Here’s how video replay will work at the World Cup

One of the most controversial things in the sport of football over the past couple of years has been the tool meant to help avoid controversy: the Video Assistant Referee system, or VAR for short. But a lot of fans still don’t really understand what it is or why it’s been controversial. So let’s take a look at just what VAR does and how it’s going to work at the 2018 World Cup in Russia.

In design, VAR is supposed to be something that helps referees make the correct decisions when action is too close or too fast to accurately judge in the moment, especially in the big moments. After the referee makes an initial decision, VAR can be utilized in certain circumstances to make sure the call was correct and that nothing was missed. For example, referees can make sure there were no attacking fouls in the buildup to a goal or penalty. It can be used to assess red cards, and make sure yellow cards are given to the correct player.

Sounds pretty good, right? Sadly, things haven’t always worked out.

In practice, VAR has been perceived to be as much hindrance as valuable tool. There have been times that it’s created too-long delays in the course of a game. In Major League Soccer, it’s even been involved in incorrect decisions, including in matters later reviewed by the MLS Disciplinary Committee. Those issues and other similar incidents in Italy and Germany have greatly lessened people’s comfort level with VAR, with many fans outright calling for it to be scrapped.

Despite all the controversy around it, we still have VAR for the World Cup.

If a situation that warrants VAR arises — again, making sure there were no attacking fouls in the buildup to a goal or penalty, assessing red cards, and making sure yellow cards are given to the right player — the referee will either receive a signal that a VAR review is needed, or will ask for one himself. Then play will stop until the referee can view the play and confer with the VAR official to make a decision. Ideally, this takes a matter of moments, but in some previous cases it has taken several minutes.

A report that assistant referees have been told not to flag for offside in tight situations, could mean that we are in store for a few extra VAR reviews. This makes sense given that offside calls made on the pitch cannot be overturned with VAR, but if a player is offside during the buildup to a goal and it’s not called, that can be corrected with VAR. In other words, FIFA would rather take an extra minute and correctly call off a goal for offside with VAR than have a situation where offside is called incorrectly and a good goal is disallowed.

If utilized correctly, VAR has the ability to be massively useful. In fact, a Belgian study says that VAR has improved referees’ decision accuracy from 93 percent to almost 99 percent — that sounds like a tool worth using. But when VAR misses, the misses are incredibly high profile and draw a lot of headlines. Hopefully we don’t have to talk about VAR a whole lot during the course of the tournament, because if we do talk about it a lot, then we’ll only wind up adding to the already-significant amount of controversy around the new tool for referees.