How VAR Works in the Premier League: Reviews Explained

The ball hits the net at a Premier League ground and roughly 55,000 people make a noise. Fourteen miles away, in an industrial park off the A408 near Heathrow, two qualified referees are already looking at a different feed of the same moment, and for the next eight seconds nobody in the stadium knows whether the noise they just made was justified.

That gap — between what happens on the pitch in England and where the decision about it is actually made — is the thing worth understanding first. VAR came into the Premier League in 2019-20, after a season of use in the FA Cup and the EFL Cup and after the 2018 World Cup had shown English audiences what it looked like. The protocol it runs on was written by IFAB, the body that maintains the Laws of the Game, and it is deliberately narrow. Most of the arguments in this country are about what VAR does not do, and almost all of those are arguments with the protocol rather than with the officials applying it.

The four categories VAR is allowed to touch, and nothing else

The protocol lists four match-changing situations. Outside them, the video assistant referee has no authority to intervene at all, regardless of how obvious the error is or how many replays a broadcaster shows.

Category	What it covers	What it excludes
Goals	Whether a goal should stand, and offences in the attacking phase leading to it	Anything before the attacking phase began
Penalties	Whether a penalty should have been given or not given, and offences leading to it	Contact outside the penalty area unless a red card is in play
Direct red cards	Serious foul play, violent conduct, denial of an obvious goalscoring opportunity	A second yellow card, which cannot be reviewed
Mistaken identity	A card shown to the wrong player	Whether the card itself was correct

The second yellow exclusion causes more confusion in England than any other line in the protocol. A player sent off for two cautions cannot have that decision reviewed, even when replays show the second foul was not a foul at all, because the sanction is a caution rather than a red card and cautions are outside the four categories. It looks arbitrary. It is a deliberate boundary, drawn to stop VAR from re-refereeing the ordinary run of the game.

Penalties work in both directions, which supporters often forget. VAR can recommend awarding a penalty the referee missed entirely, and it can recommend rescinding one he gave — and in the second case it can also look at what happened immediately before, so a penalty can be overturned because the attacking side committed an offence in the build-up rather than because the contact itself was insufficient. A penalty rescinded for an offside two passes earlier is the protocol working exactly as written, however unsatisfying it feels from the stands.

The attacking possession phase is the other technical concept worth knowing. VAR can rewind from a goal to the moment the attacking team gained possession, checking for offences along the way. It cannot rewind further. If the ball has gone out of play, or possession has changed and changed back, the phase resets and everything before it is closed. A foul in the build-up two minutes earlier is not reviewable no matter how clearly it led to the goal.

Clear and obvious error, and why the bar is set where it is

Two different standards run through the protocol and confusing them explains most of the disagreements English supporters have.

Matters of fact are binary. Whether a player was in an offside position, whether the ball crossed the touchline, whether an offence took place inside or outside the penalty area — these have correct answers, and VAR checks them for accuracy without any threshold at all. A millimetre is a millimetre.

Matters of opinion are different. Whether a challenge was careless or reckless, whether contact was sufficient for a penalty, whether a handball was in an unnatural position — these are judgements, and the VAR may only intervene where the on-field decision was a clear and obvious error. The phrase in the Laws is minimum interference, maximum benefit.

The consequence catches people out constantly. The referee's original decision is the reference point, so two identical incidents can produce opposite outcomes depending on what the referee gave in real time. If he awarded a penalty, the question is whether awarding it was clearly wrong. If he waved play on, the question is whether waving play on was clearly wrong. In the grey middle, both stand.

My own view is that this is the genuine design flaw, and it is not the officials' fault. A threshold defined by whether something is obvious is itself a judgement, made by a different person, in a different room, watching a different picture at a different speed. Consistency was never available. What was available was a narrower system with fewer interventions, and English football chose accuracy over restraint at almost every point where it had a choice.

Inside Stockley Park on a matchday

• 2019Arrived in the Premier League
• 4Reviewable categories
• 19Clubs voting to keep VAR in 2024
• 1Clubs voting to scrap it

Structural facts about the system and its adoption, not figures from any particular season. The 2024 vote was on a resolution to abolish VAR from the following season.

Every Premier League VAR operation runs out of a single building. Stockley Park sits near Heathrow in west London, and the decision to centralise there rather than put a video booth in each of the twenty grounds was made for consistency and for cost — one facility, one set of equipment, one set of standards, and officials who work in the same room every week rather than in twenty different portakabins.

Each match has its own booth. Inside it are the VAR, who is a qualified referee and usually a current or former member of the professional select group, an assistant VAR, and replay operators whose job is to find and cue the relevant angles as fast as possible. The feeds are the broadcast cameras, supplemented by the dedicated offside cameras. The audio channel to the on-field referee is open throughout.

1. 1Goal scoredThe referee does not signal for the restart until the check has been completed.
2. 2Silent checkThe VAR reviews the goal and the attacking phase that produced it, without interrupting anything.
3. 3Nothing foundThe VAR confirms the check is complete and the referee restarts the match. This is the usual outcome.
4. 4Factual issue foundOffside or a ball out of play is communicated directly to the referee, who disallows the goal without a review.
5. 5Judgement issue foundThe VAR recommends an on-field review and the referee walks to the pitchside monitor.
6. 6Referee decidesOnly the referee changes the decision. He may keep his original call after watching the replays.
7. 7Restart setPlay resumes according to what the correct decision would have been at the moment of the offence.

The standard sequence for a goal check under the VAR protocol. Most checks complete within the first two steps and are never visible to anyone in the ground.

What happens on almost every attacking move is a silent check. The VAR looks at the incident, finds nothing that meets the threshold, and says nothing beyond confirming the check is complete. The overwhelming majority of VAR activity is invisible, and the system is doing its job most successfully at exactly the moments nobody notices it.

The other change to the pitch is subtler and predates most people's awareness of it. Assistant referees are now instructed to delay raising the flag for offside where an attacking move is likely to produce a goalscoring opportunity, so that the phase can be played out and then checked. A flag raised early kills a move that VAR cannot restore. A flag delayed by four seconds preserves a goal that might be legitimate, at the cost of a defence that has stopped playing. Every English supporter has watched that trade-off go wrong.

Who ends up in the chair on any given weekend is a separate process with its own criteria, covered in our guide to how Premier League referees are appointed.

Semi-automated offside, and how the line actually gets drawn

The original method was manual and it was slow for two specific reasons that had nothing to do with anyone being indecisive.

1. 1TrackingOptical cameras record the position of the ball and multiple points on every player's body many times a second.
2. 2Kick pointSoftware identifies the exact moment the ball was played, rather than a human selecting a frame.
3. 3Line generatedThe system determines the attacker's furthest playable point and the relevant defender, and produces the offside line automatically.
4. 4Decision relayedThe VAR receives the outcome and communicates it to the referee as a factual matter, with no pitchside review.
5. 5Animation builtA three-dimensional graphic is generated for broadcast and for the screens inside the ground.
6. 6Judgement remainsWhether the player was interfering with play, and whether a defender deliberately played the ball, are still decided by people.

The sequence of an offside review under semi-automated technology. The manual method it replaced required a human to perform the first three steps.

First, the frame. Broadcast cameras capture a limited number of images per second, so identifying the precise moment the ball was played meant a human choosing between frames that were milliseconds apart, on a decision that could turn on a shoulder. Second, the line. Two lines had to be positioned by hand on a calibrated model of the pitch — one on the attacker's furthest playable body part, one on the second-last defender — and the operator had to identify which body part on which player mattered.

From 2020-21 the Premier League widened the broadcast lines so that marginal calls fell to the attacker, an acknowledgement that the precision being claimed was greater than the precision available.

Semi-automated offside technology removes both bottlenecks. Optical cameras track many points on each player's skeleton and the position of the ball at high frequency, the system determines the kick point and the relevant body parts itself, and the offside line is generated rather than drawn. The Premier League adopted it during 2024-25, later than the original timetable had suggested — the rollout was delayed for testing, which was the right call and an unusually candid one.

One detail of the old method deserves rescuing from the general complaint, because it was never as crude as it looked. The lines were not drawn on the television picture. They were drawn on a calibrated three-dimensional model of the pitch, built from surveyed reference points at each ground, which is why they appear to bend correctly across the turf and why a line can be placed accurately on a player standing side-on to the camera. The precision of the geometry was not the weak point. The frame selection and the human choice of body part were.

It settles position and nothing else. Whether a player in an offside position was interfering with play, obstructing an opponent's line of vision, or challenging for the ball is a judgement under Law 11, and no camera decides it. Nor does the technology determine whether a defender deliberately played the ball, which resets the offside phase and which has produced some of the most contested decisions in England since VAR arrived.

Goal-line technology is a separate system entirely, fully automatic, and it reports to the referee's watch within a second — the distinction is explained in our guide to goal-line technology in English football.

On-field review against factual decision, and when the referee walks over

The referee goes to the monitor for some things and not for others, and the rule governing which is entirely consistent even though it looks random from the stands.

Factual matters are communicated directly. If the VAR establishes that a player was offside, or that the ball had left the field, or that the offence occurred outside the area, the referee is told and acts on it. There is no walk to the monitor, because there is nothing for him to form an opinion about.

Matters of judgement produce an on-field review. The VAR recommends that the referee looks at the incident himself, the referee goes to the Referee Review Area — a marked-out spot on the touchline with a monitor in it, which only he may enter — and watches the replays. He can then change his decision or keep it.

That last clause matters more than English coverage usually allows. Only the referee can change a decision. The VAR recommends and cannot impose, and a referee who watches the replays and sticks with what he gave has done exactly what the protocol envisages. It happens, and it is not stubbornness.

There is a practical limit that gets overlooked. Once play has restarted with a subsequent event — another goal, a card, a substitution — the window closes on the earlier incident. A check has to be resolved before the game moves on, which is precisely why the referee holds up the restart while the VAR works, and why an official who lets play resume too quickly can leave an error uncorrectable.

The referee can also initiate a review himself, asking to see an incident he is unsure about. And when a decision is overturned, play restarts according to what the correct decision would have been, which occasionally produces odd-looking restarts several passes after the incident.

Any red card that survives a review then feeds into the disciplinary machinery, which is a separate system with its own tariffs and appeal routes — set out in our guide to Premier League suspension rules.

Where the added time comes from

From 2023-24 the Premier League adopted the stricter approach to added time that had been used at the 2022 World Cup, and English supporters noticed immediately because the numbers on the fourth official's board got considerably larger.

The principle is that time genuinely lost to stoppages should be played. The fourth official accounts for goal celebrations, substitutions, injuries and treatment, the taking of penalties, red cards, and the duration of VAR checks and reviews. A match with two VAR reviews, four substitutions and a lengthy injury will produce added time that would have looked absurd a decade ago.

The board shows a minimum, not a maximum. The referee retains discretion to play longer, and does, particularly where a stoppage occurs during the added period itself. A check that runs for ninety seconds in the 89th minute is added on, which is why a late VAR review effectively extends the match by its own length plus whatever follows it.

There is a fairness argument buried in this that English football has not fully worked through. A team defending a lead is punished by long added time, and a team defending a lead is also the team most likely to benefit from slowing the game down, so the rule corrects a genuine abuse. It also means a side that has held out for ninety minutes can face eleven more, which changes what a one-goal lead is worth. The mechanics are covered in our guide to stoppage time rules in the Premier League.

What the crowd in the ground is actually told

For the first seasons, almost nothing. A graphic reading "Checking" appeared on the stadium screens, then "Check complete", and the 55,000 people who had paid to be there had less information than anyone watching on television with the sound on.

That was indefensible and it has been improved in stages. Replays and the offside graphic now appear on stadium screens, so supporters can at least see what the decision was based on. IFAB has approved referees announcing the outcome of a review over the public address system, a practice used at FIFA tournaments, and English football has moved in the same direction. Exactly what is announced, and at which point, has changed more than once, so treat any description of the current wording as provisional rather than fixed.

The underlying problem is structural. Television has a director choosing angles, a commentator explaining, and a former referee on hand to interpret. The ground has a screen and a lot of people guessing. Whatever is done about announcements, the person in the stadium will always be the least informed participant in a VAR decision, which is a strange outcome for a sport whose atmosphere is its principal product.

The complaints English supporters make, and which ones hold up

Some of these are well founded and some are not, and separating them is more useful than defending or attacking the system as a whole.

Delay. Founded. The dead time is real, it breaks the rhythm of a match, and semi-automated offside has reduced it without eliminating it. Subjective reviews are the slow ones now, because they involve a walk to the monitor and a person making up his mind.

Inconsistency between referees. Founded, and structural rather than personal. A threshold defined as clear and obvious will be applied differently by different people, and the only fixes are a lower threshold, which means more interventions, or a higher one, which means more errors standing.

Offside decided by margins nobody can see. Founded, and the most interesting of the lot. The offside law was written to stop goal-hanging, not to adjudicate armpits, and there is a serious argument that a tolerance should be built in so that a player is only offside when clearly offside. Thicker lines were a partial version of that idea. Whether English football wants the accuracy or the spirit of the law is a question it has not answered.

In-stadium communication. Founded, and improving.

Bias towards particular clubs. Not founded. Appointments are made by a process independent of the clubs, audio from decisions has been published, and no evidence of systematic favouritism has emerged from any of it. Confirmation bias does a great deal of work in this argument.

VAR should correct every wrong decision. Not founded, in the sense that it is an argument against the protocol rather than about it. IFAB deliberately built a narrow system, and a version that reviewed everything would replace the referee.

Nobody wants it. Not founded. Premier League clubs voted on a resolution to abolish VAR from the following season at their 2024 annual general meeting and rejected it by nineteen votes to one. The clubs are the electorate, and they were not close to divided.

What VAR did to celebrating a goal

This is the cost that never appears in the accuracy arguments, and it is not small.

The ball goes in. There is a beat — a fraction of a second where a stand that used to erupt now hesitates, because everybody in it has learned that a goal is not a goal until somebody says so. Players have adapted too, jogging back with an arm half-raised rather than running to the corner. Some managers now wait for the screen before turning to the bench.

Then there is the second version, the goal confirmed after ninety seconds of checking, which produces a noise that is louder and completely different in character. Relief rather than joy. English grounds have developed a whole vocabulary around it, including the ironic slow handclap during a long check and the roar that goes up when the referee draws the rectangle in the air.

And then the worst one, the goal that was celebrated fully, wildly, for a minute and a half, and then taken away. Nothing in the sport was previously capable of that particular emotional handbrake turn.

None of this is an argument for abolishing anything, and I would not make it into one. It is an argument for recognising that the sport traded something for accuracy, that the thing it traded was the immediacy of the single moment football is built around, and that the trade was made without anybody putting it to the people in the stands. Whether it was worth it depends on how you weigh a correct decision against a spontaneous one.

VAR in the FA Cup and the EFL compared with the Premier League

English football does not run one system. It runs several, and which one applies depends on the competition and the ground.

Competition	VAR used	Practical effect
Premier League	All matches	Full protocol at all twenty grounds
EFL Championship	Not in league matches	Cost of installation and staffing at 24 clubs
EFL League One and Two	Not in league matches	Same reason, applied further down
EFL play-off finals	Yes, at Wembley	The ground is equipped
FA Cup	At equipped grounds and in later rounds	In practice, Premier League stadiums
EFL Cup	At equipped grounds and at the final	Same pattern

Goal-line technology is the exception that proves the point about money. It is installed far more widely than VAR because it needs no officials, no booth and no ongoing staffing — a set of cameras, a watch, and an automatic signal. The marginal cost of running it on a Tuesday night is close to nothing, which is why English football adopted it with almost no argument and adopted VAR with a decade of one.

Cost is the whole explanation for the EFL's position. Equipping and staffing VAR at 72 clubs would consume a meaningful share of what those clubs receive centrally, and Championship clubs have discussed introducing it more than once without agreeing to pay for it. The FA has changed which rounds of its own competition are covered, so the boundary in the cup has moved and may move again.

The result is a genuine oddity that only English football produces. A Championship club can play a league fixture with no VAR on the Saturday, a cup tie at a Premier League ground with full VAR on the Tuesday, and a league fixture with no VAR again the following weekend — three matches in nine days under three different sets of assumptions about what will be checked. Players adjust their behaviour accordingly, and anyone who claims that does not affect how they defend in the box is not being straight about it.

The structure of the competitions where this bites hardest is set out in our guides to FA Cup rounds and the Carabao Cup format.

Where to read the official record after a match

Three sources exist and they are better than any of the arguments about them.

The Premier League publishes explanations of contentious decisions through its own match centre, setting out what was checked and why the outcome was reached. It is brief, it is written in the language of the protocol, and it answers the narrow question of which rule was applied.

The Key Match Incidents Panel is the more interesting document. An independent panel reviews contentious decisions after the fact and records whether it considers each one correct, with findings published periodically. It is a retrospective audit rather than an appeal — no result changes — and it is the closest thing English football has to a public accuracy score for its own officials.

Match Officials Mic'd Up releases the actual audio between the referee and the VAR on selected incidents, with explanation. It is the single most useful thing PGMOL has done for public understanding, because it replaces speculation about what was said with a recording of what was said. It is also, occasionally, uncomfortable listening, which is the point.

What is not published is the referee's match report, which goes to the FA and forms part of the disciplinary record rather than the public one. For the rest of this section, the England guides hub collects every page, and our broader football coverage sits alongside it.