Verdicts From an Empty File: VAR, Discipline and the Limits of Football Data

Minute 58 in Kazan, 16 June 2026. Referee Andrés Cunha stopped France versus Australia, jogged to the touchline and bent over the monitor. Forty seconds later he pointed to the spot. Antoine Griezmann opened the scoring, France won 2-1, and that penalty became the first ever awarded at a World Cup through VAR.

I was 27 that year, working as a data editor for a football outlet in England. I spent nearly an hour measuring the contact angle between Joshua Risdon's leg and Griezmann across five camera angles. The detail I remember sits in the fourth angle: both the ball and the offending leg were obscured. The other four angles were enough to reach a verdict, yet none of them showed the whole incident.

After the tournament I wrote a five-part series called “Anatomy of VAR”, auditing 47 video-assisted decisions. The finding was not about which call was right or wrong. It was that the intervention threshold has never been quantified in any written protocol.

Football has no VAR, only blind spots waiting to be exposed.

The “clear and obvious” threshold is not a number

The IFAB protocol uses the phrase “clear and obvious error”. That phrase carries no scale: no millimetres, no percentages, no minimum frame count. The consequence is that the same challenge can produce four different decisions from four different VAR teams, and all four remain lawful under the text.

The referee is the only person on the pitch who is not permitted to be led by emotion. He is also the only person who must decide within ten seconds, holding less information than every viewer watching at home.

Three kinds of empty file

The first is the image file. At Euro 2026 I was assigned to analyse the penalty shootout in the Italy–England final. Three young England players missed in sequence, and most coverage turned to psychology. When I counted again, Gianluigi Donnarumma had chosen the correct direction on 5 of 7 kicks, working from data on opponent habits. A ball travels from the spot to the goal line in roughly 0.3 seconds. Inside those 0.3 seconds a goalkeeper reads nothing from the ball; he reads only the standing foot. My 3,000-word analysis was cut to 500 words.

The second is the financial file. In February 2026 the Premier League referred 115 charges concerning Manchester City to an independent commission; the process has not closed. On 17 November 2026 Everton received a 10-point deduction, reduced to 6 points on appeal on 26 February 2026. On 18 March 2026 Nottingham Forest were docked 4 points. Three files, three speeds, three outcomes – under one rulebook.

The third is the medical file. Clubs disclose injuries in whatever shape suits them. Shareholders need to know whether the squad's biggest asset is fit. Opponents need to know whether the defence has lost its anchor. Journalists receive a one-line statement. That gap is designed as policy, and it works exactly as designed.

Liverpool and the language of fouls

In the summer of 2026, with the Premier League suspended, I was 29 and had no matches left to report on. I reopened all 380 games of the 2026-20 season, focusing on Liverpool's tactical fouls under Jürgen Klopp. The count came to 10.2 fouls per match on average, mostly in midfield, mostly within three seconds of losing the ball. The purpose was to buy three seconds for the back line to recover its shape, not to hurt opponents. I sent a 20-page note to an editor and was turned down flat. Three years later that note became the foundation of an e-book on law and tactics I published in 2026.

Every foul is a question about intent; data only answers questions about consequence.

Emotion reads “empty” as “clean”

This is the largest blind spot in any football argument. When a file lacks data, audiences default to innocence. When VAR stays silent, audiences default to a legal challenge. When a club escapes sanction, audiences default to a clean club. The silence of data gets read as the cleanliness of data, and those two things are logically distinct.

Viewers see an incident, referees see a moment, I see the entire process.

An empty file proves nothing. It only means nobody has proved anything yet. For anyone working in process, “undetermined” and “safe” are separate states that must never be merged.

The laws never stand outside the match; they are the second game running alongside it.

What to watch

Football has invested heavily in collecting image data, movement data and financial data. The harder task is designing process for the moment data does not arrive: specifying who may declare a conclusion, how much visible frame coverage is required, and what the default answer must be when a file is incomplete. If the default answer remains “nothing happened”, every added technology will only relocate who carries the blame rather than change the final outcome.