I was wrong about VAR

In 2018, when VAR was introduced widely, its goals were clear. Football’s lawmakers, Ifab, said it would reduce human error and make game-changing decisions fairer. The technology would intervene only when officials had made a clear and obvious mistake, rather than re-refereeing every decision.

As someone who is naturally sceptical of anything that threatened to interfere with the spontaneity of the game, and new regulation, in general, I worried that it would ruin the emotion of football. Better the devil you know, I thought.

And this scepticism was coming from someone who already knew what it felt like to be robbed by a bad refereeing decision. Worse still, the referee was my brother. Let me explain.

I was fourteen. It was the first game of the Saturday league season. My coach had asked me to play left wing. It wasn’t my usual position. I was a central midfielder by trade, but my coach sold it to me as a rare opportunity to get on the scoresheet.

Early in the match, our striker picked up the ball and slid it between their right-back and centre-back. I let the ball run across my body onto my weaker left foot, kept my body over the ball and tucked it into the corner. Three minutes into my career as a left-winger, I had scored.

I turned around to celebrate and saw the referee - my brother - with his hand in the air. Instinct prevailed, and I high-fived him.

I thought it was weird that he had broken impartiality so quickly, but, hey, everyone knew he was my brother. Maybe they’d understand.

But they wouldn’t need to. He wasn’t celebrating. He’d disallowed the goal.

The linesman had flagged me offside. I had high-fived my own brother, who was raising his hand to indicate that he was disallowing my goal. We lost 2-1. We didn’t speak on the ride home. To this day, I know that decision was wrong. I like to think that he knows that decision was wrong, too. But it’s still a heavily contentious topic in our family today.

And yet, there’s a small part of me that is happy things played out this way. Yes, I would have loved to have scored. Yes, in the moment, I felt hard done by. But years later, the decision has become part of our family folklore. We still argue about it. I still insist I was onside. He still has to defend himself. In some strange way, the mistake gave us a better story than the goal ever could have.

And for years, that was basically my argument against VAR. Football needs mistakes and controversy. It needs moments that people can argue about long after the final whistle.

Can you imagine if VAR had existed at the 1986 World Cup? There would be no Hand of God goal. Whether you still feel bitter about Diego Maradona’s goal, the controversy surrounding it has become part of football’s lore. The shirt he wore that afternoon sold for £7.1 million in 2022, making it the most expensive football shirt ever sold at auction. Had that goal been disallowed, and the story dissipated with it, I can say confidently that the shirt would have fetched much less (I know, it was still also the shirt he wore to score one of the best goals of all time).

But here is the part I’m slightly reluctant to admit: I was more wrong about VAR than I realised. I’ve changed my mind, and here’s why.