Why football needs a close-season pause, a radical reduction in scope, or the courage to scrap it altogether
There are moments when football tells you exactly what is wrong with itself. Not through a seminar, not through a laminated protocol, not through a slow-motion replay from seven angles, but through one incident that lays the whole problem bare.
West Ham versus Everton did that.
Everton were chasing European football. West Ham were fighting for survival. The match was finely balanced, the stakes were real, and then came the kind of penalty-area incident VAR was supposedly invented to fix.
Thierno Barry was grappling with Mateus Fernandes near the byline. Fernandes, the West Ham player involved in the duel, is generally listed as a midfielder rather than a centre-back, but in that moment he was the marker, the defender, the man trying to stop Barry. His arms were all over Barry, and then the ball was diverted behind by his hand.
Referee Stuart Attwell did not give the penalty. VAR Michael Salisbury looked at it and allowed play to continue, with reports saying the handball was judged accidental.
That is the problem in miniature.
Not because referees make mistakes. They always have. They always will. The problem is that VAR was sold as the cure for the kind of mistake everyone in the stadium could see, and yet here was a potentially season-shaping decision in a penalty area, involving holding, handling and an obvious attacking opportunity, and the system still ended with the wrong smell in the room.
David Moyes was furious afterwards. He said the arm moved towards the ball and questioned how the penalty was not given. Others described Everton as having suffered a major injustice, with West Ham benefiting from the officials failing to punish what looked like a blatant handball by Fernandes.
So the question is no longer whether VAR can occasionally correct an error. Of course it can. The deeper question is this: is the game better for it?
Increasingly, the answer looks like no.
VAR has not removed human error. It has relocated it. It has moved the mistake from the pitch to a room, put it in front of screens, dressed it in procedural language, and made the final error feel even more absurd because it now arrives after the one thing football was never supposed to require: a committee.
The original bargain has failed
The argument for VAR was simple enough.
Football is too important, too fast, too expensive and too emotionally loaded to let major decisions depend entirely on the naked eye. Goals, penalties, red cards and mistaken identity, those were the four areas where technology would help. The referee would still run the game, but VAR would act as a safety net.
The IFAB protocol says VAR is only meant to assist with “clear and obvious errors” or “serious missed incidents” in four match-changing categories: goal or no goal, penalty or no penalty, direct red cards and mistaken identity. It also says the referee must still make the original decision, that the original decision should only be changed if video clearly shows a clear and obvious error, and that the final decision always belongs to the referee.
That sounds neat in theory. In reality, football has discovered a flaw the size of a penalty box: “clear and obvious” is itself subjective.
One VAR thinks a pull is normal contact. Another thinks it is a penalty. One official sees a deliberate handball. Another sees an accident. One referee is sent to the monitor. Another is protected by the phrase “not enough to intervene”.
The Premier League itself has acknowledged that, during testing, officials did not always reach unanimous outcomes when reviewing the same incidents.
That admission should shake the whole cathedral.
Because if trained video officials, watching the same clips, still disagree about the same incidents, VAR is not eliminating human interpretation. It is adding another layer of it. It is not an oracle. It is a second referee with pause, rewind and the same human fallibility.
This is why the West Ham-Everton incident matters. It was not an obscure technicality. It was exactly the kind of penalty/no-penalty moment listed in VAR’s own remit. If the on-field referee misses it and VAR still does not fix it, then what exactly has the system improved?
It has taken the old frustration, “the referee didn’t see it”, and replaced it with something worse: “they saw it, replayed it, discussed it, and still got it wrong.”
That is not progress. That is bureaucracy wearing boots.
The pro-VAR case deserves to be heard, but not worshipped
To be fair, VAR’s defenders do have numbers.
The Premier League and PGMOL argue that VAR increases decision accuracy. PGMOL has said post-VAR accuracy is around 96 percent compared with 86 percent for on-field decisions alone, and that VAR delays have been reduced to an average of 48 seconds per match. The Premier League has also argued that VAR produces about 100 correct overturns per season.
Those figures matter. No serious argument should pretend VAR never works.
It does work sometimes. It catches offsides, corrects some penalties, and rescues officials from some bad calls.
But football is not a laboratory. The measure cannot be accuracy alone, especially when the accuracy is disputed, opaque, and sometimes achieved at the expense of the experience itself.
A game can become technically more correct and spiritually worse.
That is where football now stands. VAR may correct some decisions, but it also corrodes the rhythm, trust and emotional structure of the sport. It asks supporters to postpone joy. It makes players celebrate with one eye on the referee’s earpiece. It makes assistant referees delay flags. It makes referees look unsure. It turns goals into provisional events, little emotional invoices marked “pending review”.
The Football Supporters’ Association survey published in 2026 found that 75.7 percent of surveyed fans did not support the continued use of VAR in the Premier League. Even more damning, 91.7 percent said VAR had removed the spontaneous joy of goal celebrations, while only 3.3 percent said VAR had made the matchgoing experience better. Yet 93 percent supported keeping goal-line technology.
That distinction is crucial.
Fans are not anti-technology for the sake of it. They are not asking football to return to muddy guesswork and medieval lanterns. They support goal-line technology because it answers one binary question: did the whole ball cross the whole line?
It is quick, objective and almost invisible.
It does not spend three minutes psychoanalysing whether a defender’s forearm had intent.
VAR is different.
VAR has drifted from correction into prosecution.
Goal-line technology works because it knows its place
The strongest argument for limiting VAR is the success of goal-line technology.
Goal-line technology does not try to re-referee the sport. It does not judge intent, force, careless contact, natural silhouette, phases of play, or whether a forward was “interfering” in a metaphysical sense.
It answers a physical question.
Ball over line, yes or no.
Signal to the referee.
Move on.
That is why supporters overwhelmingly back it. It protects the game from the rare but enormous injustice of a ghost goal without turning every attacking move into a courtroom drama.
This should be the model for any future use of technology in football: limited, factual, fast and silent unless absolutely necessary.
VAR has become the opposite.
It is broad, subjective, slow and theatrical. It interrupts the game not only when a decision is wrong, but when a decision might be wrong if viewed from the right angle, at the right speed, by the right official, in the right philosophical mood.
Football cannot thrive like that.
Offside has become the symbol of VAR absurdity
No part of VAR has done more damage to the soul of the game than offside.
Technically, hands and arms are not considered when judging offside. Under Law 11, a player is in an offside position if any part of the head, body or feet is nearer to the opponents’ goal line than both the ball and the second-last opponent. The hands and arms of all players are excluded, with the upper boundary of the arm defined around the bottom of the armpit.
But that technical clarification does not solve the fan experience.
Supporters may say “his hand was offside” because the image looks ridiculous. What they really mean is that football has become obsessed with microscopic body-part geometry.
Armpit lines.
Shoulder lines.
Boot studs.
Knees.
Thighs.
Freeze frames where the exact moment the ball leaves the passer’s foot is itself a matter of interpretation.
The old offside law was designed to stop goal-hanging. VAR has turned it into digital taxidermy.
A striker can make a perfect run, bend the defensive line, finish brilliantly, ignite the stadium, then have the goal killed because a playable shoulder point was a sliver ahead of a defender’s knee.
This is not the spirit of the rule.
It is the rule embalmed.
This is where Arsène Wenger’s proposed offside change matters. FIFA has confirmed that the Canadian Premier League is testing an alternative “daylight” approach from April 2026. Under this version, an attacker is onside if at least one legal scoring body part is level with or behind the second-last defender. A player is only offside when there is clear separation, or “daylight”, between attacker and defender.
That would be a major improvement.
It would return the advantage to attackers and make offside closer to what fans instinctively understand. It would stop football pretending that a toenail advantage is the same as loitering behind the defence.
But even Wenger’s rule would not fully save VAR.
It may make offside less ridiculous, but the deeper problem remains: VAR has been allowed to sprawl. It is now involved in too many subjective areas, too often, with too little transparency and too much emotional cost.
So, yes, bring in the Wenger daylight rule as quickly as possible.
But do not use it as an excuse to leave everything else untouched.
The five other warning signs from this season
The West Ham-Everton incident is not isolated. It sits inside a wider pattern.
Reports on the Premier League’s Key Match Incidents process have suggested that VAR errors have risen this season, with 13 mistakes recorded by the halfway stage and later reporting saying the number of VAR errors had already matched the previous full-season total with a significant portion of the campaign still to play.
Here are five high-profile examples that show the same basic truth: VAR does not end controversy. Sometimes it manufactures it.
1. Chelsea v Fulham: Josh King’s goal disallowed
Fulham thought they had taken the lead at Stamford Bridge through Josh King.
The goal was then disallowed after VAR intervened, with Rodrigo Muniz judged to have fouled Trevoh Chalobah in the build-up. The decision caused widespread criticism, including from former officials and pundits, because the contact looked like normal football contact rather than a clear and obvious foul.
Howard Webb later admitted the decision was wrong, saying it was not merely controversial, but wrong.
That matters because this was not VAR failing to intervene.
This was VAR intervening and making the game worse.
That is the nightmare version of the system: it does not simply miss a mistake, it creates one.
2. Liverpool v Bournemouth: Marcos Senesi avoids red
In Liverpool’s match against Bournemouth, Marcos Senesi appeared to handle the ball while trying to stop Hugo Ekitike from running through.
The on-field decision was not to send him off, and VAR did not overturn it. The Premier League Match Centre explanation focused on distance from goal, but later Key Match Incidents reporting judged that the secondary action of the hand towards the ball should have been punished as a deliberate handball and denial of an obvious goalscoring opportunity.
Again, this is not some tiny offside line.
It is a major red-card question.
If VAR cannot reliably identify denial of an obvious goalscoring opportunity after replay, what is it for?
3. Brentford v Manchester United: Nathan Collins stays on
Brentford beat Manchester United 3-1, but one of the major talking points was Nathan Collins pulling back Bryan Mbeumo and avoiding a red card.
A penalty was given, but Collins was only booked.
VAR reviewed the incident for more than three minutes and still did not recommend a red card.
The issue was not whether there was a foul. That was accepted. The issue was whether it was denial of an obvious goalscoring opportunity.
Key Match Incidents reporting later listed the failure to send Collins off as one of the season’s VAR errors.
This is exactly the kind of incident VAR is meant to clarify.
Instead, it gave everyone a delay, a debate, and no confidence.
4. Newcastle v Manchester City: Phil Foden and Fabian Schär
Manchester City’s title race was affected by a 2-1 defeat at Newcastle, and one major flashpoint came when Phil Foden was challenged by Fabian Schär in the penalty area.
No penalty was given and VAR did not intervene.
Former referee Keith Hackett later argued it was a foul and that VAR should have stepped in.
Whether one agrees with Hackett or not, the broader point is familiar: the system does not end the argument. It often deepens it.
Supporters no longer argue only about the referee’s decision. They argue about why the referee was not sent to the monitor, why the threshold was set there, why similar incidents elsewhere were treated differently, and whether “clear and obvious” has become a hiding place.
5. Everton v Arsenal: William Saliba on Thierno Barry
Before the West Ham controversy, Everton had already been on the wrong end of another major penalty call involving Thierno Barry.
In Everton’s 1-0 defeat to Arsenal, William Saliba challenged Barry in the box. Barry got to the ball first and Saliba caught his boot.
The Key Match Incidents panel later judged, by a 3-2 majority, that Everton should have had a penalty and that VAR should have sent the referee to the monitor.
The symmetry is striking.
Everton.
Barry.
A penalty appeal.
VAR Michael Salisbury involved.
And a later conclusion that the system failed to correct the decision.
Then, against West Ham, another Barry incident, another penalty shout, another VAR non-intervention, another explosion of disbelief.
At some point, “unlucky” becomes too polite a word.
The referee is being hollowed out
One of the most damaging consequences of VAR is what it has done to on-field authority.
Officially, the referee is still in charge. The IFAB protocol is clear: match officials must make an initial decision as if VAR does not exist. They are not supposed to avoid decisions and let Stockley Park sort it out.
But football is not played inside a protocol document.
It is played at speed, under pressure, in front of 60,000 people and millions watching at home. In that environment, the existence of VAR inevitably changes behaviour.
Assistant referees keep flags down for tight attacking situations because they know VAR can check later. The Premier League’s own VAR guidance explains that assistants delay flags in close marginal situations where an immediate goalscoring chance may follow, so that the attack can play out and VAR can then review.
That may be procedurally sensible.
Emotionally, it is awful.
Everyone waits. Defenders stop and restart. Attackers celebrate and pause. Fans roar and then look at the referee.
The game’s natural punctuation has been replaced by buffering.
The referee also begins to look less like the person running the match and more like the local branch manager of a remote authority. Decisions are made, paused, checked, re-checked, announced, justified and still disputed.
The question begins to hang over every major moment:
Who is actually refereeing the game?
The person on the grass?
The assistant with the flag?
The fourth official?
The VAR?
The assistant VAR?
The replay operator?
The protocol?
The “high bar”?
Football used to accept that the referee might be wrong because the referee had one view, one angle, one instant.
VAR has removed that human excuse without removing the human mistake.
That is a terrible trade.
The pursuit of perfection is damaging the game
Football has always contained injustice.
That is not a defence of bad officiating. It is simply part of the sport’s texture.
A wrong offside flag used to hurt. A missed penalty used to rage through phone-ins and pubs for days. But the game moved. The argument had a human scale. The referee missed it. The linesman got it wrong. It was infuriating, but it belonged to the match.
VAR has changed the nature of the anger.
Now the mistake is not just human.
It feels institutional.
It has been reviewed. It has passed through a system. It has acquired the chill of official approval.
That makes the emotional damage greater, not smaller.
When a goal is scored, the first reaction should not be suspicion. A goal is football’s lightning strike. It is the point of the whole thing.
VAR has made that moment conditional.
Supporters now celebrate in instalments: first the ball hits the net, then the eyes go to the referee, then the screen, then the ear, then the dreaded rectangle gesture, then the waiting.
This is not a minor inconvenience.
It attacks the central experience of the sport.
The FSA numbers are devastating because they capture what every matchgoing supporter recognises: VAR has taken the most explosive emotional moment in football and placed it under review.
A sport that cannot let people celebrate goals properly has lost the plot.
“Clear and obvious” has become a fog machine
The phrase “clear and obvious” was supposed to limit VAR.
Instead, it has become one of the most maddening phrases in football.
When VAR intervenes, supporters ask why the error was clear and obvious enough. When VAR does not intervene, they ask why the error was not clear and obvious enough.
When similar incidents are treated differently, the phrase starts to look less like a principle and more like a trapdoor.
The West Ham-Everton incident is the perfect example.
If a defender or marker has his arms around an attacker and then diverts the ball with his hand in the penalty area, what level of obviousness is required?
Does the ball have to arrive with a written confession?
Must the handball introduce itself to the referee?
At some point, the threshold becomes self-defeating.
The higher the bar, the more VAR misses.
The lower the bar, the more VAR re-referees the match.
There is no stable middle ground because subjective football incidents do not behave like laboratory samples.
That is why the current model cannot be saved by minor tweaks.
The problem is structural.
Expanding VAR would make the problem worse
Some will argue that the answer is to expand VAR.
Review second yellows.
Review corners.
Review throw-ins.
Review all major attacking phases.
Give managers challenges.
Use more technology, more angles, more audio, more specialists.
That road leads to football becoming a forensic exercise with a ball attached.
There are already examples of important decisions outside VAR’s remit causing controversy. For instance, recent Key Match Incidents reporting has highlighted second-yellow errors, which are not currently reviewable under standard VAR rules.
But that does not mean everything should be reviewable.
It means football must accept a hard truth: there will always be mistakes.
Once the game accepts that, the aim should not be total correction. It should be the best balance between fairness, flow, authority and emotional integrity.
VAR currently fails that balance.
The close-season solution: pause it, shrink it, or scrap it
The Premier League clubs voted in 2024 to continue VAR, while accepting that improvements were needed in areas such as delays, fan experience, training, transparency and semi-automated offside technology.
That was the cautious decision.
It was also the predictable one.
Nobody wants to admit that a system introduced with such confidence may have damaged the product it was meant to protect.
But this coming close season should be different.
The evidence is now too loud to ignore.
Fan opposition is overwhelming. High-profile mistakes continue. Offside remains alienating. Referees look less authoritative. The rhythm of the game is still interrupted.
And incidents like West Ham-Everton make the central promise of VAR look hollow.
Football should consider three possible futures.
Option one: scrap VAR and keep goal-line technology
This is the cleanest answer.
Keep goal-line technology because it is fast, factual and trusted.
Scrap VAR for penalties, red cards and offside.
Return authority to the referee, assistant referees and fourth official.
Accept that mistakes will happen, but at least they will happen in the flow of the game, not after a remote review that still fails to satisfy anyone.
This would not be anti-modern.
It would be pro-football.
Option two: limit VAR to goal-line and extreme factual errors only
If scrapping VAR entirely is considered too drastic, then its scope should be reduced almost to nothing.
Technology should be used only where it can answer a factual question quickly.
Did the whole ball cross the line?
Was the offence inside or outside the box, if a foul has already been given?
Was there mistaken identity?
Perhaps, under a reformed offside law, was there clear daylight between attacker and defender?
Everything else should return to the referee.
No slow-motion handball trials.
No three-minute penalty archaeology.
No searching for contact after a goal has been scored.
No microscopic offside verdicts that depend on a freeze frame and a body-part line.
Option three: keep VAR only if Wenger’s offside law arrives and the protocol is rebuilt
The Wenger daylight law would at least make offside more humane.
If FIFA and IFAB move quickly, and if semi-automated technology can make those calls fast and transparent, there is an argument for keeping a narrow offside review process.
But even then, the scope must be tight.
VAR cannot continue as a second match referee.
It should not be allowed to roam through the game looking for crimes.
It should exist only as an emergency brake.
And if a review cannot produce a decision quickly, the on-field decision should stand.
Football cannot keep sacrificing momentum to uncertainty.
What a proper reset should include
A serious close-season review should not be a public-relations exercise.
It should ask uncomfortable questions.
First, the Premier League should publish fuller decision data and audio wherever possible. Supporters are asked to accept decisions they cannot hear and processes they cannot see. That is not sustainable.
Second, the “clear and obvious” threshold must either mean something consistent or be abandoned. At present, it is stretched and squeezed according to the incident.
Third, referees and assistants must be told to referee assertively again. The pitch officials should not behave like they are waiting for permission from a video booth.
Fourth, offside must be changed. The Wenger daylight proposal should be accelerated. If the attacker is broadly level, give the goal. Football should reward attacking movement, not punish anatomy.
Fifth, handball must be simplified. If experts, referees, former players and fans still cannot agree after years of rewrites, the law is too tangled. VAR has exposed that confusion rather than solved it.
Finally, fans must be treated as stakeholders, not atmospheric wallpaper. If more than nine in ten surveyed fans say VAR has damaged the spontaneous joy of celebrating goals, that cannot be brushed aside as nostalgia. It is the sport telling administrators that the matchday experience is being drained.
The final question: what is football for?
VAR’s defenders often ask: do you want more wrong decisions?
The better question is: what kind of game do we want?
A game with some human error, but speed, authority, instinct and joy?
Or a game where errors still happen, but now after long delays, uncertain thresholds, hidden conversations and celebrations strangled by doubt?
No one wants injustice.
No one wants referees to be poor.
No one wants important matches decided by obvious mistakes.
But VAR has not delivered the clean justice it promised. It has delivered a new form of controversy: colder, slower and more infuriating.
The West Ham-Everton incident should be part of the breaking point.
Mateus Fernandes’ handball and grappling with Thierno Barry was not some philosophical puzzle. It was a penalty-area incident that demanded clarity.
The on-field referee missed it.
VAR did not rescue it.
Everton were left angry.
Supporters were left asking the same question they have asked too often:
If VAR cannot fix that, why is it there?
Football can survive human error. It has done so for more than a century.
What it may not survive, at least not in its most thrilling form, is the illusion that every moment must be purified by technology, even when the technology still depends on the same human judgement it was supposed to correct.
The game does not need perfect refereeing.
It needs credible refereeing.
It needs goals that feel like goals when they go in.
It needs referees brave enough to make decisions.
It needs assistants trusted to use their flags.
It needs technology that knows when to stay quiet.
This close season, football should stop tinkering around the edges.
Scrap VAR, or shrink it until it becomes what goal-line technology already is: limited, factual, quick and almost invisible.
Because the current version is neither justice nor entertainment.
It is football trapped in a waiting room.
