Soccer should learn from the NFL to fix the mess that VAR has created

Is it time to give the video assistant referee the red card, or does soccer actually need the red flag?

As the fallout continues in the wake of Erling Haaland‘s goal in Manchester City‘s 1-0 Premier League win against Manchester United at Old Trafford on Sunday, the audio of VAR Matt Donohue and assistant VAR Blake Antrobus arriving at their decision was released on Tuesday. The 2:29 clip was nothing less than a pitch for the sport to follow the NFL, tennis and cricket by introducing a challenge process for teams on the wrong end of a calamitous decision.

OK, “calamitous” might be a little strong in the grand scheme of things, but by incorrectly awarding the goal — Pro Ref, the referees’ body, publicly admitted within three hours of the final whistle that the VAR team had awarded it in error by failing to identify City midfielder Enzo Fernández in an offside position — the sporting ramifications are potentially huge.

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If City win the Premier League title by one or two points, the goal-that-shouldn’t-have-been will be decisive. If United manager Michael Carrick fails to halt the club’s worst start to a Premier League season for 34 years, he could lose his job and point to the negative momentum caused by Haaland’s goal and the defeat it inflicted.

Yet if Carrick had the ability to immediately challenge the decision, citing Fernández’s offside position, the Premier League’s most contentious VAR mistake could have been corrected and erased from the record books within seconds. Except soccer doesn’t have a challenge process.

In the NFL, coaches are able to throw a red flag onto the field to challenge some aspects of plays. In cricket, team captains have 15 seconds to dispute an umpire’s decision they believe to be incorrect, and a similar system is in place in tennis. There are penalties for failed challenges — in the NFL, teams lose a timeout, and all sports offer a limited, fixed amount of such reviews per game. As the VAR continues to show it’s an imperfect safety net, the time has surely come for a challenge system to be made available to managers and coaches.

The VAR was introduced at the FIFA World Cup in 2018 to put an end to controversial, incorrect or inexplicable decisions by the on-field team of officials which were sometimes the difference between success or failure. It was brought in to ensure that swift justice was served on players who had committed fouls unseen by the referee or, in some cases, overturn erroneous calls that led to players being shown red cards.

That was the utopian idea of the VAR — the ultimate fail-safe to make incidents like Diego Maradona’s “Hand of God” goal against England at the 1986 World Cup nothing but a memory of different times when technology wasn’t available to correct bad calls. But City’s goal against United at Old Trafford wasn’t an isolated example of the VAR being unfit for the purpose.

A Luis Díaz goal for Liverpool against Tottenham Hotspur in October 2023 was wrongly disallowed for offside, prompting the Anfield team to receive an apology for a “significant human error” by VAR Darren England and his assistant Dan Cook. Eight months earlier, Arsenal also received an apology from PGMOL (now Pro Ref) after a “human error” by VAR Lee Mason led to Ivan Toney scoring an equalizer against the Gunners for Brentford. Mason did not correctly check the guidelines for offside and allowed the goal.

That might sound painfully familiar for United with Donohue and Antrobus failing to even once ask themselves whether Fernández was challenging for the ball or obstructing United defender Lisandro Martínez‘s path to clearing it. Had the VAR team applied the offside law correctly, the goal would have been disallowed.

In each of those aforementioned incidents — and there have been many more since the Premier League adopted the VAR in the 2019-20 season — an appeal by the team on the wrong end of the decision would have dealt with the matter quickly and satisfactorily.

So how feasible, or likely, would it be for the Premier League to allow managers to contest a VAR decision during a game? Primarily, such a radical move would have to be green-lighted by FIFA and IFAB (International Football Association Board), so the Premier League couldn’t make a unilateral decision to implement it although, as the richest and most powerful league in the world, it could probably get away with it.

Opponents might say that it would be yet another break from tradition, but all sports evolve and simply allowing mistakes to happen because, as the old pros always say, “they even themselves out over a season,” is not a credible argument. Some, including former United goalkeeper Peter Schmeichel, have called for the VAR to be scrapped altogether, but that is a nonstarter.

For all its flaws, the VAR has led to the majority of big decisions being called correctly. It’s just the obviously incorrect ones that need to be addressed and allowing for managers to have one or two appeals per game — coaches get at least two challenges per game in the NFL; they get a third challenge if one of their two original challenges is successful — would be a move forward.

Would it add even more delays? Perhaps, but as we saw during the World Cup this summer, FIFA was not averse to allowing for three-minute hydration breaks in each half. With Sunday’s VAR discussion for the Haaland goal lasting 149 seconds, another minute would hardly be a problem if it resulted in the right outcome.

Maybe teams would have to add a Laws of the Game expert to their already-crowded benches — coaches and players tend not to know rules as comprehensively as they should. But as Sunday’s VAR mess highlighted, even the officials don’t always apply them correctly.

But don’t give the VAR the red card. Bring in the red flag instead.