The Video Assistant Referee, commonly known as VAR, brought huge improvements to the game of football. Since its introduction in Serie A’s 2017/18 season, 117 incidents were correctly overturned after review of VAR. The number of mistakes without VAR is estimated to have been 5.75 percent, whereas with it, the mistakes dropped to 0.89 percent. Nevertheless, further improvements have to be made to VAR in order to address specific dubious events that take place throughout the 90 minutes of a football game. In particular, two issues came up during two Juventus vs. AC Milan games this season. One occured on Apr. 6 and the other on Jan. 16. In both games, penalties that should have been awarded to AC Milan were neglected, thus severely affecting the final result of the games.

In both games, the current VAR rules are to be blamed. In the episode that occurred during the game disputed on Apr.6, the referee was not directly involved since he was following the course of a Juventus counter attack and did not see that in the Juventus penalty box a Juventus player kicked an AC Milan player with no reason whatsoever. This is a clear fault and a penalty should have been awarded to AC Milan. Why didn’t the VAR team communicate with the referee, urging him to stop the Juventus counter attack and recommending him to conduct an On Field Review? Principle 2 of the VAR Protocol clearly states, “Video assistance is only for key match-changing situations (goals, penalty incidents and direct red cards and mistaken identity) and serious missed incidents”; the Juventus player kicking the AC Milan player without the referee seeing, is a case of “serious missed incident”, and thus, the video assistance should have been called.

In order to solve this problem, football should adopt the same system that tennis has with hawk eye. In fact, in tennis, each player receives three hawk eye challenges per game, which the players can use whenever they feel that a decision by the court referee was incorrect. By introducing this rule into football, each team would have a specific number of VAR challenges per game, to be used whenever they feel that the referee was wrong in his decision to not call for VAR or failed to see a fault. It would be the coach’s responsibility to ask for a VAR challenge when he thinks it is most appropriate. In the specific case of the Juventus player kicking the AC Milan player, AC Milan’s coach could have utilized one of the VAR challenges, thereby forcing the referee to go and review the VAR, instead of hopefully and powerlessly waiting for the VAR team to communicate with the referee. This rule would have allowed AC Milan to be awarded their penalty and, overall, it would have allowed for a more competitive and fair game.

The second case occurred on Jan. 16,and regarded a tackle committed by a Juventus player on an AC Milan player in his own penalty box. In this instance, once again, VAR was not consulted. This time, however, the referee was following the action closely. At first glance, this seems to be a referee problem; if the referee still decided to avoid VAR even when closely following the tackle. In that case he either must be incompetent – something I refuse to believe since Serie A is a highly respected league – or he must be a Juve fan – another thing that I refuse to believe since I am not a conspiracy theorist and I believe in the honesty and hard work of the Italian Referee Association.

So, what seems to be the real problem? Well, by reading Law 5 section 4 of the International Football Association Board, we find out the following: “the referee may be assisted by a video assistant referee – only in the event of a ‘clear and obvious error’”. The term “clear and obvious” is too stringent and binding. It pushes the idea that border-line episodes, on the border between objectivity and subjectivity, the choice of the field will prevail while technology will help the referee only when there is a macroscopic blunder. In short, this can be easily understood as a step backwards that restores the superiority of the referee to the detriment of eliminating errors. Since the choice to avoid sanctioning the tackle of the Juve player on the AC Milan player was not a clear and obvious error – but was nonetheless an error – the referee did not go to consult VAR.

So, how should we reform this section of the Law? Instead of the referee asking if there was a “clear and obvious error”, the referee should be asking if the decision he made is correct, any wording that allows the referee to ask the latter would be an effective change. By making this change, the referee will be pushed to consult the VAR in disputed episodes such as the aforementioned, but also, when reviewing the VAR, the referee will reflect on whether decision was correct, and not to what extent it was wrong.