VAR Isn't Broken. The People Operating It Are.

The Jamie Gittens injury and Ferran Soriano's legal sabre-rattling are unrelated, yet both expose the same rot: Premier League referees have abdicated responsibility. VAR is not the villain. The men in Stockley Park are.

The False Dawn of Video Assistance

When VAR arrived in 2019, it promised to eliminate 'clear and obvious errors'. Instead, it created a new species of error: the forensic, frame-by-frame rewrite of reality. Consider the 2023/24 season, where the Premier League's own Independent Key Match Incidents Panel judged 31 decisions wrong – 20 of them involving VAR. That is a failure rate of 64% on the very interventions designed to fix mistakes.

Compare that to rugby union's Television Match Official, where the on-field referee retains authority and the TMO advises. In the Premier League, the VAR has become a shadow referee, re-refereeing the game with a different threshold. The result? Inconsistency so profound that clubs now employ analysts whose sole job is to model which referees are more likely to overturn what. That is not sport. That is game theory.

The Abdication of Whistleblowers

Referees no longer make decisions; they make referrals. Take the recent Chelsea match where Jamie Gittens was injured – a challenge that warranted a red card went unpunished because the referee deferred to a VAR check that focused on the wrong angle. Gittens is now out for weeks. The referee's excuse? 'It wasn't clear and obvious.' That phrase has become the coward's charter.

Ferran Soriano's warning that Manchester City's legal fight could take years is a symptom, not a cause. Clubs are lawyering up because they no longer trust the officiating. When the stakes are this high – Champions League revenue, relegation, titles – referees cannot hide behind technology. They must own the call.

  • Case 1: In the 2024/25 season, VAR overturned 12 on-field red cards, yet the average time for a review was 2 minutes 18 seconds – killing momentum and fan experience.
  • Case 2: Referees have admitted privately that they avoid making big calls because they fear being contradicted by VAR. That is institutional cowardice.
  • Case 3: The PGMOL's 'matchday experience' pilot – where referees announce decisions over the PA – was abandoned after six weeks because referees found it 'too stressful'. If they cannot explain a decision, they should not be making it.

The 'Clear and Obvious' Canard

The counter-argument is that VAR reduces howlers. Nonsense. It simply redistributes them. Without VAR, a linesman's flag might wrongly deny a goal. With VAR, a toenail offside does the same. The difference is that one is human error; the other is manufactured by a committee of faceless officials.

Furthermore, the idea that referees are 'human' and need help is precisely why VAR was introduced. But help should not mean replacement. The best referees – think Pierluigi Collina – commanded authority because they made decisions and stood by them. Today's referees are technocrats, terrified of their own shadows.

The Day of Reckoning

I predict that by the end of the 2025/26 season, the PGMOL will be forced to publish live audio of VAR conversations – not as a PR exercise, but because a club will threaten legal action citing 'loss of sporting integrity'. Manchester City's lawyers are already circling. Soriano's warning is not idle. When that audio is released, the public will hear referees second-guessing each other in real time. And the game will change. Mark my words: that release will trigger the first formal vote of no confidence in a Premier League referees' chief.

Until then, we are left with a competition where the rules are applied by men who refuse to apply them. VAR is not the disease. It is the symptom. The disease is a refereeing culture that values self-preservation over justice. And it is killing the Premier League's credibility.

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