On a weekend when Mohamed Salah looked back to his old self again and Liverpool progressed to the fifth round of the FA Cup with relative ease, the wider football conversation drifted elsewhere. Not to the south coast, not to Merseyside, but to the Midlands, where the competition rolled on without VAR, and a storm brewed over modern officiating.
The debate is no longer simply about whether VAR is good or bad. It is about what it has done to referees.
The Aston Villa v Newcastle tie offered a timely case study. With no VAR in operation at this stage of the competition, a series of contentious decisions went unchecked: an offside goal allowed, a handball inside the box judged outside it, and challenges that divided opinion. Alan Shearer called it evidence that referees have grown reliant on a “comfort blanket”. Others argued that the absence of technology merely exposed how difficult the job has always been.
Officials who now operate week after week with review layers above them are suddenly left alone with instinct.
When Structure Replaces Instinct
That wider shift is not unique to football. Over the last three decades, most industries have edged away from relying solely on human judgement and towards clearer, repeatable frameworks. Banking no longer depends entirely on a teller spotting suspicious behaviour; software flags it instantly. Travel has moved from paper boarding passes to automated gates. Even supermarkets quietly double-check purchases through scanning systems. None of it removes error entirely. It simply reduces the obvious ones.
In regulated online sectors, a similar preference for structure has emerged. Rather than relying on loosely defined incentives, many platforms organise their offers into clearly signposted sections governed by consistent terms and visible timelines. Dedicated pages for slots promotions consolidate deposit-based bonuses, free-spin packages, and scheduled features within defined parameters so users understand precisely what applies and when. The emphasis is not persuasion but predictability. Clear frameworks narrow ambiguity and reduce reliance on individual discretion.
While the list could extend across almost every modern industry, the broader point is that as scrutiny increases and margins tighten, systems tend to replace instinct as the primary safeguard.
Football’s embrace of VAR follows the same logic. It was not introduced to replace referees or strip the game of instinct, but to place firmer boundaries around its most consequential decisions. The intention, much like structured frameworks elsewhere, is to limit clear and correctable errors rather than eliminate human judgement altogether.
That is, at heart, the argument many make in favour of it.
Why Liverpool Fans Care About the Margins
Liverpool supporters understand margins better than most. Title races have turned on single calls. Champions League nights have been defined by inches. When you are competing at the highest level, you do not crave chaos. You crave consistency.
The FA Cup will introduce VAR in later rounds, restoring that review layer. Whether referees have become too dependent on it remains open to interpretation. What Villa Park showed, however, is that modern football now lives in a world that expects precision.
The real question is not whether technology belongs in the game. It is whether officials can balance instinct with structure in a sport where the stakes and scrutiny grow sharper every season.
