longer and more complicated the laws are, the more such opportunities there will be. This can lead to perverse consequences, such as players running with their hands behind their backs, for fear that if the ball so much as touches their arms they will be penalised, which was clearly not the intention of the laws. Soon after VAR was introduced, Jonathan Wilson, the football writer who wrote the foreword to DC’s book, posited the ‘Wilson Scenario’, which is a potential consequence of the new, more complex, VAR-driven law, under which a handball is more serious if it leads to a goal-scoring opportunity: if an accidental handball in an attacker’s own box enabled a long ball up the pitch which led to a goal at the other end, the handball would then have to be checked and penalised by the VAR, which would lead to a penalty to the defending team; so the rational thing for the attacking player receiving that long ball would be not to score the goal, to avoid the handball being reviewed, and that doesn’t make any sense, and is clearly not what the laws intended.

Fouls are similarly hard to pin down. Even if we can’t precisely describe them, fans mostly know what fouls are when we see them - DC calls this tacit knowledge - but it is impossible to define the line between what is and isn’t a foul, in a way that can be objectively applied by a VAR to the infinite number of situations that might arise during a game. A lot of minor incidents during the course of a game might technically be fouls, but they don’t affect the game and don’t really matter, so referees use their discretion and let them go, if they even notice them. But the VAR system assumes that such discretion should not exist: everything should be scrutinised, notably in the run-up to a goal, and goals thereby get ruled out for minor infractions that not even the opposing players noticed or appealed for at the time.

Given that - even with the longer laws we now have - there is a lot of judgement involved in deciding what is a foul, the effect of VAR is to replace one referee’s subjective judgement with another (and sometimes that is then in turn replaced by a panel’s judgement post-match). Even though the VAR has access to different and slower motion pictures, it is not obvious that this leads them to make better decisions: slowing pictures down can (as DC shows) make people judge actions to be more intentional than when seen in real time. And however many camera angles they have, a VAR still needs to make a judgement about whether an incident is serious enough to be penalised. If they decide it is, we get a new judgement, though not necessarily a better one, at the cost of making players and fans hang around waiting, frustrated, while the momentum of the game drains away.

DC suggests a way of capturing the tacit knowledge of what a foul is using an approach called comparative judgement, developed for use in educational assessment⁹, to create a ‘Foul Probability Index’ that captures through exemplification which fouls a wide range of football experts and fans judge to be the most serious, and so allows an informed decision about which ones were serious enough to be penalised. Ultimately this could allow the VAR to make a more objective judgement about whether a particular incident was a foul, which would need the support of much more sophisticated technology than VARs have available to them at the moment. Though she makes a compelling case, and I definitely agree it’s worth a try, I am not convinced this approach will be embraced by football fans, and I suspect it will be - at best - many years before it could be used in the heat of football battle.

Unlike handballs and fouls, offside is ostensibly an objective decision, other than when it needs a judgement about whether a player is ‘interfering with play’. Whether an attacker was beyond the last defender when the ball was played sounds like a straightforward fact. It is a decision could be - indeed may soon be - automated¹⁰. But the way fans and commentators have reacted to VARs’ offside decisions suggests that the football community don’t really want objective decisions at all: if we did, we would be happy with a goal being ruled out for an armpit or a big toe being offside, but many are not - there’s no confidence that such decisions are either accurate or within the spirit of the game¹¹. The ‘clear and obvious error’ criteria for VAR intervention does not apply to objective, factual decisions - including offside - which is why VAR ends up trying to measure toenails¹².

The revealed preference of football fans is for an assistant referee to make a judgement in real time about whether a situation looks and feels offside or not. And we are willing to accept that these decisions will be imperfect and inconsistent¹³. We would - it seems - prefer a decision that may be objectively wrong (giving us an opportunity to have a good moan if it disadvantages us), but which is quick and within the spirit of the game, over a decision that is laboriously pored over and ultimately - probably, within the limits of what the technology can tell us - accurate, as if accuracy was the most important thing. It is telling that the culprit when a goal is overturned following review is generally said to be the VAR, rather than ‘the offside rule correctly applied by the VAR’.

Importantly, the offside law - with or without VAR, and even when it is not applied with strict accuracy - shapes the game in ways that make it competitive and interesting to watch, and creates opportunities for different tactical approaches. Defending teams can hold a high line to squeeze the play, or a low block to stretch it. Attacking teams facing a high line have to try and time their runs to be roughly in front of the last defender when the ball is played, and may take different levels of risk with that, testing their skill and tactical acuity. Sometimes they may get it wrong. But where there are close offside calls, the players themselves, the fans, and sometimes even the TV cameras and the people drawing the lines for the VAR can’t tell whether a player is really offside or not, so the concept of ‘wrong’ can be unknowable - you might as well toss a coin. Either way, the offside rule has served its purpose: it has helped make the game what it is. Without VAR, sometimes the assistant referee will get it wrong, one way or another, but it probably evens itself out, the law has done its job, and the game flows on.

Even allowing for all these uncertainties and the fuzzinesses, there are of course refereeing decisions, even relating to offsides and handballs, that are outside the margin of error and objectively wrong: Harry Maguire was clearly and obviously offside before he scored his injury time winner for Manchester United against Leicester at Old Trafford recently, but that decision was not reviewed because it was an FA Cup game. As a Leicester fan, I find myself sanguine rather than angry about that, though I am not sure I would have felt the same had it been a league game that had made the difference between us being relegated or staying in the league¹⁴.

So, reflecting on all this, am I wrong about VAR? In a word: yes. I am (or was) wrong. I have changed my mind.

The arguments against VAR (or at least some of them) are more compelling than I had appreciated. VAR does not generally sit comfortably with the realities of how football is played and enjoyed: that’s not, as I had previously assumed, simply the argument of football nostalgics wanting to preserve an imagined golden age of the game. It reflects the nature of football - a game with simple, high-level rules which leave a lot to the judgement of referees, who are expected to understand and officiate whatever is going on around them within the spirit of the game. The changes to the laws that VAR has driven, trying to make them more precise so they can be applied more accurately and consistently, has run into the problem that there is a lot that is implicit about how the game works, which could never be turned into an algorithm: so many things could happen during a game that could not be foreseen, so it would be impossible to try and make a rule for all of them, which is why football’s laws are so high level, leaving much to the officials’ judgement.

And I was guilty of taking it as read that the most important thing about the laws of football is that they can be and are applied accurately and consistently. But I realise that’s not the case. They’re not criminal laws, so they don’t shape society or determine whether people go to prison. Football is not a matter of life and death. Our ambition should be for a game that is fair, competitive and entertaining, and the laws of football should be at the service of that; we should aim for accuracy in the application of the laws only to the extent that it supports that objective. The costs and complexities introduced to try and make VAR work have ended up out of proportion to the problem they were trying to solve¹⁵.

What is clear from the VAR experiment is that by trying to turn football into a sport where everything is nailed down, defined and judged precisely, we lose a key part of the essence of the game, how it flows and what is allowed. If VAR has helped us recognise and value that, it has not been all bad.

So where does this leave us? In her book, DC proposes to pause VAR and spend two years trying out various alternative options. I disagree with this. I do like the idea of trying out different ideas out of the spotlight of the professional game (DC suggests ‘law labs’, for example in university football or specially organised tournaments), including some ideas that sound like they wouldn’t work; the experience of introducing technology into sport shows us that some ideas work when they sound like they wouldn’t, and vice versa, so we should be open-minded. I suspect that many possible innovations (such as DC’s suggestions - a Foul Probability Index, a player review system, and a more lenient offside law) will come up against the problems above: they sit awkwardly with the realities of what football is. But I may be wrong: we will only ever know that if we try them.

I would suggest setting some tests for whether any innovations should be adopted more widely. Their purpose should not be greater accuracy and consistency for the sake of it, because that’s not what football wants or needs. Rather, we should aim for a system that is quick, simple and proportionate, and makes the game better for fans (in the stadium as well as those watching at home). Anything that can do that should be warmly welcomed.

The automated offside system should be tried as planned, and I hope it proves successful. The main measure of success will be if no one really notices it - if assistants’ flags are mostly raised when they should be, and not if they shouldn’t (accepting that, as discussed above, ‘should’ and ‘shouldn’t’ are fuzzy concepts here). I’m not confident it’ll work though: it will probably continue to show us armpits and big toes being offside, and such decisions, even if they are strictly correct, aren’t what football seems to want. And I don’t really know how the system will judge whether a player is interfering with play. So if in a year or two we find ourselves endlessly debating the automated system, I would suggest we abandon it, for the same reason we should abandon the current approach to VAR: despite the best of intentions, it’s making things better not worse.

But, unlike DC, I don’t think we should pause the VAR system completely while we test out possible alternatives. Because there is one important thing we do know about what works: where technology is asked to help make decisions that are important, objective and uncontentious, its input is valuable and valued - as shown in particular by goal-line technology, which is never discussed except on the rare occasions it goes wrong.

And there is one type of decision that VARs are asked to make that, in my view, falls into this category: decisions where a referee has completely missed a serious infringement, either because they did not see it or did not realise its seriousness. Examples might be when a player is metres offside, or when there is a red card offence off the ball, a blatant push in the penalty area during a corner, or a clear handball that led to a goal. Even in a world of subjective decisions, such mistakes could be seen as objectively and uncontentiously wrong: I suspect even Manchester United fans would (at least privately) accept that Harry Maguire was offside before he scored the recent winner at Old Trafford, and French fans would, I think, acknowledge that Thierry Henry’s 2009 goal against Ireland should not have stood. Football would be poorer if the opportunity to spot and review such errors was lost, even if only temporarily: indeed, there is a risk that players, knowing that a VAR was not watching them, would be incentivised to try and gain an unfair advantage when they knew they were out of sight of the on-field officials.

So I would suggest a more limited ambition for the VARs: give them a remit not to look for ‘clear and obvious’ errors, but for mistakes that are indisputably clear and blindingly obvious: egregious blunders that simply cannot be allowed to stand, for the credibility of the game. If that means a VAR has to sit there for most of the time with nothing to do, that should be seen as a success.

The VAR system was, indeed, originally intended to deal only with the most serious errors, and there have been attempts to drag it back to that¹⁶. But I don’t think that worthy ambition can be achieved while VARs are expected to intervene on subjective judgements (and as explained above, I think even offside decisions might as well be seen as subjective). Since what is serious is a subjective judgement itself - it is often not clear and obvious what a clear and obvious error is - VARs will always find themselves tangled up in debatable decisions, if they are required to second-guess the judgements of the on-field officials. So we should stop asking them to do that.

In the system I’m suggesting, where the VAR no longer intervenes in decisions where they think the on-field officials have merely made an incorrect judgement, they would - for example - not need offside lines to be drawn, because they would only take action when the naked eye could see that a decision to raise or not raise a flag had been wrong. There would be no need for a handball law referring to the unnatural bigness of the body, or lines drawn on a shoulder showing where the arm ended, because the VAR would not be trying to make such fine judgements. If there was any doubt in their mind about whether to intervene, they should not do so. Could such a limited-VAR system work? I think it’s worth a try.

Perhaps this is a forlorn hope, but VAR might then start to fade into the background. There would still be refereeing errors and controversies and debates, of course, which fans and pundits know and love. With the memory of VAR fresh in their minds, errors might even be recognised (if not always by partisans) as an inevitable reflection of the uncertainties and ambiguities of this great, daft game of ours. And sometimes there would be incidents where there was legitimate debate about whether the VAR should have intervened - though everyone would come to know the mantra that, if there’s a debate to be had, the VAR should stay out of it; so such debates should largely resolve themselves.

One important effect of this limited-VAR model would be that, without a VAR looming over it, football would no longer be setting an impossible standard of accuracy that referees were implicitly expected to meet. Debates about refereeing decisions would be underpinned by the knowledge that we’ve tried to do things differently and it’s not worked, so this is the system we’re stuck with, with all its imperfections. From a referee’s point of view it might - though I’m not a referee so I can only speculate - ease the pressure on them: they would still have a backstop if they missed something glaring, which even the best referees will do on occasions, but most of the time they would be able to concentrate on refereeing to the best of their abilities. They could use their professional judgement and common sense for the vast majority of decisions, and not have those constantly being second-guessed by one of their colleagues in a video-booth, with the whole world watching. This would allow the football authorities to focus on helping referees to make better judgements, rather than digging ever-deeper holes trying to get an inherently flawed system to work.

We would, as a consequence, be able to revert to a simpler set of laws that would reflect that reality, and fans’ expectations, and trust the judgements of the on-field officials as we always used to; the Wilson scenario could be quietly pensioned off. And we could stop having those quasi-philosophical debates about whether an offside flag should be raised if there is the possibility it might be overturned, and how we should conceptualise passages of play which are subsequently proven not to have existed.

Finally, having changed my mind in the course of writing this piece, I need to revisit the arguments in favour of VAR that I set out at the top of this piece. My key worry was that, without VAR, on-field officials are the only people watching the game who don’t have access to the footage that shows whether the decisions they have made were right or wrong. I now realise that would be a stronger argument if VAR had, in practice, made life better and easier for referees; whereas on the whole it seems to have done the opposite - as we can see when referees make their weary way to the pitchside monitor to review a decision, observed in turn by a vast audience who all know they will almost certainly overturn it. In the system I’m suggesting, the VAR would still be able to tip off a referee (details tbc) if they had made a real howler. But in general, the experience of VAR should have given us a renewed respect for officials, and reinforced the importance of letting them do their job: those on the field of play, watching the game with an experienced eye, will be best-placed to make the judgements that someone has to make, to give us a game worth playing and watching. So, for me at least, that concern falls.

I am at ease with the fact that the Iheanacho goal against Everton would not have stood under the limited-VAR model, but that the Ben Chilwell goal in the FA Cup Final would have done (so that FA Cup Final would probably have gone to extra time and perhaps penalties, which would probably have benefited Chelsea). And we would have lost the opportunity to mock the expressions on the faces of those Chelsea fans as their celebrations were abruptly ended. So be it. There would have been other things to cheer.

And, in my view, all of that would be a price worth paying so that Daisy Christodoulou, and all football fans, would be able at last to stop thinking about VAR - and, if necessary, find something else to complain about instead.

1. Video Assistant Referee, introduced over the last few years to check key decisions during football matches. Despite the way the term is sometimes used, the VAR is the person not the technology.

2. Though even I find the occasional fans’ chants of ‘V-A-R’, following a contested decision we didn’t like, a bit embarrassing.

3. I cannot fathom why those Chelsea fans made that footage public, but kudos to them for it.

4. Atul Gawande’s 2014 Reith lectures about medical errors are relevant, fascinating and moving.

5. There are similar issues in cricket, though not so protracted, which have been discussed on BBC Test Match Special’s Ask The Umpire from time to time.

6. A few years ago I posted a thread on Twitter arguing that VAR had exposed that the purposes of the laws of the game were not always clear, and that we should start by defining and agreeing those, so that we could define clear, objective laws to meet those purposes. I now think I was only half right: the problem is that some of the purposes of football’s laws cannot be precisely articulated - they are implicit and widely understood, but hard to nail down - and the laws themselves are a fair reflection of that.

7. ‘Handling the ball involves a deliberate act of a player making contact with the ball with the hand or arm’.

8. It is spread across most of pages 16 and 17 of the book.

9. There are notable parallels between VAR and educational assessment: in particular, the need to manage measurement error while retaining public confidence, and to balance validity (measuring the right thing) with reliability (measuring consistently).

10. I will be intrigued to see how fans react to automated offsides: maybe the decisions will be quick enough that they will barely be noticed, and we will simply see better-informed decisions by assistant referees which everyone will be happy with. But if there are any teething troubles, which on past experience seems likely, the technology will no doubt be seized upon by angry fans, and become another stick to beat the system with.

11. See for example this early comment from Martyn Ziegler in the Times.

12. The fact that there is a subjective element to offside - whether an attacker is interfering with play - if anything reinforces that drawing lines on a screen largely misses the point.

13. ‘We just want some consistency’ is a common complaint of football pundits and fans - mostly, to be fair, when they think their team has been disadvantaged - but I don’t think this applies to offsides, where we want the game to flow and good goals scored within the spirit of the rules to stand.

14. Spoiler alert: we’re going to be relegated.

15. DC quotes St Augustine’s ‘disordered loves’.

16. See for example here.