Atlético controversy shows VAR creates far more angst than it resolves
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Football is living through a global case study on whether fairer actually makes for better in the world of professional sport

The number on the sign displayed prominently by the entrance of the football universe had been wiped away. IT HAS NOW BEEN … _**0**_… DAYS SINCE THE LAST VAR CONTROVERSY.

The second leg of  in the Champions League round of 16 went to penalties on Wednesday, sending Real through over Atlético. Antonio Rüdiger hit the winning spot kick, but the shootout truly turned on an especially eagle-eyed call by the video assistant referee.

The issue is not so much the correctness of the call – the contact was all but imperceptible even with the benefit of an endless stream of replays, zooms and alternate angles shared in the minutes and hours afterwards. Yet the VAR intervened so quickly and decisively that CBS’s referee analyst, Christina Unkel, speculated that ball sensor technology must have been used to determine that contact had taken place (Uefa later clarified that it had not; the call was made solely with video evidence). Alvarez was deemed to have touched the ball twice and his penalty was disallowed, ultimately helping eliminate his beleaguered club.

The conflict is not just about the correctness of the call, but the aggressive way in which VAR was used at all. Referee Szymon Marciniak didn’t appear to have spotted the infraction, despite standing just a few feet away and staring right at the ball when it was struck. As such, he had hardly committed a “clear and obvious error”  for the use of VAR in the Champions League. That will be scant consolation to Atlético, who saw a Champions League campaign ended by cross-town rivals Real for a sixth time in six European meetings.

This is the nature of soccer in the age of VAR. What was heralded as a way to quell controversy has instead, added layers of exactly that.

VAR incidents are now so endemic that Norway’s clubs were compelled to vote on whether use of the technology should be scrapped two weeks ago. Ultimately, they decided to , even though most of the country’s professional clubs want rid of it.

In the Norwegian league, the use of VAR has become so unpopular that fans felt they had no choice but to  in protest, which may or may not be A Norwegian Thing. (If it isn’t, please don’t tell me. It’s preferable to live in the illusion that there is a Nordic nation out there that registers its umbrage through airborne fish delicacies.)

Ultimately, the decision on whether to keep or scrap VAR devolved into a power struggle of a sort between Norway’s 32 top professional clubs and the federation. Whereas the vote to introduce VAR – which Norway didn’t adopt until 2023, years later than most European countries – was conducted by those pro teams alone, the decision to scrap it was voted on by every club in the country. Several amateur clubs  they felt conflicted about being dragged into a fight about a technology not in use at their level. Had it been left up to the pros, VAR would have been scrapped, by a 19-13 margin. Instead, the federation orchestrated a vote among all the country’s clubs to force the retention of VAR – and avoid becoming the first nation to scrap it – prevailing by 321 votes to 129.

Next door, Sweden remains a holdout in never introducing VAR in the first place. But the Swedes, Norway’s fellow travelers in techno-skepticism, don’t think of themselves as luddite outliers. “We are a leader,” the chief executive of Swedish club Malmö  last year.

Perhaps they are. When England’s Football Supporters’ Association polled its members on the introduction of VAR before it actually came to the Premier League in 2019,  were in favor. When it asked them again in 2023, almost two-thirds opposed it. Last summer, Wolverhampton Wanderers went so far as to  to abolish VAR – no other clubs voted with Wolves.

The reason VAR remains in dispute in some leagues, and unloved in most, is that it implicitly promised to do something that it couldn’t achieve: eliminate human error.

A year ago, the Premier League’s chief football officer  that VAR had helped referees make the correct decision 96% of the time, up from 82% in the pre-VAR era. Even if you take that number on its face, the rub is in that last 4%. In the first half of the 2024-25 EPL season, VAR made 10 errors – by either missing an “intervention” or simply getting it wrong – . While the mistakes were cut down by half year-over-year, misapplications or miscommunications in VAR, or outright errors, are still so common that they dominate the discourse on many Premier League matchdays.

The incurable issue with VAR is that it was framed in the wrong way upon its introduction. Or rather, it wasn’t framed at all. If it had been presented by the leagues and various bodies that adopted it as a tool for referees to get _fewer_ calls wrong, a tolerance for mistakes might have been baked into the recipe. If it had been sold as a way to correct only the biggest, most obvious missed calls (think ), there would be a different level of expectation among everyone about how often it would be used.

But it wasn’t introduced with those caveats. Success was never really defined. In this vacuum, it was broadly assumed that there would be no more bad calls. Fans figured that the total avoidance of mistakes would be beneficial – or better for _their_ team, at any rate, convinced as many fans are that they are the victim of conspiracies.

Though the accuracy of refereeing may have gone up, the attendant costs to the game’s flow and the emotion of scoring goals feel to many like they don’t justify the price of admission. Goals, the whole objective of the sport, are guilty until proven innocent by VAR validation. Based on the ending of Real v Atlético, so are spot kicks.



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And goals are the very reason why the Swedes have resisted VAR. “When a goal is scored, you let the feelings go, you don’t have to wait for a decision at a later stage,” Malmö CEO Niclas Carlnen . “Of course, that means you have to accept that the decision is not always right. In Sweden we have prioritized the feelings and the explosion that you have inside stadiums when you score.”

The frothing scrutiny of referees, meanwhile,  for their being given better equipment.

Whether the game realizes it or not, modern football has been living through a case study on whether fairer sport actually makes for better sport. And if the often marginal and sometimes inequitable gains in fairness yielded by VAR – some MLS stadiums have more TV cameras available for VAR use than others, for instance – justify the damage to the sport’s cadence.

It’s certainly done nothing to stop the metastasizing of a  within the sport’s . These are symptoms of our time writ large, perhaps, when the only  lies in a desire to smash the status quo.

The difficulty of applying the rules accurately and correctly in a sport that only ever moves faster while the eyesight and judgment of the refs stays the same, has not been resolved. It has merely been deflected, slightly, from the refs on the field to some other refs near the field, or in a booth somewhere.

Elite sport is, at heart, a dance of skill and savvy and physique and, yes, mistakes. By automating the trickiest parts of a referee’s job, the notion that match officials are also entitled to human error has sloughed off. By giving a few people on the field a chance at a do-over, the leeway to get any little thing wrong – even the faintest touch of a ball at the wrong time – vanished.

Maybe things were better before. Many think so in Norway. And in . And probably in the Atlético half of Madrid. If you go by public sentiment, in other places, too. That’s the trouble with VAR: it didn’t solve a problem. Not entirely. Or even close to it. It merely dulled one issue and presented a few new ones. And so the discussion over its merits can’t be resolved either.

*   _Leander Schaerlaeckens is at work on a book about the United States men’s national soccer team, out in 2026. He teaches at Marist University._
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