VAR's Expanding Role Threatens Football's Soul, Experts Warn

Ten years into its use in professional football, the video assistant referee has become the sport's most contentious technology—not because it fails to work, but because it works too well, and keeps expanding into territory it was never meant to occupy.

When the International Football Association Board first approved VAR a decade ago, the mandate was narrow and clear: use video replay to catch the obvious errors that human referees might miss, while keeping the referee in charge of the match. The technology was meant to be a safety net, not the net itself. But something shifted. Each season brought new applications—offside calls assisted by artificial intelligence, handball decisions, fouls in the penalty area—until what began as a corrective tool became a parallel decision-making system that could halt play for minutes while officials reviewed angles in slow motion.

The World Cup this past summer made the tension visible. Matches stopped. Fans waited. The fluid, fast-moving game they came to watch fractured into intervals of uncertainty and technical review. By mid-September, as domestic seasons kicked off again, the complaints had only grown louder. In Germany, where VAR has operated in the Bundesliga for nine years, organized fan groups launched a coordinated campaign in August demanding the technology be removed entirely. Their argument was blunt: VAR had robbed football of its joy. The technology, they said, needed to go back in the box.

What makes this moment significant is that German football fans are not passive consumers. Many hold club memberships that give them genuine influence over governance. Their push was not mere grumbling but an organized challenge to the sport's direction. Yet Jochen Drees, who heads VAR operations in Germany, argued for refinement rather than removal—a response that Susmit Gulavani, an assistant professor of AI and machine learning in sport at the University of South Carolina, recognizes as a natural institutional tendency. Once a technology proves capable, the impulse is to expand its role, not constrain it.

Gulavani frames VAR as a symptom of a broader pattern in how societies deploy technology. "The idea behind VAR was that technology could reduce human error while leaving the referee in charge," he told Deutsche Welle. "Over time, however, VAR has expanded in both its use and its influence." The introduction of semi-automated offside technology improved precision, but it also raised expectations that technology should deliver perfect outcomes—a standard no human system ever could. That gap between what technology can do and what the sport actually needs is where the sense of mission creep originates. VAR is now expected to resolve almost every contentious decision, even though many incidents, such as fouls or handball calls, still require human interpretation that no camera can provide.

Alternatives are being tested. At the U20 men's football World Cup last year, challenge cards—borrowed from American football—were trialed. Coaches could request reviews rather than officials initiating them constantly, reducing the cascade of interruptions. The system, officially called Football Video Support, continues to be tested, though it is often viewed as a cheaper alternative to VAR rather than a genuine replacement. Gulavani argues for a different framing altogether: treat technology as decision support, not decision replacement. "AI and technologies like VAR are good at processing large amounts of information quickly and consistently, but they cannot fully understand the context, intent, or nuance that many sporting decisions require," he said. "Human referees are still needed to interpret the Laws of the Game and exercise judgment in situations where there is no objectively correct answer."

A return to football without technology seems unlikely. Business, recruitment, and event management have already integrated AI and automation into their operations; sport will not reverse course. The real question is whether the sport can find a way to return technology to a supporting role—one that catches the clear error without governing the match itself. If it can, the lesson might ripple beyond the white lines of stadiums into how other institutions think about the tools they deploy.