• Home
  • Features
  • Video Assistance Referee: The Numbers

Video assistance referee: The numbers

VAR technology

Entering the football canon in 2018, most notably, at the 2018 World Cup, the Video Assistant Referee is one of the most divisive things in football since Sir Geoff Hurst’s winning goal in 1966.

Of course, these two chapters revolve around the same thing - whether or not the ball crossed the line. Modern technology has since proven that, yes, Hurst did score, but VAR itself seems to be struggling with this concept even five years into its career.

The Goal website recently listed ten separate failings of VAR since 2018, including an offside goal in Arsenal's match against Brentford in February. It also didn’t spot Cristian Romero pulling Marc Cucurella's hair in Chelsea's 2-2 draw with Spurs in August.

These incidents - and plenty more - lead to one, inevitable question: what’s the point of the video assistant referee? It seemingly removed the curse of natural human error and replaced it with a more technologically advanced version of the same thing.

What does the evidence say about all this, though? Is it possible to prove once and for all that VAR is good or bad for the game?

 

Box office entertainment

Big data is more than a buzzword. Increasingly, everything from marketing campaigns to bus timetables is driven by an analysis of numbers - and professional football has long been a pure form of this practice.

We know that Arsenal had an expected goals per 90-minute stat of 1.89 in 2022/23, for instance, because everything in football is quantified. We also know that Wolves couldn't find an assist if their lives depended on it, at 0.32 assists per game.

The Sportingtech website shows how the latest data is traded between both official and private sources. In this case, it’s to capture the interest of sportsbook operators, using data ‘feeds’ to provide information about thousands of events.

It’s this kind of data that helps us dig deeper into VAR. Let’s start with an obvious point - the technology is deeply unpopular. A study mentioned by Sky Sports revealed that just 1 in 25 football fans (4%) think that VAR is working well in England’s top flight.

 

 

American site CNN summed up the latter point in just three words, namely, “box office entertainment”, a phrase that hints at the larger farce surrounding VAR. Yet, other sources suggest that things are starting to turn a corner.

 

Close to perfect

The International Football Association Board (IFAB), the body that introduced the video referee in the first place, found that major errors occurred in every 1 in 3 games. On paper, that sounds like a disaster, but most of these incidents are corrected at the time they occur.

An independent panel of former players discovered that VAR only embarrasses itself once every 37.5 matches. This number represented a dramatic increase in accuracy in the wake of the World Cup in Qatar. It previously sat at one in 24.3 games before last winter's event.

IFAB claims that VAR’s accuracy is close to perfect, at 93%. A problem with the technology arises if we consider another figure, i.e. the fact that almost two-thirds of interventions concern goals or penalties.

Ultimately, while the video referee is flawed, much of the noise surrounding its use likely stems from the fact that the ‘loser’ in a VAR decision tends to end up short-changed in the game they’re playing in.

That kind of thing rarely goes down well.

 

More Articles