When 'Clear and Obvious' Becomes a Licence for Inertia

The Premier League has quietly redefined the meaning of a 'clear and obvious error' to mean 'not absolutely indefensible'. The result? VAR has become a rubber stamp for the referee's original whim, a safety blanket that protects the man in the middle rather than the integrity of the game. This season has already taught us that if an on-field call is merely wrong—not egregiously, laughably wrong—it stands. That is not just a betrayal of the technology's purpose; it is an institutionalised defence of incompetence.

A History of Handball, Or How We Got Here

Remember the chaos of 2019-20, when VAR chalked off a goal for a shirt tug that had no bearing on the play? The backlash was so fierce that PGMOL overcorrected. Instead of fixing the system, they neutered it. The 'clear and obvious' threshold became a shield. Now, unless the referee has missed a mass brawl in the six-yard box, VAR stays silent.

Consider the infamous 'Moyes penalty' at Old Trafford in 2023-24. A blatant foul on Garnacho was waved away, and VAR refused to intervene because the contact was deemed 'not clear enough'. The contact was there, the foul was there, but VAR's new philosophical bent—'the on-field decision carries overwhelming weight'—turned a stonewall penalty into an acceptable error. This is the logical endpoint: VAR now exists not to correct mistakes but to lend technological legitimacy to them.

The Case for Intervention: Three Instances That Show the Absurdity

The guideline has become so restrictive that it effectively requires video evidence of a crime scene, not a football match. Let's list what this season has produced:

  • In Nottingham Forest vs Bournemouth, a clear trip on Elanga in the box was waved away because the referee had a 'reasonable view'—even though he clearly guessed wrong.
  • A West Ham goal stood against Aston Villa despite an offside in the buildup that the VAR official judged as 'not decisive enough'—a term that now appears nowhere in the Laws of the Game.
  • The Evan Ferguson 'ghost goal' at Brighton—no, that was goal-line technology, but the absurdity remains: VAR has become so reluctant to overturn decisions that even obvious offsides are being missed if they occur in the 'grey areas' of penalty box scrambles.

Each case is defended with the same mantra: 'not a clear and obvious error'. But who decides? The same officials who made the original error. This is the fox guarding the henhouse, and the hens are already dead.

Defending the Indefensible: PGMOL's Counter-Argument, and Why It Fails

PGMOL's defenders argue that VAR must not re-referee the game, that football is a sport of human error, and that slowing down every decision with frame-by-frame analysis kills the flow. There is a grain of truth: we do not want a video review for every throw-in. But this argument is a straw man. Nobody is asking for that. We are asking for VAR to correct factually wrong calls—when a player is clearly fouled, when the ball has clearly crossed the line, when a clear offside is missed.

The problem is that PGMOL has conflated 'clear and obvious' with 'unambiguous on video'. But a foul can be clear and obvious without being a karate kick. A tug on the shirt that prevents a goalscoring opportunity is clear and obvious if you have any football nous. The technology exists to provide angles; the officials choose to ignore them. They hide behind the letter of a directive that they themselves wrote, and they wrote it to protect themselves, not the game. This is not about flow or spirit; it is about accountability.

The Only Fix: A Recalibration That Will Redefine the Season

This can change, but only if the Premier League forces PGMOL to redefine 'clear and obvious' as 'a significant error that would be widely spotted by any reasonable person watching in real time—or with the luxury of replay'. That is not a pipe dream; it is a call to action.

I predict that before the end of the 2025-26 season, PGMOL will be forced to reduce the threshold for VAR intervention, not because they suddenly see the light, but because a title-deciding decision will be wrong, and the backlash will make the 2020 handball debates look like a polite tea party. Manchester City or Arsenal will be denied a title by a 'clear and obvious' non-call, and the ensuing firestorm will force a change. That is the only language the Premier League understands: the language of the title race.

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