For about ninety seconds, Coventry City were in the FA Cup final. It was April 2024, extra time in the semi-final at Wembley, and Coventry — a second-tier team that had already clawed back from 3–0 down against Manchester United — had just scored the winner: Victor Torp, sliding in at the far post. The Coventry end detonated. Strangers embraced. Then the video assistant referee went to work, and the replays found that, at the moment the pass was played, a Coventry attacker had been a few millimetres ahead of the last defender. Toenail offside, as it is now known. No goal. Coventry lost the shootout. And here is the kicker: in the Championship, the league Coventry actually plays in, there is no VAR. The goal would simply have stood. For one evening they had been promoted into a more accurate sport, and it cost them the final.
The detail that deserves dwelling on is not the margin but the law. Under IFAB’s Law 11, a player is offside if any part of the head, body or feet is nearer the opponents’ goal line than both the ball and the second-last opponent. Hands and arms don’t count — and the arm, the law helpfully specifies, ends “in line with the bottom of the armpit”. The armpit line is not a commentator’s joke. It is codified. That is what the video referee has done to football: taken rules written for the resolution of the human eye and enforced them at the resolution of the freeze-frame. As Daisy Christodoulou, author of I Can’t Stop Thinking About VAR, puts it, “the celebration has been relocated from the moment of the goal to the moment of the verdict.” The crowd no longer cheers an event. It cheers a decision.
Which is why football has become, almost by accident, the cleanest available case study in a much wider problem: what happens when you make a judgement system more accurate without asking what the judgement was for. The Premier League was the last major European league to adopt VAR, in 2019, after a trial in which Mauricio Pochettino warned that fans would be unhappy — one of the more prescient managerial statements on record. And the technology does, on its own terms, work. Decisions are more often correct than they were. But correctness turned out to be the measurable half of the trade. The cost — the pause, the withheld celebration, the goal you learn not to feel until it has been certified — is real, and appears in no metric. Accuracy wins every argument about these systems because accuracy is the part that can be counted.
Consider what the offside law asks of a human. The assistant referee must watch, simultaneously, the exact instant the ball is kicked, the position of the second-last defender and the position of the attacker — three events in different places, processed by a pair of eyes that was never built for it. Everyone quietly understood this for a century. The rule existed to stop goal-hanging: strikers loitering by the post, waiting for the ball to be hoisted over. It was a rough instrument for a rough job, written at the granularity of what a linesman could see, and its margin of error worked as a kind of lubricant. A toe beyond the last defender is offside according to the letter, but it is not the crime the law was written to prevent. Nobody gains an advantage from a toe. The letter and the point have been separated by a zoom lens.
Worse, the zoom lens isn’t even as precise as it looks. The lines are drawn on broadcast footage running at 50 frames per second — one frame every 0.02 seconds, in which a sprinting footballer moves up to twenty centimetres. Pick the frame a beat early or late and the verdict swings by more than the margin being judged. The millimetre certainty on screen is an artefact of a measuring device too coarse to supply it. We have built a courtroom exhibit out of guesswork, then appealed to its authority.
Aware, perhaps, of the fragility of all this, the system is hedged with humility clauses. VAR may intervene only for a “clear and obvious error” or a “serious missed incident”, and only in four categories: goals, penalties, straight red cards, mistaken identity. In practice the humility survives about as long as the first replay. In September 2023, Liverpool had a Luis Díaz goal wrongly disallowed for offside after the VAR, believing the on-field decision was a goal, checked it, found nothing wrong and announced “check complete… that’s fine, perfect” — thereby confirming the very error he existed to catch. The referees’ body released the audio, apparently reasoning that transparency would help. It did, in a way. It clarified that the failure mode of a precision system is not imprecision. It is confident, well-documented wrongness.
Meanwhile the laws themselves are swelling to accommodate their own enforceability. The handball rule was once about twenty words — a deliberate act, hand or arm, ball. After years of revision it runs to roughly eleven times that, and at one point IFAB had to issue a formal clarification of where the arm begins, because the sport had talked itself into public disputes about the definition of an armpit. Rules written for people now have to be drafted for the machines that audit the people.
Other sports absorbed their cameras without this much blood, and the reason is instructive. Tennis and cricket are stop-start games full of natural seams; a review slots into a pause that already existed, and tennis even rations challenges, keeping the technology a scarce, tactical resource. Football’s product is precisely its lack of seams — forty-five unbroken minutes in which emotion compounds. The delay is not an inconvenience layered on top of the spectacle. It is taken out of the spectacle, like a tax. A review system suited to cricket was bolted onto the one major sport whose entire rhythm argues against it.
There are proposals to restore the intent — redraw the line at daylight between attacker and defender, tolerate the toe, automate the call so at least the verdict arrives instantly. Any of them would be an admission of something sport is reluctant to say out loud: the benefit of the doubt was never a flaw in the system. It was the system. A rule enforced beyond the resolution it was written for stops being the same rule; it becomes a new law wearing the old one’s name, and nobody gets to vote on it, because the change arrives disguised as mere accuracy. The goal was disallowed. The ninety seconds happened. A better law would know the difference.