When the VAR Machine Rewrites the Law: An Anatomy of the War Between 'Clear and Obvious' and the Human Hand

Opening: A Decision That Didn't Need a Monitor

Kazan, June 16, 2026. The 58th minute, the score at 1-0 to France. Antoine Griezmann burst into the penalty area, collided with Josh Risdon and went down. Referee Andrés Cunha of Uruguay, standing less than ten metres away, waved it away: nothing. But then he put his finger to his earpiece, stopped the game, walked to the sideline and leaned down toward a monitor. Thirty seconds later, he returned and pointed straight at the penalty spot.

That was no ordinary penalty. It was the first penalty in World Cup history to be awarded by VAR — Video Assistant Referee. I sat in a small apartment in Nagoya, nineteen years old, a second-year sociology student, and replayed the clip seventeen times in one night. I wasn't taking notes to judge whether Cunha was right or wrong. I was taking notes to understand another question: the referee's authority to decide — something that had always belonged to the human eye and instinct — where had it moved to during those thirty seconds?

The 3,000-word piece I published on a new sports platform two days later was shared more than four thousand times. Not because it was good. Because it asked the exact question viewers were confused about: when technology steps onto the pitch, who is really holding the whistle?

Eight years later, I am still sitting with that question. And the answer has become colder, more complex, and far more troubling than I once imagined.

Context: VAR Wasn't Born to Fix Errors — It Was Born to Transfer Power

Let's start with a truth that very few people in the stands are willing to admit. VAR, by its very design, is not a machine for fixing errors. It is a machine for transferring power.

Before 2026, the power model on the pitch was simple. The referee was the final decision-maker, and assistant referees only supported at the two touchlines. Error was part of the game — not because anyone wanted it, but because the human eye, at 90 minutes' speed, at twenty metres' distance, has physical limits it cannot overcome. IFAB, the body that governs football's laws, wrote in its technical documents that football accepts 'a certain degree of error' as the price of continuity and the rhythm of the game.

But when broadcast rights revenues soared, when a single penalty could decide hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for a club or a federation, then 'an acceptable degree of error' became something no one was willing to accept any more. VAR was not born from an abstract need for justice. It was born from economic pressure, from betting contracts, from the social-media pressure that turns every mistake into a crisis. And when it was born, it carried an internal contradiction that has never been resolved.

That contradiction lies in the phrase launched alongside VAR: 'clear and obvious error'. This is the door IFAB left open so that VAR would not intervene in every situation. The principle is simple: VAR may only intervene when the referee has made a clear and obvious mistake — that is, when the error, seen with the naked eye and at real speed, cannot be disputed. If the situation requires dissection, VAR stands still. The on-field decision stands.

Sounds reasonable. But look at reality. The phrase 'clear and obvious' does not define anything concrete. It has no unit of measurement. It has no numerical threshold. It does not say clear to whom, obvious within how long, and from which camera angle. This is precisely the point I want you to hold in your mind throughout this article: 'Clear and obvious' is not a technical standard, it is a confession that the law is unable to define itself.

Core Analysis: An Anatomy of Data from the Pandemic Penalty Fever

In 2026, when the COVID-19 pandemic swept across Europe and global football froze, the 2026/21 Premier League season witnessed something unprecedented: 40 penalties, most of them from the new handball law that IFAB issued and amended multiple times within a single year. Revenue stopped, schedules were turned upside down, but on the pitch, referees still had to apply a law whose authors had not yet finished defining it.

In that long, uncertain holiday — I was then a first-year employee at a Japanese sports broadcaster — instead of worrying about my job, I downloaded the entire Opta dataset on 47 handball incidents that had been penalised that season, and manually coded three variables for each: the angle by which the arm escaped the body's silhouette, the arm's posture relative to the shoulder, and the distance from ball to body.

The result took me two days to believe.

In 38 of the 47 incidents, the defending player's arm was outside the 'natural body silhouette' — a concept IFAB used in its explanatory documents but never included in the official text of the law. In 31 incidents, the arm was in an unnatural position relative to the shoulder axis. But here is the strange part: in 12 incidents, the ball struck the hand right on the arm's path back to its natural position — meaning the player was pulling the arm in — and it was still penalised.

What does that mean? It means referees, in practice, had created their own definition of handball: not 'the hand deliberately blocked the ball' (as the old law said), but 'the hand escaped the boundary of the body'. This was a colossal philosophical shift, and it happened quietly, without any vote by IFAB, without any press release.

I brought this finding to an online refereeing research seminar. One participant objected that my coding was subjective. That is partly true — visual coding is always subjective. But I replied that the subjectivity itself is the data: when ten people watch the same incident and classify it differently, then the problem isn't the incident, it's the definition they are using to classify it. We are not arguing about the same law. We are arguing based on different versions of the law that each of us constructs in our own head.

This data became the bridge that brought me into the international refereeing research community. Not because I had answers, but because I asked the right question: if referees have created their own standard, then who controls that standard, and how does it propagate from one match to the next?

The Euro 2026 Semi-Final: When I Stood Alone to Defend Something No One Wanted to Hear

July 7, 2026, Euro 2026 semi-final, England vs Denmark at Wembley. In the 104th minute, in extra time, Raheem Sterling went down in the penalty area after a shoulder-to-shoulder contact with Joakim Maehle. Referee Danny Makkelie of the Netherlands pointed to the spot without walking to a monitor. Not a single review. He stood where he was, and the decision was the decision.

Harry Kane took it, Kasper Schmeichel saved, but Kane scored the rebound. England went to the final. The whole of Europe exploded.

I was then a first-year employee at the newsroom, and I stood alone defending an argument almost no one wanted to hear: under the standard of 'clear and obvious error', Makkelie had every right to keep his original decision. Why? Because the shoulder contact between Sterling and Maehle fell exactly in the grey zone — there was contact, but not so obvious that a referee in another position would have overturned it. When the situation is not clear and obvious, VAR is not allowed to intervene, even if the VAR official personally thinks otherwise.

My colleagues pushed back hard. They said I was cold, that I was siding with power, that I was defending an unmistakably clear error. I understood that reaction. But I wasn't writing to defend Makkelie. I was writing to point out a structural truth: if we want referees to follow the law, then we must accept that sometimes the law leads to outcomes we don't like.

A veteran editor read what I wrote, recognised the unusual meticulousness of someone willing to separate himself from the crowd to analyse rather than emote, and invited me to write a regular column on football law. That was the turning point of my career.

But the deeper lesson I carried from that Wembley night was not about Sterling or Makkelie. It was about us — the viewers. We want VAR to deliver justice. But how do we define justice? Is justice the decision we agree with, or is justice the decision that is correct under the law, even when we disagree? These two definitions clash, and VAR is merely the mirror that reflects the clash more sharply.

The Pandemic Handball Law: A Logic Accident Its Designers Never Noticed

Let's be blunt: the handball law that IFAB issued and amended in 2026 and 2026 was a logic accident. Not because the lawmakers were incompetent. But because they tried to model something that cannot be modelled in words: the human arm in motion.

The human arm is not a geometric shape. It is a chain of joints, muscle, and neural reflex governed by the cerebellum within milliseconds. When a defender turns, jumps, rotates the torso, the arm automatically opens up to maintain balance — that is a survival reflex, not a tactical decision. Anyone who has ever jumped high knows this. But the handball law is written as though the arm were an object that can be 'placed' into a position, like a deliberate hand.

The strange thing is that IFAB amended this law several times in one year. Each amendment proved even further that the lawmakers had never modelled the human arm from a physical standpoint. They redefined the shoulder-arm boundary. They added the concept of the 'natural body silhouette'. They removed and then restored the criterion of intent. Each new version was born to patch the hole in the old version, and a new hole appeared. That is not reform. That is an endless loop.

Why does it happen? Because lawmakers are trying to resolve a contradiction that cannot be resolved: they want to remove intent entirely from the definition of handball (so referees don't have to read players' minds), but at the same time they want to avoid penalising situations where the ball hits the hand harmlessly. These two desires conflict. When you remove intent, you are forced to penalise every contact, including harmless ones. When you keep intent, you force referees to read minds. There is no middle road out.

And VAR — the machine born to deliver accuracy — becomes the very tool that magnifies the problem. Because VAR can look in slow motion, from multiple angles, it can detect contacts no naked eye would ever see. This creates a paradox: the more accurate the technology, the more violations are detected, and the greater the feeling of injustice in the viewer's heart. We penalise what the human eye does not see, and we call that justice.

The Counter-Intuitive Angle: What We Call 'Fairness' Is Really Something Else

This is the part I want you to linger on the longest.

After many years of watching, I have reached an uncomfortable conclusion: most arguments about VAR are not really arguments about fairness. They are arguments about expectation.

Think about it. When a VAR decision favours your team, you call it 'correct'. When it goes against you, you call it 'VAR ruining football'. The same situation, the same law, the same machine — only the side we stand on differs. This isn't true only of fans. It's true of commentators, coaches, club boards. All of us are reacting to outcomes, not to process.

And here is the crux I want to underline: VAR does not judge — it exposes how we are about to believe. Each time the machine intervenes, we don't learn something new about football. We learn something about ourselves: how far we are willing to trust technology, and how far we are willing to accept an outcome against our wishes.

The paradox is this: we bought VAR hoping it would eliminate controversy. The result is that it created more controversy, at higher intensity, because now there is a system we believe 'must be accurate' — and when that system still delivers a controversial decision, we feel betrayed. VAR promised too much. It cannot keep its promise, because it was designed to answer a question the law never clearly defined: what is a 'clear and obvious' error?

I once spoke with a FIFA-level referee, whose identity I'll keep confidential. He said something I'll never forget: 'The machine doesn't make me more right. It only makes me lonelier. Before, when I made a mistake, the whole stadium knew I was wrong, but we accepted it together as part of the game. Now, when I decide, I know it will be examined from ten angles, and I am no longer the only one deciding — I'm merely the announcer of the outcome of a process I do not control.'

His words capture what I call the alienation of refereeing power. Referees used to be the decision-makers. Now, often, they are merely the transmitters of a VAR-room decision that viewers cannot see, a room whose process no one knows, but whose outcome everyone sees. Power doesn't disappear. It moves. And when it moves to a place no one can observe, it becomes harder to control.

I don't write this to attack any individual referee. I write it to stress that the problem is not the people. The problem is the design. IFAB designed a system to fix errors, but did not design a definition for the 'error' the system must fix. This is not an individual's fault. It is a systemic hole, and every system has holes where language is not strong enough to describe reality.

I recall the first time I read the International Court of Justice's declaration on the definition of aggression in international law — a concept legal scholars have debated for over a century without reaching consensus. The handball law has the same problem at a smaller scale: it tries to define a behaviour through language, but once language meets motion, it shatters. The human arm does not obey definitions. It obeys physics. And no law can rewrite physics.

So What Should Change?

If you ask me, a law expert who has watched more than seven thousand matches, what should change, I'll answer with three specific proposals — not comprehensive solutions, but measurable steps.

First, IFAB needs to define 'clear and obvious' through an operating procedure, not through an emotional phrase. That means: specifying the maximum review time in seconds, the mandatory number of camera angles, and the conditions that automatically push a situation past the intervention threshold. You cannot manage a standard you cannot measure.

Second, on-field referee consultations need to be broadcast live in full, with audio, for viewers. A large part of the feeling of injustice comes from mystery. When viewers hear the referee and the VAR team exchange reasons, they won't necessarily agree with the decision, but they will understand the process. Understanding does not deliver fairness, but it reduces the feeling of being deceived. And the feeling of being deceived is what fuels every revolt in the stands.

Third, and perhaps most importantly: we need to accept that VAR will always have flaws, and design the law to absorb that error rather than trying to erase it. Football once accepted error. The shift to a 'no-error' model created an expectation that cannot be satisfied. Perhaps we need to partly go back: allow error in the grey zone, and intervene only in the clear zone. That is exactly what the law is trying to say. The problem is that viewers have never accepted the 'grey zone' as part of the game.

This is why I always return to my own story: a man born in Brazil, working in Japan, writing about football law for a global readership, I have learned that every culture defines fairness differently. In South America, people want referees to let the game flow, to accept hard contact. In Europe, people want absolute accuracy. In Asia, people prize discipline and consistency. No culture is right. There are only different expectations placed on the same machine.

Takeaway: What I Believe Will Happen

I believe something different from the crowd: VAR will not disappear, and it will not become perfect. It will continue to evolve in a direction I call 'semi-automation' — meaning technology will do the work it does best (objective measurement like semi-automated offside), and humans will keep the work they do best (reading context, reading intensity, reading intent).

What worries me is not that VAR is wrong. What worries me is that we are teaching a generation of viewers to believe there is a single, absolutely correct answer to every on-field controversy. The law does not work that way. Law is always a process of compromise between conflicting values: continuity of the game and accuracy, humanity and objectivity, the referee's authority and the club's interest. There is no absolute justice on a football pitch. There are only decisions and the people who must live with them.

So when you watch the next match — at World Cup 2026, at a Euro qualifier, at a late-night Champions League game — and the referee walks to the monitor, don't just ask whether he's right or wrong. Ask another question, the question I have asked for eight years: where is power in that moment, and who is truly holding the whistle?

The answer will not satisfy you. But it will make you understand football more.

And football, from the beginning until now, was never designed to satisfy us. It was designed to make us believe — in a team, in a game, in a miraculous possibility that anything can happen. VAR doesn't ruin that. But it forces us to learn to believe more consciously, more soberly, and less naively. That is not a loss. It is the coming of age of a sport that has grown too big to keep living on the instinct of a single human eye.