In the 10th minute of last Sunday's Racing–Real Madrid match, Kylian Mbappé went down in the box after a light touch from Matteo Prati and Munuera Montero awarded a penalty. Almost nobody saw it. Racing's manager, José Alberto López, put it plainly: if a hundred people watch that incident, ninety-eight say it isn't a penalty. The VAR operator, Milla Alvéndiz, reviewed the action without calling the referee to the pitchside monitor. Mbappé scored and Madrid went on to win 3–0.
In the 72nd minute of the same match, VAR did intervene: it called Munuera to the monitor to review a penalty he had given against Madrid for a handball by Tchouaméni, and the referee overturned it after seeing that the ball had deflected off the player's own body. For Racing fans, the conclusion was immediate: VAR looks when it feels like it. And the question half the country is asking is the same one: is VAR fulfilling its mission?
The short answer is yes, if its mission is to reduce errors. The data are clear. In Spain, the Technical Referees Committee calculated that in the first season with VAR, correct decisions on key incidents rose from 91.5% to 96.9%. In the Premier League, the independent panel that reviews decisive incidents each round puts accuracy at around 82% before VAR and around 96% after. An academic study covering more than 2,000 matches across thirteen countries found the same thing: correct decisions rose from just over 92% to 98% with the help of video. And some controversies have simply vanished. Phantom goals, offside calls by several metres or assaults behind the referee's back are no longer argued about, because the footage resolves them.
Fans themselves acknowledge it. According to a YouGov survey from January 2024, a majority of football supporters in Spain—58%—believe that refereeing errors have decreased since VAR arrived. And yet anyone who follows Spanish football knows that the refereeing debate has not dropped in intensity. If anything, the opposite is true.
Part of the explanation lies in the rulebook. VAR was not created to referee the match all over again, but to correct 'clear and obvious' errors in four specific types of incident: goals, penalties, straight red cards and cases of mistaken identity. For objective incidents, such as an offside, that is straightforward: the image decides. But for matters of interpretation, such as contact in the box, VAR can only step in if the referee's decision is indefensible. And that is where the trap lies: if the replay shows there was contact, however slight, the incident becomes open to interpretation and the on-field referee's call is protected. VAR may see that the penalty is soft, but the protocol does not allow it to call that a clear error. The system, by design, shields precisely the kind of mistake that generates the most outrage.
That explains the paradox. Before VAR, a refereeing error was accepted, however angrily, as part of the game: the referee was far away, the incident happened quickly, he only had one chance to see it. Now fans know there are several people in a room with every camera angle and all the time they need. If the error is upheld even so, it no longer looks like a human mistake but like a decision. And a decision, in a football culture as fraught as Spain's, is almost always read as either favouritism or persecution.
VAR has also moved the controversy into the boardrooms. In January 2023, Elche equalised against Cádiz with a goal that had originated from an offside position and which VAR never reviewed. Cádiz contested the match and demanded that the final minutes be replayed. The Federation's own bodies declared themselves incompetent to rule on the matter, the club appealed to the Tribunal Administrativo del Deporte and the result never changed. Before cameras existed, an error like that would have been written off as a bad afternoon. With cameras, it became a legal dispute.
A lack of transparency makes things worse. Since January 2024, the Federation and LaLiga have published the conversations between the referee and the VAR room at the end of each round, but only when the referee goes to the monitor. That is why the audio of the overturned Tchouaméni penalty exists and the audio of the Mbappé penalty does not. We know how the referees reasoned when they intervened, and not when they decided not to—which is precisely what is most hotly debated. Other leagues go further: the Premier League periodically explains its decisions with audio, and Serie A has a weekly programme in which conversations from the most controversial incidents are broadcast. Not even that puts an end to the debate, but at least it gives supporters something more than suspicion.
It would be unfair to blame VAR alone for the refereeing tensions in Spain. The Negreira case left the credibility of the refereeing establishment under a cloud for years, the big clubs use their own media platforms to pressure referees, and a large part of football discourse thrives on a sense of grievance. Without VAR, the controversy would probably be the same or worse. But that does not change the diagnosis: technology has improved refereeing and, at the same time, changed the way every error is judged.
So VAR fulfils its technical mission, but not the one supporters believed it had. It was never designed to eliminate errors altogether, only to eliminate scandalous ones. The problem is that, with cameras everywhere, any error looks scandalous. As long as the protocol shields borderline decisions and the audio from unreviewed incidents remains unpublished, every penalty like the one awarded to Mbappé will keep feeding the same suspicion: that VAR saw the incident and chose to do nothing.
