VAR, Video Assistant Referee, technology has become a constant fixture in football. While it has its share of controversy, even in this year’s Champions League with Madrid, the Premier League voted to keep it at the end of the 23/24 season. Of course, not every team wanted the program to continue. Wolverhampton Wanderers led the charge in England to bin the technology and were handily defeated 19-1. This was in a meeting of team owners, so while the fans don’t get a vote, the owners must see some value in the system.
Go further North to Scandinavia and the sentiment about VAR turns rather ugly. In Norway specifically, a league in which members run their clubs, protests against VAR made global news. In July of last year, Rosenborg’s game against Lillestrom was abandoned when fans threw smoke bombs and fishcakes onto the field.
Norway voted to discontinue VAR in a 19-13 vote amongst the teams that make up the Norwegian league. The vote reflects fans’ criticism of how VAR is still susceptible to human error and takes away the spontaneous moments of football.
The Norwegian Football Federation, however, created a larger vote with all clubs in Norway regardless of size, with a majority in favor of keeping VAR. So no changes have been made since that latest vote.
Technology’s near-ubiquitous presence within all sports aims to mitigate human error as well as provide the unquestionable results that fans crave. 2025 is the year that the MLB started testing the Automatic Ball-Stike Challenge System, and the NFL decided to move on from measuring with chains and using Sony’s Hawk-Eye technology. These decisions mark a shift from the human elements, which seem to anger fans more than aid the game.
Overall, the verifications that stem from this technology are supposed to limit controversies while bolstering the joy of the game. In football, this is not the case, and in other sports, it’s too early to tell. One thing is certain, however, and that is in-game technology has a long way to go to be at its best.
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