Inside the VAR Room: 523 Matches, 47 Seconds of Waiting, and the Lesson of One Wrong Sentence

In the 58th minute at Kazan Arena, on 16 June 2026, referee Andrés Cunha stopped the Group C opener between France and Australia. He drew a rectangle in the air, then walked toward the monitor at the touchline. The stands roared. I was in a Valencia radio studio, headphones on, and I said into the microphone a sentence I still remember word for word: “The ball hit his armpit. It is not handball. No penalty.”

Ten seconds later, the colleague next to me touched my arm. Since 2026, IFAB has defined the boundary of the arm as starting at the bottom of the armpit; the upper shoulder no longer sits outside the handball zone. The sentence I had just spoken was out of date against the current laws. More than four million listeners heard it. The editorial desk had to issue a correction. I lost an evening. What I lost that mattered more was the right to trust my own memory.

I retell this story not to apologise for the eighth time. I retell it because it is the starting point of everything I have written since. Seven years later, with major tournaments again packed into one summer and VAR again about to be dissected frame by frame, I want to put a narrower question on the table. Not whether VAR is right or wrong. But how long a decision can take before it stops being worth anything.

VAR is past its trial phase

The video assistant referee entered the Laws of the Game officially from the 2026-19 season, after closed trials that began in 2026. Today, nearly every major European top-flight league runs a permanent VAR room, and Asian leagues are following the same route with a delay of a few seasons. Vietnam's V.League began using VAR in a number of matches from 2026 and is still in its expansion phase. The debates Europe went through will arrive later, but they will arrive in full.

In a major-tournament season, the pressure of time is compressed. Viewers no longer tolerate a three-minute process, because they are caught up in flags, in national-team stories, in collective emotion. That is understandable, and it is also dangerous for the quality of the argument. When emotion runs high, people tend to demand a quick verdict, when what they actually need is a verdict they can verify.

Two concepts that are often merged need separating here: “correct” and “explained”. A decision can be correct in law and still be treated as wrong because nobody understands which clause it rests on. Equally, a decision wrong in law can be accepted if the process is transparent and consistent. A referee does not judge