The Premier League is planning to introduce in-stadium VAR announcements from next season in an attempt to provide greater understanding of key refereeing decisions.
A trial is currently being held across the Carabao Cup semi-finals, with the officials asked to offer an explanation of select judgements over the stadium’s public address system.
That will continue in this week’s second legs and the expectation is for the Premier League to now adopt the policy in 2025-26 when VAR enters its seventh season of use.
It is hoped improved communications will enhance a VAR process that has come under regular scrutiny, with a referee announcing their final decision after each visit to a pitchside monitor and offside judgements.
Tony Scholes, the Premier League’s chief football officer, has also said that football’s lawmakers, IFAB (International Football Association Board), will “continue to be lobbied” in a bid to further increase transparency around VAR. That could eventually lead to in-game communications between officials being played out to fans at home and in stadiums, a move that would follow the lead of other major sports. IFAB currently prohibit those advancements.
When will referees give on-field VAR decisions?
The Premier League accepted 12 months ago that the in-stadium VAR experience was “nowhere near good enough” and gave consideration to announcing decisions over public address systems ahead of this season.
The call was made to delay its introduction, leading to the Carabao Cup semi-final first legs seeing in-stadium VAR announcements used for the first time in English football last month.
An in-stadium VAR announcement was made during the League Cup semi-final between Spurs and Liverpool (Julian Finney/Getty Images)
“We will monitor it, but our intention is for the referee to announce VAR decisions in the middle of the pitch from the start of next season,” Scholes told reporters today. “With regard to further VAR comms, we will continue to lobby IFAB to allow us to open up as much as we can.”
Only the final decisions reached, rather than the process, would be relayed to supporters following a referee’s visit to the pitchside monitor. The EFL said last month that the “conclusion of factual matters such as accidental handball by a goalscorer or offside judgements” would also be announced.
The Premier League’s leading officials have already received training on the communication process.
Is VAR decision-making improving?
The Premier League believe so. Although its imperfections remain, Scholes said total VAR errors, including missed interventions, had fallen to 13 after 23 rounds of this season. The Premier League’s figures, built up through the weekly findings of the independent Key Match Incident panel, had that figure at 20 last season and 25 the year before. They added that the average VAR delay per match was 40 seconds this season, down on the 66 seconds of last season.
High-profile controversies, such as the red card shown to Arsenal’s Myles Lewis-Skelly last month — which was overturned on appeal — have continued to draw criticisms of a process that Wolverhampton Wanderers called to abandon in a vote at the Premier League’s AGM last June. But Scholes maintains that improvements have been made.
“These guys (Premier League officials) are good,” he said. “The rest of the world recognises how good they are and if we benchmark them against previous years then they’re good as well.”
Anthony Taylor during Nottingham Forest vs Southampton (Mike Egerton/Getty Images)
How is time-wasting being addressed?
The Premier League have long-term hopes to see the ball in play for 60 minutes of every match, yet for this season, that figure stands at an average of just 57 minutes and six seconds.
A contributory factor to that is the time-wasting of players late in games, particularly involving goalkeepers. Those stoppages have become increasingly used for tactical purposes, as well as an age-old means of winding down the clock.
The Premier League has previously clamped down on time-wasting, encouraging referees to take a hard line in the opening weeks of the 2023-24 season. Punishing a player claiming to be injured, however, is much less straightforward, especially when it is a goalkeeper.
“I have to accept it’s partly of our making,” said Scholes. “When we introduced the requirement for outfield players who go down injured to leave the pitch for 30 seconds, we obviously couldn’t bring that in for goalkeepers as well.
“While we’ve eradicated outfield players doing it, there’s been an increase in goalkeepers doing it. It’s absolutely on our minds and we would like to find a way of dealing with it.”
What is the plan for semi-automated offsides?
A key thread to VAR’s advances is the use of semi-automated offsides.
The technology has been used by FIFA as far back as the Arab Cup in 2021 before it was then rolled out for the 2022 World Cup finals in Qatar. Other major competitions, including the Champions League since 2022-23, have also adopted semi-automated offside technology (SAOT), with specialist cameras following the movement of all 22 players and delivering a real-time verdict that negates the lengthy delays that come with calibrating offside lines.
The Premier League is yet to join the movement, but ongoing trials could lead to its introduction before this season is out. That, in theory, would again speed up the VAR process.
“We are still testing it and making significant progress,” said Scholes. “I’m hopeful that at some point this season we will be able to introduce semi-automated technology.
“We are not going to introduce it if we’ve got any doubts at all with regards to its operation. The system we’ve adopted, we believe it to be the best system, the most accurate and future-proof system.”
(Top photo: Julian Finney/Getty Images)
