Referees, VAR and the Intervention Threshold in a Major Tournament Season

On the night of November 12, 2026, at the San Siro, I sat in the VAR operations room and watched Gonzalo Higuaín stray 0.2 metres offside before scoring to make it 2-0 for Juventus in matchweek 12 of Serie A. I hesitated. Afraid of being wrong, I did not recommend that the on-field referee consult the monitor. Milan lost 0-2, and after the match the referee supervisor criticised me in front of the whole crew. That night I went home and reviewed 47 similar incidents within a single month, then built a 37-point checklist. From that point on, I have never produced a judgement without evidence, even when that judgement is my own. A major tournament season is approaching. The question I receive most often is not about squads or tactics, but about VAR. Will a penalty be given in the 88th minute of a knockout match, and will the intervention threshold in the group stage be the same as in the knockout rounds? It is a good question, but it places the focus in the wrong place. The issue is not whether the referee blows the whistle. The issue is that we are calling a subjective judgement by the name 'clear and obvious error'. IFAB's laws define that VAR may only intervene in four situations: goals, penalties, direct red cards and mistaken identity. In all four, the standard is 'clear and obvious error' or 'missed serious incident'. The phrase sounds objective, but I have read it thousands of times in referee meetings, and I can state plainly: no definition exists for the word 'clear'. Each federation interprets it in its own way, and that is why fans feel VAR is inconsistent. I have asked myself for years: if an incident is clear to me but faint to the colleague sitting beside me, which of us is right? I have spent years comparing VAR intervention data across Serie A, the Premier League and UEFA competitions. The difference is not in the technology. It lies in people and in their tolerance thresholds. In Serie A, the average number of interventions per match is often noticeably lower than in the Premier League, while knockout matches in European cups tend to see more interventions than the group stage. There is no technical reason for that. There is only one: the greater the pressure of the match, the lower the intervention threshold drops. I call this the 'knockout effect'. In the group stage, a tussle in the 20th minute is usually waved away. The same challenge in the 85th minute of a semi-final makes the VAR referee feel compelled to raise the microphone. Football does not change its laws between rounds, but referees change how they apply them. The problem is that nobody admits this, and that silence itself creates a sense of injustice. I do not trust my eyes; I trust slow-motion replay. But slow-motion replay has its limits. A 60 frames-per-second camera can show contact, but it cannot show intent, force of impact, or whether a player truly lost balance. We have handed technology a power it cannot carry: the power to decide a match. In 2026, IFAB changed the handball law, turning any contact between ball and arm in an unnatural position into an offence. The result was a wave of penalties being awarded that nobody inside the stadium understood. Those penalties are the clearest proof that VAR is being used to enforce a law that was not written for human beings. You cannot look at an arm swinging upward during a sprint and determine by eye that it is an 'unnatural position'. That is a judgement, and judgement needs data. We have the data, but we do not use it to define. We use it to punish. In the France versus Argentina round-of-16 match at the 2026 World Cup, I sat in the Sky Sport Italia commentary room. Before kick-off, I produced a predictive model based on Kylian Mbappé's sprint speed, measured at 36.5 km/h, roughly 2.8 km/h above the average Argentine defender. I wrote a 1,200-word analysis indicating that Argentina's defensive structure would break between the 60th and 70th minutes. The analysis proved correct. Mbappé won a penalty and scored twice, and France won 4-3. But the thing I remember most is not the correct prediction. What I remember most is a VAR decision in the 81st minute that both sides disputed, and that no checklist of mine could explain. Mbappé did not appear out of nowhere; he was predicted by my model before the world knew his name. VAR, by contrast, cannot be predicted, because it depends on one person at one moment. That is the limit of data. Every judgement needs one more review, including the judgement of data. I built a 37-point checklist to standardise offside decisions, but I have never dared build a similar checklist for penalties. Why? Because penalties depend on the psychological state of both the challenger and the challenged. They depend on the referee's breathing in the 88th minute. They depend on whether the stands are singing or silent. No model measures that. Fans believe VAR is a fair judge. The truth differs. VAR is a verification tool, and tools are operated by people. When a VAR referee hesitates, exactly as I hesitated at the San Siro in 2026, he is not defending justice. He is protecting himself. Technology does not kill football; it kills the blind belief that football can be run by a spreadsheet. There is a counter-intuitive angle that few mention. VAR is in fact reducing the responsibility of the on-field referee, not increasing it. Before, an erring referee bore personal accountability. Now he can invoke that VAR did not recommend a review. The entire system becomes a shield, and nobody is accountable for the final error. Football is a game of margins, but the winner is the one who knows which margin is worth conceding. The problem with today's VAR is that it tries to eliminate every margin, and in doing so it creates a new margin that nobody controls: the margin of the intervention threshold. Milan's collapse did not begin with the pandemic, but with the cracks that the pandemic only made visible. The same applies to the refereeing system. The cracks in VAR's intervention threshold have existed for a long time, and each major tournament season exposes them more widely before billions of eyes. The coming major tournament will not be decided by semi-automated offside technology, nor by longer stoppage time. It will be decided by whether referees dare to hold the same intervention threshold from the group stage to the final. Before I blow the whistle, I review myself. That is what I want to see in every VAR room this season: a referee willing to look at himself before looking at the screen.