The Offside Law, VAR, and the Limits of Visual Evidence

On 14 June 2026, at Luzhniki, I sat in row eleven of the media tribune with a team sheet marked up with phonetic notes. The World Cup opener between Russia and Saudi Arabia finished 5-0; in the 71st minute, when Artem Dzyuba headed the ball into the net, I realised I had just mispronounced his name three times on live air. That night I did not yet grasp something more important: this was the first World Cup to run VAR across all 64 matches. Two days later, in Kazan, I stood less than thirty metres from the touchline as referee Andrés Cunha stopped France against Australia, walked to the pitchside monitor, and awarded a penalty to France. The stadium fell silent for almost two minutes. That silence has stayed with me for seven years, every time I have to explain why a goal was taken away over a single toe.

Before talking about VAR, the law comes first. Law 11 of the Laws of the Game states plainly that being in an offside position is not an offence. An offence only forms when a player in that position becomes involved in active play — interfering with the ball, interfering with an opponent, or gaining an advantage from that position. Those three branches force the referee to answer a question no camera can answer: what was that player trying to do?

In 2026, IFAB amended the law in favour of attackers by making level onside. In 2026, the law-making body clarified the notion of a defender's "deliberate play", attaching four criteria: the ball travelled from distance, the defender had a clear view, had time, and the ball was on the ground. Read on paper, those four criteria are clear; applied to a live passage at thirty kilometres an hour, they blur.

In Vietnam, V.League 1 brought VAR into official operation in 2026, and almost every round with VAR leaves behind a debate that runs on social media. At international level, the 2026 World Cup in Qatar was the first to use semi-automated offside technology; the 2026 World Cup, with 48 teams, will put the officiating system under greater pressure than any tournament before it.

Those two realities — a domestic league still learning to trust technology, and a world tournament four years ahead of it — produce the paradox I meet every week: viewers are supplied with more visual evidence than ever, and they argue more than ever.

The semi-automated offside system at Qatar 2026 used 12 dedicated cameras tracking 29 data points on each player's body, sampling 50 times per second; the ball carried an inertial sensor operating at 500 Hz. The system returns a 3D image and a timestamp accurate to the millisecond. According to figures FIFA published after the tournament, the average offside review time fell from around 70 seconds to around 25.

That is a genuine technical advance. Machines measure position better than people. But the offside law does not ask about position. The law asks about intent.

In 2026, in the English Premier League, Roberto Firmino scored against Aston Villa and had the goal taken away because his shoulder was ahead of the last defender. The world called it an "armpit offside". Read the law closely and the call was entirely correct: any body part with which a goal can be scored counts towards the offside line, and the shoulder is on that list. The error lay in our expectations of the law, not in the law itself.

Another paradox sits in the notion of "deliberate play" clarified in 2026. Suppose a defender sticks out a leg to cut out a pass, the ball brushes his shin and rebounds to a striker standing in an offside position. The referee must decide within seconds: did that defender play the ball, or merely react? IFAB's four criteria are the tool for answering, but they rest on a subjective judgement about whether a human being had enough time and enough view. No camera photographs "enough time". No sensor measures "deliberate".

Technology has solved the easiest part of the offside law — the geometry — and left the hardest part entirely intact.

I saw this clearly while re-watching footage of Spain's matches. What made me pause was the way Pedri moved before the ball reached his feet, not his pass-completion rate. Most offsides called in professional football do not originate in the feet but in a player's decision several seconds before the ball leaves the passer's boot — an interval that semi-automated offside can reconstruct only as body shape, never as reason. Pedri does not run after the ball, Pedri runs towards where the ball will arrive — and that is the whole difference.

There is something the offside trap can never catch: the player's intention. And VAR does not fix errors for the match — it exposes how we define error.

Many people argue that VAR has made football fairer. I do not dispute it. But fairer in what sense?

Picture two spectators watching the same passage. The first sits in the stand, sixty metres from the play, with no big screen, sensing only the rhythm of running and the sound of contact. The second sits at home, replaying the passage three times in slow motion. Both are "right" in their own way, and both are equally dissatisfied. The spectator in the stand loses the continuity of the match; the spectator at home loses the right to trust their own eyes.

During the period when stadiums had to close, I learned something about this. When the stands are empty, I hear the ball strike the boot clearly — something ten years as a referee never let me hear. With no roar covering it, every decision on the pitch becomes naked. Most VAR arguments therefore take the shape of a dispute about data, while in substance they are a dispute about who gets to feel the match.

A modern referee must live with two things at once: a machine telling them the position to the millimetre, and a crowd demanding emotional consistency. The mistake in Russia that year did not teach me how to referee correctly — it taught me how to live with the sound of my own whistle. The same thing is happening to an entire generation of referees: they are not learning to referee correctly, they are learning to read a screen.

My view is that the offside law should split into two clear layers: a geometric layer handled by machines, and an intent layer decided by humans — with criteria published before the season, rather than re-explained after every round. Alongside that, Arsène Wenger's "daylight" proposal, under which offside is only called when a clear bodily gap exists, is a line of experimentation worth following. It will not make football fairer. It will make football easier to explain.

And when a child asks me why the goal just now did not count, I want the answer to be shorter than a 3D frame.