The no-VAR table and the paradox of trust in the Premier League

Twenty seconds. That was how long the on-field referee at Old Trafford waited for a signal from the VAR room after Erling Haaland's goal in the Manchester derby. I was sitting in a small coffee shop on Rua Augusta in São Paulo, where four Brazilians were staring at the big screen. Nobody said anything for those twenty seconds. When the whistle confirming the goal sounded, a man of about fifty slapped the table. He did not celebrate. He uttered, in Portuguese: "Not again."

That is the phrase I heard most during five years in Brazil. Not "brilliant", not "wonderful", but "not again" – the phrase of someone who has grown used to football's finest moments being placed under the scrutiny of a dark room hundreds of kilometres from the pitch. When the stands empty, houses become their own private grandstands – and in those grandstands, people no longer scream when the ball hits the net. They wait.

After that derby, the Premier League's refereeing body admitted a VAR error in the decision to allow Haaland's goal. It was the second admitted error within a month. The first involved a penalty awarded to Sunderland – a penalty the refereeing body itself admitted was "incorrectly awarded" while simultaneously insisting it was not "a clear and obvious error". Those two statements sat side by side in the same communiqué. And it is precisely the gap between them that this story begins.

This season's VAR debate has crossed the line from a technical topic into something else. Wayne Rooney has publicly called for VAR to be scrapped. Fan groups are collecting signatures demanding its abolition. Every matchweek, another contentious decision becomes the centrepiece of talk shows, where former legends sit opposite each other and argue over faint lines on a screen.

That backdrop is not new. But something is: this time, alongside the noise, a dataset has appeared. FotMob – the Norwegian sports-data platform – recomputed the Premier League table under the assumption that VAR did not exist. In principle the method is simple: for every VAR intervention, they reverted the outcome to the original on-field decision. If VAR overturned a penalty, the no-VAR table keeps that penalty. If VAR disallowed a goal, the no-VAR table allows it.

The results were published with a headline designed to be clicked: Arsenal would not be where they are without VAR. That is the opening line. And it is the line I want to spend the rest of this piece addressing.

I have covered Brazilian football for five years, from Maracanã with its sixty thousand spectators to the Sunday afternoons on synthetic pitches on the outskirts of São Paulo, where there is no VAR, no assistant referees, only a man with a whistle and two teams. There, arguments do not disappear. They simply move from the screen to the voice. People still shout. People still swear they have been robbed. But nobody waits twenty seconds for permission to celebrate.

When football returned to empty stadiums in 2026, I went to Maracanã and found only an elderly security guard sweeping leaves. He told me about the 2026 defeat to Uruguay – the match in which a whole nation wept together in a single moment. He said: "Back then there was nothing to look back at. A goal conceded was a goal conceded. People cried, then they carried on living." I have thought about that sentence many times while reading the no-VAR table.

The no-VAR table, when you look at the numbers, changes almost nothing.

That is the first and most important conclusion the dataset delivers. Strip every VAR intervention from the first five matchweeks and most clubs shift by between zero and two points. Manchester City – the club most affected – lose four points, dropping from 15 to 11. Arsenal keep 12 and remain top. Brentford rise to second in the no-VAR scenario, Liverpool sit fourth. Coventry City, the promoted side, sink to the bottom with one point instead of three.

I sat with this dataset for two evenings. What struck me was not the numbers, but the distance between them and the headline attached to them. If most clubs shift only one or two points over five matchweeks, then claiming VAR is "wreaking havoc" is a statement the data does not support. VAR may be wrecking the emotions of viewers. It may be wrecking fans' trust in the fairness of the game. But it is not wrecking the table – at least not to the degree the headlines want people to believe.

The real problem with VAR is not the points it takes from clubs, but the fact that it forces people to believe in a standard that cannot be defined.

That is the Sunderland penalty. The refereeing body admitted the decision was wrong. It also said the error was not severe enough to count as a "clear and obvious error" – the sole threshold permitting VAR intervention. Placed together, the two statements create a paradox: a decision can be wrong without being wrong enough to correct. Within VAR's logic there exists a grey zone where the wrong is admitted but not remedied. And it is precisely that grey zone where every argument breeds.

Former player and now manager Michael Carrick offered a different, less noticed view that is probably more accurate. He said the problem is not the technology but the people operating it: too many screens in the VAR room, not enough supporting staff, and a process that forces referees into sub-optimal decisions. That is a far more constructive read than the slogan "scrap VAR". It shifts the question from whether to keep VAR to how VAR is being operated. And that is a question the Premier League can answer.

The Enzo Fernández case adds another layer. The player was judged to have interfered with play from an offside position – a situation the laws describe in vague terms such as "interfering with play" or "affecting an opponent". This is not VAR's fault. It is the fault of the law. When laws are written with concepts that cannot be measured, technology can only amplify that ambiguity onto a bigger screen.

Meanwhile, lower down the table, another story is unfolding. Tottenham under Roberto De Zerbi have two points from five games. The no-VAR article states something admirable: "VAR cannot be blamed for Tottenham's woeful form." That is a rare sentence in this dataset – a sentence that does not turn VAR into a suspect. For De Zerbi, there is no shield. He must answer for what is happening on the pitch through his own work.

Chelsea under Xabi Alonso are in a similar position. Their defensive mishaps cannot be explained away by any referee's decision. Aston Villa are described as having "turned a corner" after beating Tottenham 3-2, yet sit eighteenth with four points – an internal contradiction inside the article itself, revealing that even its author is struggling to keep the story coherent.

On the other side, Keith Andrews at Brentford is the only name praised without qualification. Brentford sit second in the no-VAR table, and their football is described as the season's "surprise package". Hull City receive similar billing. But I wonder: would those compliments have been written if Brentford were not second in a hypothetical table? Are we praising their football, or praising a number?

At Crystal Palace, Pierre Sage is described as enduring a "testing start" and being "not helped by VAR". That phrasing is telling, because it divides clubs into two camps: those helped by VAR and those harmed by it. Coventry, Ipswich and Brighton fall into the first on specific incidents. Fulham and Nottingham Forest fall into the second. The division is so neat that it is hard to believe it is accidental. It looks like an editorial device engineered to give every fan a reason to click – to find out which side their club is on.

Let me say this plainly: the no-VAR dataset, as a sporting document, says almost nothing new. It is the echo of a season only five matchweeks old, where gaps between clubs are still too small to mean anything. Finishing 16th or 20th on a two-point spread is like ranking raindrops by how fast they fall – possible, but it does not help anyone understand the storm.

But there is one thing the dataset inadvertently reveals, and it is worth more than the table itself.

The article's headline implies Arsenal are being favoured by VAR. The data inside the article shows the opposite: Arsenal remain top even without VAR. In other words, VAR has not given Arsenal a single extra point – if anything, it is taking points from their direct rivals. Headline and data point in opposite directions. Not because the writer is careless, but because the purpose of the headline is not to describe the truth. It is to produce a click.

This is the point I consider most important in the entire VAR story this season: VAR's crisis is not a crisis of decisions – it is a crisis of trust, and trust is not built with data.

Fans are not screaming because VAR took four points from Manchester City. They are screaming because they no longer believe the results on the pitch are correct. That is a different kind of loss – a loss of meaning. A football match only has value if people believe it is fair. When that belief erodes, people do not need the table to change before they feel cheated.

Sports journalists bear a responsibility here. We can choose to exploit the anger – write headlines that make people's blood boil, publish hypothetical tables so every fan can check how many points their club has lost, turn every matchweek into a tribunal. That works. It brings reads, shares, comments. But it helps nobody understand what is actually happening.

People chase the trophy, but what they are really chasing is a story about themselves. VAR does not ruin that story by making wrong decisions. It ruins it by forcing people to believe in something even its operators cannot define.

I once wrote a piece about Brazil's defeat to Belgium in the 2026 World Cup quarter-final, when I was eighteen and had just started as a contributor. I stood outside the fan zone in São Paulo and watched hundreds weep. A middle-aged man sat in silence for twenty minutes after the final whistle and said something I still remember: "This team grew up with me, and now a part of it has died." I did not write a single line of tactical analysis in that piece. I simply recorded his words. My editor said I lacked professionalism. The article got over two thousand shares.

From that, I learned something: people do not come to football to read numbers. They come to find themselves in it.

There is another dimension the no-VAR table inadvertently exposes: the way the sports-data industry operates. FotMob did not publish that dataset because they believe readers need to understand the nature of VAR. They published it because they know a hypothetical table is a compelling product. It lets every fan check how many points their club has lost, which creates an engagement loop: read the piece, check your club, share the result, argue with friends. This is the "data-as-entertainment" model – a trend reshaping how data providers monetise fan emotion.

There is nothing wrong with that model as a business. But it raises a question of responsibility: when data is packaged to maximise emotion rather than to clarify truth, what does the reader receive? They receive a table that angers them, a headline that makes them click, and a vague sense that football is being sabotaged by some invisible force – while in reality the table barely changes.

In Vietnam, where I was born, football has had its own refereeing controversies. But there, no hypothetical table was ever published. No dataset allowed fans to check how many points their club had lost. There, people shouted, argued, blamed referees – but they laboured under no illusion of being handed objective truth. Vietnamese football's honesty lies in the fact that it does not pretend to be measurable.

More errors will be admitted. More refereeing bodies will issue public apologies. More debates over scrapping VAR will follow – and perhaps it will not be scrapped. Modern football has gone too far to turn back from technology. The question is no longer whether to keep VAR, but what we expect from it.

If we expect absolute fairness, it will fail. Absolute fairness does not exist on a football pitch, or anywhere else. If we expect it to correct clear and obvious errors, then first we must define what "clear" and "obvious" mean – which, after years, nobody has managed.

At twenty-six, I write about sport to understand why people stay together. And I think the answer lies here: people stay because of moments that cannot be replayed. Haaland's goal will live in the memory of Manchester, whether it was confirmed after twenty seconds or instantly. Brazil's 2026 defeat will live forever, even though no screen recorded it. The loop does not exist for us to endure, but for us to see ourselves in time. And if VAR teaches us anything, perhaps it is this: the finest moment in football is not the moment that is confirmed. It is the moment we believe.