One of the funnier aspects of history is that the video assistant referee (VAR) was originally introduced to end the constant debates about refereeing decisions. That has sadly backfired, and in addition we have gained a new popular genre: the pro-contra-VAR debate in all its fundamental form every few weeks. Now IFAB, the rule-making body of world football, has given this debate new spark. Presumably from the 2026 World Cup onward the VAR will once again gain additional powers and also intervene at corners and yellow-red cards. The decision is regarded as a formality.
Now this rule body is anyway a quirky bunch. Four of the eight voting members at the general assembly are FIFA people, the other four come from Great Britain—as if people playing football in other parts of the world don’t also exist. The rumored new rule also stands in rather stark contradiction to IFAB’s desire to speed up football. Therefore the VAR is supposedly to intervene without time delay. Based on previous experience, that is, let’s say, unlikely.
Meanwhile, the other planned changes for the flow of the game are actually good news. Finally there will be time-wasting regulations for throw-ins, goal kicks and substitutions, so perhaps there will be at least partial relief from the slow-motion creep of the leading team from the 75th minute, endless fiddling, minutes-long substitution ceremonies and “Hey—why don’t you take the throw-in yourself?” But what everyone will talk about, and this is almost tragic, is of course again the VAR. And the eternal fragmentation of the game.
That the voracious VAR keeps gaining more powers is only logical. A core motive for its introduction was to free football from chance. No club conglomerate should fare worse due to a refereeing error and have to forgo revenues. But the principle of error and subjectivity cannot be eradicated: anyone who followed the Africa Cup of Nations final would certainly not think that VAR has freed football from mistakes. And because the “could-have” causal chain can spin endlessly in any game, the decision-makers are left with as a solution to the inadequate VAR only more VAR.
Actually an AI Debate
What does that mean in the final consequence? Perhaps we have not understood this correctly yet. For the VAR discussion is actually an AI discussion. The semi-automatic offside detection, now in use in the men’s Bundesliga this season, is created by AI. High-resolution special cameras can already feed AI with data from which it calculates the positions of players and the ball. AI for foul detection is also being tested. There is little doubt that football governing bodies will increasingly replace referee and VAR competencies with AI. And to the ref, the role (which may eventually be replaceable) is perhaps more of a communicator.
The complaint from some referees’ bosses that referees today make more mistakes because they are not used to relying on themselves, the debates about lost skills, the question of responsibility in decisions – all of this is actually an AI discourse. The fallible VAR itself, which attracts so much attention, is perhaps only a stepping stone toward partial automation in the machine room.
Whether that is good or bad is debatable. Tech-free decisions by professional referees are perhaps not really a human core competence that urgently needs to be preserved. Many referees are also fundamentally grateful for the assistance. And yet they already wrestle with loss of authority and hate for decisions, over which they have ever less influence. Perhaps the rest of the world can already imagine a broader future scenario. The consequences are also the growing fear of errors—a culture that rightly does not trust human beings and their abilities to take action. With responsibility. And the search for the error-free game, clearly, is a bottomless pit.
In earlier epochs of football, much coarser refereeing errors were everyday, yet football today does not feel fairer to us. We have simply forgotten that. The ongoing outcry will not be changed by the new VAR powers. For not only corners and yellow-red cards can turn the course of a match. But almost anything else can as well. So quickly the human cannot escape being human.
