The VAR Intervention Threshold: Why the Same Incident Gets a Different Verdict in Every Competition

In the 58th minute at the Kazan Arena, on 16 June 2026, referee Andrés Cunha of Uruguay stood inside the penalty area, one hand raised to his earpiece, his eyes fixed on the monitor by the touchline. He had just decided not to award France a penalty after a challenge between Australian defender Joshua Risdon and forward Antoine Griezmann. Then the voice from the VAR room came through. Cunha ran to the touchline, reviewed two angles, came back, and pointed to the spot. Griezmann scored, France won 2-1. It was the first penalty ever awarded by VAR at a World Cup.

That night I sat in a newsroom in Manchester, rewinding the tape over and over. Not to watch the goal. I was watching Risdon's foot — the angle of contact, the timing, and one thing nobody on television mentioned: who is authorised to trigger this process, and where does the threshold for triggering it actually sit?

Eight years later, at 35, I still do not have a consistent answer. And I have started to believe that the inconsistency itself is the real story. Football does not have VAR, only shadowed corners waiting to be exposed. I first wrote that line in a personal notebook in 2026, and it still holds for every competition I follow.

Who is allowed to press the button?

Start with the text. VAR was written into the official Laws of the Game by IFAB — the International Football Association Board, the body that keeps football's rules — from the 2026-19 season, after trials beginning in 2026. Its founding principle is captured in a phrase I know by heart: "minimum interference, maximum benefit".

VAR may only intervene in four categories. One, a goal or no goal. Two, a penalty or no penalty. Three, a direct red card. Four, mistaken identity, when the referee sanctions the wrong player. Outside these four categories, VAR stays silent. A second yellow card is out of scope. An offside that does not lead to a goal is out of scope. Challenges that do not affect the outcome are out of scope.

This is the first boundary, and the most misunderstood. A viewer at home sees an obvious foul and calls it "VAR asleep". But VAR is not asleep. It is locked by its own law.

The more important boundary is the intervention threshold. IFAB stipulates that VAR may act only in the case of a "clear and obvious error" or a "serious missed incident". This threshold is not quantified. There is no definition of how many seconds a "clear error" lasts, how many degrees it deviates, or how much force it carries. It is a judgement.

And every judgement requires a person to make it. On the pitch, that person is the referee. In the VAR room, it is the video review team. Between these two people lies a gap the law does not fill. The referee is the only person on the pitch not permitted to be led by emotion. But technology has no emotion, while the people operating it do. That intersection is where every VAR controversy originates.

Historically, the penalty area has always been the most sensitive zone in football law. For more than a century, the decision to give or not give a penalty depended entirely on one person standing a few metres away, at one particular angle, within a fraction of a second. When VAR arrived in 2026, the expectation was that this margin of error would disappear. The 2026 World Cup saw the highest number of penalties in World Cup history up to that point — partly because VAR uncovered fouls the human eye had missed. The greater the expectation, the deeper the disappointment.

Where does the threshold sit?

I once spent an entire season recording every time a referee walked to the monitor. From 2026 to now, I have kept a private notebook, each page a VAR decision: the moment, the category, who called, who decided, and the final outcome. It is not exciting work, but it gives me something television never does: a pattern.

The first thing I noticed is that the intervention threshold differs between competitions. The Premier League is famous for its "high bar" — intervening only when the error is so obvious it cannot be defended. Other competitions, especially in continental Europe and at World Cups, tend to operate with a lower threshold, intervening earlier. The same challenge in the box, one league gives a penalty, another lets it go. Not because the laws differ. The laws are identical. The people interpreting them differ.

In my notebook there is a page marked in red, recording an incident I watched fourteen times. It was a situation within a major tournament, when a defender and a forward collided at the edge of the box. The referee stood seven metres away, at a diagonal angle. He did not blow. The VAR team checked for 40 seconds and concluded there was no clear error. In another match in the same round, a similar challenge, the VAR team called the referee to review, and a penalty was awarded. I placed the two clips side by side. The only differences were the forward's running speed and the defender's foot placement — things the law does not quantify.

Every foul is a question about intent; data only gives us the answer about consequence. VAR measures consequence — where the ball went, whose foot touched whose. It cannot measure intent. And the intervention threshold, at its deepest layer, is a judgement about intent: whether this player acted deliberately or accidentally, actively or passively, fouled or merely collided.

The three layers of a decision

A VAR decision is not an event. It is three layers stacked on top of one another, and each layer has a different person responsible.

The first layer is on-pitch observation. What the referee saw, from which angle, for how long. This is the most undervalued layer. A television viewer has dozens of camera angles, slow motion, and close-ups. The referee has one angle, real speed, and a fraction of a second. The distance between these two experiences is so large that they are almost two different sports.

The second layer is the VAR team's assessment. Three people in a closed room, in front of a wall of monitors, with the power to rewind, pause, and zoom. They do not decide in place of the referee. They decide whether to invite the referee to review. This is the crux few understand: the VAR team does not judge the incident. The VAR team judges the threshold.

The third layer is the final decision. If the referee goes to the monitor, the decision belongs to him. If the VAR team concludes a clear error and the referee does not need to review, the decision belongs to the VAR team. Two paths, two different bearers of responsibility, but the viewer sees only one outcome.

The viewer sees the incident, the referee sees the moment, I see the whole process. And within that process, each layer can be right or wrong independently of the others. A referee observes correctly but the VAR team assesses the threshold wrongly. A VAR team assesses correctly but the referee reviews and still decides the opposite way. When the media say "VAR was wrong", they are collapsing three layers into one. That is why these debates never end: each side is talking about a different layer.

Based on my experience following matches across many seasons, I have realised that most controversies do not sit in the first layer. Referees rarely observe crudely wrong. The controversy sits in the second layer — where the threshold is interpreted. And because the second layer happens in a closed room, unseen, it becomes the ideal place to assign blame.

Same incident, three competitions, three verdicts

I want to give three concrete examples, because abstraction helps no one.

The first example, the 2026 World Cup, France versus Australia. Risdon's challenge on Griezmann. Referee Cunha initially did not blow. The VAR team intervened, Cunha reviewed, and changed the decision. Here the threshold was low, and the process worked exactly as designed: an error missed on the pitch was corrected in the VAR room.

The second example, a Premier League match when goal-line technology failed. I am talking about Aston Villa versus Sheffield United on 17 June 2026, when a free-kick from Oliver Norwood took the ball over the line, but the goal-line system did not signal, and the referee allowed play to continue. VAR could not intervene, because a goal-or-no-goal decision based on goal-line technology sits outside VAR's four categories. The match ended 0-0. It is a perfect example of a blind spot: one technology cannot cover the failure of another.

The third example, a match at a major tournament when offside was determined by semi-automated technology. The ball crossed the line, the stands erupted, then the screen showed a drawn line and a name. The goal was disallowed because a hand or a knee protruded by a few centimetres. Here the threshold is no longer a judgement — it is a number. And precisely because it is a number, it creates a new kind of controversy: technically correct, but senseless in feeling.

Three examples, three kinds of threshold: a judgement threshold in the penalty case, a locked technical threshold in the goal-line case, and an open technical threshold in the semi-automated offside case. All called "VAR", yet operating on entirely different natures. The laws never stand outside the match; they are the second match running in parallel. And that second match has its own tempo, its own margin of error, its own tactics.

The blind spot of technology

There is a paradox I have long wanted to write about but never had the occasion: more technology means more controversy. It sounds absurd, but the mechanism is clear.

Before VAR, a refereeing error was an error. Fans were annoyed, then forgot. The match moved on. With VAR, an error becomes an event that is recorded, replayed, dissected, and archived. It does not disappear. It is reproduced. Every replay is a new controversy.

VAR does not fix mistakes, it only changes who carries the blame. Before, when a penalty was missed, people blamed the referee. Now, when a penalty is missed despite VAR, people blame the VAR team, the intervention threshold, the law, IFAB, the entire system. Responsibility is dispersed, and because it is dispersed, it becomes harder to attribute. Technology does not make mistakes disappear. It makes them ownerless.

This is the point emotional media never reaches. When an incident causes outrage, the natural reaction is to demand justice. But justice in football is not an absolute concept. It is an agreement: we agree that the correct outcome is the one consistent with the law, regardless of how we feel. The problem is that the law, at its intersections, is not specific enough to produce a single outcome.

And here is the real blind spot: the intervention threshold is not a technical bug to be fixed. It is a philosophical choice to be acknowledged. IFAB chose "minimum interference" because it feared VAR would slow the game and break its continuity. That is a reasonable choice. But that choice has a price: it leaves a grey zone, and inside that grey zone, everyone can claim to be right.

Offside: when the threshold becomes a number

Semi-automated offside technology, applied at the 2026 World Cup, marked another turning point. Here, the threshold is no longer a judgement. It is a coordinate. A foot, a shoulder, a knee crossing the line by a few centimetres, and the goal is disallowed.

I have watched dozens of such situations, and what I noticed is that the viewer's feeling does not soften when the threshold becomes more precise. On the contrary, it becomes sharper. Because when the threshold is a judgement, a viewer can tell themselves that another person would judge differently. When the threshold is a number, there is no room for difference. You are either right or wrong, and you cannot argue with a coordinate.

This creates a new form of dissatisfaction: dissatisfaction with precision itself. A goal disallowed because the tip of a boot crossed the line by two centimetres is correct under the law, yet it violates something the law does not define: the match's sense of fairness. And this is the biggest lesson I have drawn: technical precision and the sense of fairness are two quantities that are not proportional. There are moments when we must choose one over the other, and IFAB has never admitted that it is choosing.

Handball: the law changed twice in three years

No area shows the law's confusion more clearly than handball. Within three years, IFAB amended this rule at least twice, each time in a different direction.

In the early phase, the criterion was an "unnatural silhouette" — an arm positioned so as to make the body unnaturally wider. The criterion sounded reasonable but could not be quantified. How far must an arm be extended to be called unnatural? Who decides?

In the later phase, the law tightened in another direction: a handball in the build-up to a goal, even if accidental, was still treated as an offence. This led to situations that even referees found absurd but were obliged to call.

For me, this is the clearest proof of the article's central argument: when the law tries to become specific in order to eliminate controversy, it often creates new controversy at another layer. Handball is not a technical problem. It is a philosophical problem about intent, and intent cannot be written into a formula.

Emotion and the laws

I want to talk about emotion, because this is the part writers like me tend to avoid, and avoiding it too much is a mistake.

The referee is not permitted to be led by emotion. But the viewer is entitled to be. So is the player. A penalty in the 88th minute of a final is not merely a legal situation. It is the outcome of 88 tense minutes, of a season, of a career. When the referee blows or does not blow, he affects more than a single incident. He affects everything that has accumulated into that moment.

This is why I never write that emotion is wrong. Emotion is data. It tells me how much this situation matters to those involved. It tells me how much pressure is weighing on the referee. A referee in an eighty-thousand-seat stadium, in a final, hears the roar of the crowd every time the home side attacks. He must decide inside that roar. Emotion is not something he can switch off. He can only learn not to let it write for him.

But here is the counter-intuitive point: the viewer's emotion and the referee's law operate on two different reference systems. The viewer refers to perceived fairness — which team deserves it, which team was wronged. The referee refers to the text — what is written, what is not. These two systems cannot be merged, and trying to merge them is the source of every endless controversy.

Football does not have VAR, only shadowed corners waiting to be exposed. The biggest blind spot is not inside the VAR room. It is in the gap between the viewer's perception and the text of the law.

There is one example I still remember. The penalty shootout of the Euro 2026 final at Wembley, on 11 July 2026. Three young English players — Bukayo Saka, Jadon Sancho, Marcus Rashford — failed in turn. Goalkeeper Gianluigi Donnarumma chose the right direction on most of the kicks. The media talked about psychology. I dug into the mechanism: the distance from the spot to the goal is 11 metres, the average ball flight time is about 0.3 seconds, and Donnarumma had studied each taker's habits before the match. Here there was no VAR, no monitor, no review team. Only two people, eleven metres, and a third of a second. And it showed me what VAR never shows: the limits of the human being, laid bare with the most honesty.

What process for the future?

So what should change? I have no authority to pass a verdict, but I can describe what the data and precedent suggest.

Audio transparency is the most valuable change in years. From the 2026-23 season, IFAB allowed the publication of conversations between referees and the VAR team in some competitions, and the Premier League began releasing these recordings. Its value lies not in pleasing viewers. It lies in shifting the debate from "what did they decide" to "how did they reason". When viewers hear the reasoning, they can dispute the reasoning, instead of disputing an obscure outcome.

Publishing the threshold is the second task. Competitions should make public their operational definition of a "clear and obvious error", with concrete examples from the previous season. Not to fix the threshold, but to create a shared reference point. At present, every competition has a threshold, yet none writes it down.

Separating roles is the third task. The VAR team currently assesses both the incident and the threshold. These two should be separated in terms of responsibility, so that when something goes wrong, people know where it went wrong.

Finally, accepting the grey zone. No technology can erase the grey zone, because the grey zone is inherent to the law. What should be done is not to erase it, but to teach viewers to recognise it. A decision inside the grey zone is not a wrong decision. It is a debatable decision, and football is built on such decisions.

My conclusion is not a call to abandon VAR. VAR has corrected many mistakes, and I have watched enough matches decided by an undetected offside to know the technology has value. But I have also watched enough controversies to know that VAR cannot solve the root problem: football is a game run by human beings, under a set of laws that is never specific enough.

And perhaps that is the most beautiful thing about it. If the law were specific enough for machines to adjudicate every incident, there would be no referees, no controversy, no nights when I sit rewinding the tape to understand why a man in Kazan changed his decision after 40 seconds.

The second match — the match of the laws — will continue. What I want the next generation of referees to do is not to eliminate mistakes. It is to make mistakes transparent, traceable, and learnable. A mistake that is recorded and explained is worth more than a mistake buried in the roar of the crowd. And if we accept that, perhaps the next VAR controversy will no longer be a controversy about an outcome, but about a process.