VAR Is Not Killing Football — a Counterfactual Table Is Fooling You

In the middle of the Manchester derby, I sat in front of a screen in Beijing with a cup of coffee that had gone cold long before. Haaland collected the ball inside the box, turned, and fired. The net rippled. The referee pointed to the centre circle. The Etihad erupted. Three days later, the refereeing body admitted the error. And like a ritual that had been programmed in advance, English football returned to the one question it always returns to: what is VAR actually for?

While millions argued about a single goal, something else appeared quietly. FotMob published a hypothetical Premier League table — "if VAR did not exist". The press wrote headlines. Fans of every club rushed to check where their team stood. And I, after fourteen years of reading football data to hunt the blind spots the mainstream ignores, looked at that table and found the opposite of what the headlines were screaming.

Let us set the scene properly. After the first five matchweeks, the Premier League is going through the deepest crisis of confidence in video refereeing since the system arrived. Two decisions have caused direct controversy: Haaland's goal in the Manchester derby, and a penalty awarded to Sunderland. Both have been admitted as wrong by the refereeing body. The English media exploded. Wayne Rooney publicly called for VAR to be scrapped. A section of supporters turned "scrap VAR" into a stadium chant.

Right at that moment, FotMob released its no-VAR table — a counterfactual reconstruction built by removing every decision that involved video review. It spread like fire on dry grass. The most popular headline: Arsenal would not be where they are without VAR.

The problem is that the data does not say that.

To understand why, you have to look at the structure of the counterfactual. It is not a tactical model. It does not measure xG, pressing intensity, or team shape, and it touches no underlying metric. It does exactly one thing: it adds and subtracts points based on the assumption that controversial decisions would be reversed. In other words, it is a table of "what ifs", not of "how".

And precisely because of that, it reveals more about crowd psychology than about football.

When the whole world believes in the table, I believe in the data. So let the data speak.

Reading the FotMob counterfactual closely, the first thing that hits you is not upheaval — it is surprising calm. Arsenal still lead. Manchester United still sit mid-table. Coventry still sit bottom. Most clubs shift by nothing to two points, nothing to two places.

The most eye-catching figure belongs to Manchester City: from 15 actual points down to 11 in the no-VAR table — a four-point swing, the largest in the league. Yet even so, they remain in the leading group. Arsenal keep their 12 points and stay on top. Brentford move up to second. Liverpool sit fourth.

At the bottom, Coventry — one of the promoted sides — drop from three points to one. Sunderland, Tottenham, Aston Villa and Fulham all sit on two points, forming a cluster where a single win flips everything.

If you read that table without the headline, you would think it was an ordinary standings page. No revolution. No collapse. No giant brought down. The largest swing VAR creates for any single club is four points — and the rest barely move at all.

So why are the headlines screaming that everything has been turned upside down?

This is where you have to separate signal from noise. And this is where I have to say plainly what the data-analysis world rarely dares to state in public: the no-VAR table is almost identical to the real table — more than ninety percent identical. If VAR were truly "wrecking" the league as people claim, removing it would produce a completely different standings page. It does not.

The gap between the claim and the figure is the whole story. And to understand why that gap exists, you have to look at how a dataset like this is born, spreads, and gets consumed.

FotMob is a pure sports-data provider. It has no duty to analyse tactics, no duty to assess league governance. Its job is to make engaging data. And a "table without VAR" is maximally engaging: it invites every fan to look up their own club, compare, and argue. This is a "data-as-entertainment" model that is maturing fast across the sports industry — where the data supplier monetises engagement, not analysis.

To be fair, the dataset is not technically wrong. It is simply a conditional calculation. The error lies in how it is packaged — an enormous headline attached to a tiny effect. And the second error lies in how the public reads it: as evidence for a belief it already holds, rather than as a measurement that needs verification.

There is a paradox worth pointing out. The most popular headline says Arsenal benefit from VAR. But look at the data, and Arsenal top the table both with VAR and without it. Meaning that, according to the very data being cited, VAR gives them no advantage at the summit — while their direct rivals drop points without it. The headline and the data point in opposite directions. That is not an editorial slip. It is a design built for clicks.

I am not denying the problem exists. Two admitted errors within one month is serious. But serious at which layer? The answer lies in a line I consider the most important in the entire story: the refereeing body admitted the Sunderland penalty was awarded "incorrectly" — but not as a "clear and obvious error".

Read that line carefully. If a decision is wrong but not enough to be called a "clear and obvious error" — the core intervention threshold of VAR — then the system is undermining the very standard that justifies its existence. This is not the story of a referee being wrong. This is not the story of a decision being wrong. This is the story of a standard contradicting itself, and every time the refereeing body admits an error, it digs the crack in that standard deeper.

And this is the truly frightening part of the data. Not the table. The gap between admitting wrong and being unable to classify the wrong. When a system admits it is wrong but cannot name the kind of wrong, it is no longer a technical tool. It becomes a language problem. And language problems cannot be fixed with better software or more screens.

This leads to a different reading of the crisis — one a former player like Rooney will not offer, but a manager under pressure like Michael Carrick has reason to raise: the problem may lie in operational resources, not in technology. Too many screens. Too few support staff. A VAR room overwhelmed while the match runs at maximum speed. That is a far more constructive read than the slogan "scrap it".

Now let us talk about the people caught in the wave.

Carrick at Manchester United is under the heaviest pressure. A derby defeat, a public statement that he is "worried", and a league position that would barely improve even if VAR were removed. Watching his matches, I see a team with no anchor to hold onto: even if every decision were reversed, they would still sit mid-table. That is the most dangerous kind of pressure, because it removes every external excuse.

Roberto De Zerbi at Tottenham stands in the opposite situation but faces a harsher fate. His team have only two points, and the very article I am analysing states bluntly that VAR cannot be the excuse for their form. When a writer agrees to remove the alibi of a sinking team — while the whole subject of the piece is blaming VAR — that is a moment of honesty worth noting. And for De Zerbi, that moment becomes a verdict: the accountability rests entirely with him.

At the other end, Keith Andrews of Brentford is the only name praised without reservation in the entire story. A club climbing to second in the no-VAR table, with a manager described as doing an exceptional job. This is the one bright spot not split by controversy.

And there are other names in the grey zone: Pierre Sage at Crystal Palace with a difficult start but the benefit of being "not helped by VAR", Arbeloa at Fulham, Glasner at Nottingham Forest. Together they form a network — managers who have almost no statistical alibi.

At the other end of the scale, Mikel Arteta sits lowest on pressure. His team lead both tables. When the data supports you, you do not need to speak.

Now let us talk about the thing the media does not want you to look at directly.

In England, and here too — where I write these lines between two football markets I have followed side by side for years — there is a repeating pattern: fans of a punished team always believe the system is against them, and fans of a favoured team stay silent. This is predictable, but the data model does not care who you support. It says: your team shifted exactly two places. That is the end of it.

And I realise that, amid this storm of emotion, one table is truly being forgotten — the table of trust. Trust is not measured in points. It is measured by whether a system admits its errors consistently, and whether its intervention threshold still works. On that front, VAR is losing — not on results, but on legitimacy.

I will go against the crowd one more time, the way I always do.

If VAR were scrapped today, what would happen to the Premier League table? The answer, according to the very data the abolitionists are using, is almost nothing. Arsenal still lead. Manchester City stay in the top group. Coventry still sit bottom. The table differs by a few scattered points, a few small places. People are demanding the destruction of a system based on a feeling that it changed everything — while the data shows it changed almost nothing at all.

But this is where I have to interrogate myself. What if I am wrong?

Where could I be wrong? First, five matchweeks is a tiny sample. If you run this calculation across thirty-eight rounds, the swing could be far larger, and a late-season counterfactual could prove decisive. Second, the erosion of trust does not have to be measurable in points to do harm. A league where every result can be re-questioned three days later erodes the value of the very data I rely on to analyse. If results are doubted, then every table — including the no-VAR one — loses value.

Third, and perhaps most important: I may be imposing the calm of an analyst on an emotional crisis of a community. Fans do not buy tickets to read a model. They buy tickets to see fairness. And if VAR does not deliver fairness, then whether it changes the table is a skewed question.

But wait. There is one point even my harshest critics usually concede: the refereeing body admitted error. Twice in a month. They did not deny it. They did not blame the technology. They took responsibility. Over fourteen years of following football across many leagues and systems, I have learned one thing: a system willing to admit its mistakes is in its most uncomfortable, but also its most progressive, stage of maturity. The problem is that admitting error without a repair roadmap turns into a weapon against the system itself.

And here is my verifiable prediction.

Over the next three months, watch two things. One: the frequency of admitted errors. If it rises — especially if a third error lands within a month — the political pressure to reform or scrap VAR will cross the tolerance threshold. Two: whether any new guidance emerges from the international rule-making body on the "interfering with play" rule for a player in an offside position — the Enzo Fernández dispute that night exposed a fault line in rule interpretation, and that may be where IFAB is forced to step in.

If neither happens, this crisis will cool like every other VAR crisis — flaring up and fading amid noise, leaving behind one more season, one more table, one more round of argument.

So what is the problem? Not VAR. Not the table. It is our habit: reading a dataset designed to drive engagement as if it were a moral verdict. The no-VAR table does not say VAR wrecked the league. It says the league barely changed — and that, seen from a deeper angle, is exactly what makes it frightening.

A system that does not change the table but has changed belief. That is the hardest kind of impact to repair. And it is also the nature of every revolution in football: they are justified by results, but driven by emotion.

The home ground did not die; people simply mistook it for habit. But trust can die. And when it dies, no table can bring it back.

History does not care whether you dare to speak, it only waits for you to speak correctly. Until then, I will hold my line: watch the numbers before you believe the headline. Every time a new dataset appears, every time an argument floods in, read the layer beneath the headline. The system does not need people to scrap it. It needs people to read it closely enough to know which layer is going wrong.

Four points is not a crisis. Nearly one hundred percent identical is the figure worth stopping the whole sport for. Everything else is noise — and noise, in modern football, always sells better than truth.