How VAR works: the IFAB protocol and the controversies

On 28 February 2026, meeting in Hensol, Wales, the IFAB approved a change allowing VAR to intervene when a referee sends a player off for a clearly mistaken second yellow card. Until that date the protocol explicitly left second yellows out: only straight reds could be reviewed. The change took effect on 1 July 2026, was used for the first time at the 2026 World Cup, and the Premier League has adopted it for 2026-27.

The detail matters, because it explains half the pub arguments about VAR. The tool is not a camera or a room full of monitors: it is a set of laws with a closed list of situations. And that rulebook moves almost every year.

The four categories VAR is allowed to review

The IFAB protocol restricts intervention to four types of decision. Outside that list, VAR cannot step in however grave the error may look.

• Goal or no goal: this covers attacking-team offences in the build-up, the ball leaving the field of play, and offences at the taking of a penalty.
• Penalty or no penalty: it also covers where the offence took place and penalties awarded in error.
• Direct red card: serious foul play, violent conduct, spitting, biting and denying an obvious goalscoring opportunity. From 2026 it also covers a dismissal arising from a clearly incorrect second yellow.
• Mistaken identity: when the referee cautions or dismisses a player who did not commit the offence.

There is a fifth possibility, but it is optional for each competition: correcting a corner awarded in clear error, provided the correction can be made immediately and without delaying the restart. The Premier League has announced it will not take up that option in 2026-27. FIFA did activate it for the 2026 World Cup. Same protocol, different settings.

What is left out is just as revealing. An ordinary yellow card, a throw-in given the wrong way, a foul in the centre circle or a card the referee never produced are not reviewable. That is why so many weekend complaints go nowhere: it is not that VAR got it wrong, it is that VAR is not permitted to look.

What a clear and obvious error actually means

The bar for intervention has two doors: the clear and obvious error, and the serious missed incident, meaning a passage of play the officiating team did not see at all. The protocol frames it the other way round from how it is usually described: the referee's original decision is not changed unless the video review clearly shows it was a mistake.

That inversion is the key to the whole system. VAR is not looking for the correct decision from scratch; it checks whether the decision taken is defensible. In incidents where two reasonable supporters would see different things — the force of a contact, whether an arm was in a natural position, whether a forward went down easily — the standard says there is no clear and obvious error and the on-field decision stands.

The result, for the viewer, is a sense of arbitrariness that is in fact the opposite. When VAR does not intervene in an incident that looks doubtful on television, it is not failing: it is doing precisely what the protocol asks of it, which is not to re-referee the match. The frustration comes from a misunderstanding at source, the belief that the technology arrived to settle every debatable incident once and for all.

Why the on-field decision carries so much weight

The protocol contains an obligation that tends to get overlooked: the referee must always make a decision. He cannot leave an incident hanging while he waits for a voice in his earpiece. Even in doubt he has to give something, because that initial decision sets the starting point for any review that follows. If he awards a penalty, the question becomes whether awarding it was a clear error; if he waves play on, the question is whether not awarding it was a clear error. The same incident is judged with the burden of proof reversed, depending on what the referee gave.

From there, two routes. In an on-field review, the referee goes to the pitchside monitor and looks at the pictures himself; that is reserved for subjective judgements, such as the force of a challenge or whether a movement was natural. In a VAR-only review, the referee decides on the information relayed to him from the video room; that is used for objective facts, such as an offside position or whether the ball left the field of play. The referee not going to the monitor does not mean there was no review: it means the matter was factual and open to no interpretation.

The Premier League has given this principle a name of its own: Referee's Call. The referee's decision stands unless VAR identifies a clear and obvious error on the available evidence, and the league has confirmed that high threshold for the 2026-27 season as well. Alongside it, it has added transparency: stadium announcements explaining the decisions taken after a review, replays of disallowed goals and overturns on the big screens, and explanations published after the match. That does not change the standard; it changes how much information the supporter has to judge it by.

Semi-automated offside, the objective part

Offside is the exception inside the protocol: it admits no shades of judgement, only positions. The Premier League introduced semi-automated offside technology in matchweek 32 of the 2024-25 season, on 12 April 2025, in Manchester City against Crystal Palace, after trialling it in the fifth round of the FA Cup earlier that same season.

The system uses up to thirty or so cameras installed in the grounds, some of them filming at 100 frames per second — twice the rate of a standard broadcast camera — and builds a mesh of thousands of surface points per player to place the line automatically. It does not change the offside law or how exact that law is: it changes the time it takes to apply it, which was precisely the complaint growing fastest among supporters inside the stadium.

It remains, all the same, a factual review. That is why the referee does not go near the monitor on a marginal offside call: there is nothing to interpret, only a position to confirm. That the resulting image still looks unfair when a shoulder is three centimetres ahead is an argument about the offside law, not about VAR.

Why every league seems to have a different VAR

The protocol is one thing; its application is not, and there are three separate reasons that regularly get confused with one another.

The first is regulatory. A federation or a competition can only use VAR with the IFAB's permission, and that permission requires applying the full protocol and meeting the requirements on referee training and technical equipment. Within that framework sit the competition options, such as the corner: taking it up or not is each league's decision, and that is why the same incident is reviewed in one tournament and not in another without either of them breaching a thing.

The second is calibration. The threshold for intervention is adjusted through internal instructions to the officiating teams. A competition that insists on a high bar will have fewer overturns and more complaints about non-intervention; one that intervenes more readily will have fewer contentious incidents left uncorrected and more stoppages. Neither is breaching the protocol: they interpret it with different tolerances, and the supporter who watches two leagues sees two VARs.

The third is simply existence. In England, VAR operates in the Premier League, but the Championship does not have it for league matches. In 2026, clubs in that division rejected even bringing in a video challenge system for 2026-27, on cost grounds and because of the effect on the matchday experience; goal-line technology, by contrast, has been running since 2017-18. A supporter whose club goes up does not move to a stricter VAR: they move from having no VAR to having one, with everything that implies for expectations.

On top of all that, the protocol itself keeps moving. On 31 May 2026 the IFAB approved a clarification covering clear attacking-team offences committed before the ball is in play at corners and free kicks: if the criteria are met, VAR recommends an on-field review, the appropriate disciplinary sanction is applied and the set piece is retaken. It was used for the first time at the 2026 World Cup, pending evaluation before it is extended to the rest of the game.

"VAR was never designed to get everything right, only to stop an obvious error deciding a match."

Understanding the mechanism does not end the arguments, but it improves their quality. Much of what gets put down to bad faith in a video room is the predictable output of a protocol written to intervene sparingly, with a short list of scenarios and a deliberately high bar. You can disagree with that design; what makes little sense is demanding of the system something it never promised.

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