VAR: Five ways to improve football's video-assisted revolution

#3 Relax the scope of VAR

France v Croatia - 2018 FIFA World Cup Russia Final

VAR can only be used to check offences in four circumstances: goals and offences leading up a goal, penalty decisions and offences leading up to a penalty, direct red cards and cases of mistaken identity.

While this may not seem excessive, in reality, FIFA has left the interpretation so open it means that officials have tremendous scope for checking a variety of incidents for even the most pedantic of reasons, even if they have not been spotted by those they are supposed to benefit.

The interpretation of handball has been transformed thanks to VAR. When once an innocent ricochet of an arm in the box would have led to ‘play on’, now the inevitable outcome is a penalty, regardless of intent, with the 2018 World Cup in Russia littered with such decisions.

It now seems that matches played with VAR are to the tune of an entirely different rule book.