Soccer’s use of VAR has been a nuisance to the game, bothering both fans and players, and making the experience of watching soccer worse as a whole. VAR is a Video Assistant Referee that mostly reviews if goals are offside or not. However, it also looks at other things like red card reviews and whether or not a tackle should call for a red card.

VAR has caused a lot of controversial tight offside decisions to happen, with one of the most notable being Luis Diaz’s disallowed goal in Liverpool vs Tottenham in the Premier League. These messed up decisions can lead to consequences in important title races like in the premier league. For example if Liverpool lost the Premier League by 1 or 2 points, the decision against Tottenham robbed them of winning. For the players, when a team member scores a crucial goal and it is disallowed, it can be frustrating to see a goal disallowed when you were just celebrating it a second before.

When VAR gives the ref the information to make a call, mistakes happen often enough that they are talked about almost every Matchweek. If it were only a couple mistakes, that would be fine, but the amount of mistakes made in the past couple seasons is unacceptable. Some sort of change needs to happen. The Premier League themselves even admitted that the disallowed goal in the Tottenham vs Liverpool game was unjust, and that they made a mistake. For how this will be handled and what changes need to be made, one option is to just scrap VAR and let referees mark offsides, but that can be problematic as the human eye isn’t always enough. The key is to just be consistent with decisions, because one week a tackle will be a red card, and the next week a similar tackle won’t even be yellow.