The Empty VAR Screen: When a Referee Must Rule With Nothing to Look At

On 7 July 2026, at Wembley, I sat in front of a computer screen in Saigon, my hand resting on the spacebar, ready to freeze the frame. In the 104th minute of the Euro semi-final, Raheem Sterling went down inside the Denmark penalty area, and referee Danny Makkelie pointed to the spot. I rewound twelve times. Twelve times, I still could not find a point of contact clear enough to put into words. Joakim Maehle did touch Sterling's hip, a very light touch, the kind of touch nobody feels at real speed on a pitch, but at quarter speed on a screen it sits there, plain as day, waiting for someone to assign it meaning. I stayed silent for a long time in a room with only the sound of a ceiling fan. The first whistle was blown by the camera, and to me it sounded like the whole world was holding its breath.

The conclusion I wrote that night was absurdly short: insufficient evidence to confirm a foul. Four words. Four words I knew would poke the most painful spot of a community that had just lost a final berth after more than half a century of waiting. But I also knew something else, something only someone who has sat at the edge of the ring understands: when there is nothing on the screen to look at, inventing a conclusion is professional betrayal. No evidence is not the same as evidence of no foul. And it is not the same as evidence of a foul either. It is simply a gap. In modern football, a gap is the most expensive thing nobody wants to pay for.

Everybody wants an answer. Nobody wants a gap.

Context: the law was written to answer, not to stay silent

VAR was born with a very specific promise: to correct clear and obvious errors. That phrase sits in IFAB's protocol, and it is one of the vaguest sentences football has ever written into law. I spent years reading Law 12, reading the accompanying guidance documents, comparing how different federations interpret that phrase. No two places understand it the same way.

On 16 June 2026, in Kazan, in the France versus Australia match, world football witnessed VAR award a penalty at a World Cup for the first time. In the 55th minute, Antoine Griezmann was fouled by Josh Risdon inside the area. Referee Andres Cunha did not blow at first. After consulting the monitor, he changed his decision, and Griezmann scored from the spot in the 58th minute. I was seventeen then, a schoolboy in Saigon, staying up all night to watch and immediately writing a blog post titled something like "Was VAR right or wrong", analysing Law 12 and the camera angles. The post got forty views. My friends told me I wrote like I was drafting a textbook.

I was upset, but I realised something more valuable than that upset: to talk to fans, I had to speak the language of fans, not the language of legal documents. From then on I practised opening with a divisive question and closing with a poll, inviting readers to join the decision.

But there was one kind of opening I could not master until the summer of 2026: opening with a gap.

Five thousand members, one old screen, and trust split into five thousand pieces

In April 2026, world football froze because of the pandemic. I was nineteen, a second-year student. I started a Facebook group called Saigon VAR Society, initially just to revisit controversial decisions in the V-League. Every week I picked one situation, cut the video myself from the broadcast feed, posted it, and invited people to pick between two answers: penalty, or no penalty. I used the example of a collision in the Ho Chi Minh City versus Hanoi match on matchday 12 of the 2026 V-League season, one of the games my group dissected the most.

After three months, the group hit five thousand members. Five thousand members, one old screen, and trust split into five thousand pieces. I discovered an ability I never thought I had: the ability to listen to hundreds of people arguing at once without needing to conclude on their behalf. I also discovered a new fear: the fear of being attacked for holding a view against the majority.

And in Saigon, the majority in this field is quite particular. They are not only defending a team. They are defending an order they believe to be correct, in which the referee is always wrong, unless the referee is right in a direction that favours their team. I learned to write weekly community-response pieces, with poll charts and verbatim quotes of the harshest comments. One week I read more than two hundred insults. But I also read comments three hundred words long that explained the law better than I did. I remember one user nicknamed White Stork, who wrote that the hard part is not knowing the law, but knowing when the law allows you to stay silent. I do not know who he is. But that sentence has stayed with me to this day.

The semi-final night I betrayed my own belief

In July 2026, my group had grown to twelve thousand members. The England versus Denmark semi-final took place at Wembley. In the 104th minute, Sterling went down. I reviewed the footage frame by frame and wrote the conclusion: insufficient evidence for a penalty. Twenty minutes later, hundreds of comments flooded in. Not counter-arguments. Outrage. Someone wrote that I had sold myself to the bookmakers. Someone wrote that I hated English football. Someone wrote just one short line: "Hey, do you watch football or do you watch the rulebook?"

I panicked. I edited the post. I changed the conclusion to: it could be a penalty. That semi-final night, I betrayed my own belief to embrace the heart. I thought I was choosing harmony, the kind of choice an ESFJ personality tends to make in order to preserve a relationship with a community he has worked hard to build.

Three days later, UEFA announced that referee Makkelie's decision was correct under the organisers' interpretation, and that the VAR referee did not intervene because the error did not meet the clear and obvious threshold. I was mocked. A few members wrote: "Thought you were the Saigon VAR eye, turns out you're a trend-following eye."

That was the biggest shock of my student years. It was also the most important professional lesson I have ever received, more important than any course. I set myself a rule and I have kept it since: never change a position purely because of community pressure. If the analysis leads me to a conclusion nobody wants to hear, my job is to present the basis of that conclusion, not to change the conclusion and then go looking for a new basis.

Since then, I split every piece into two distinct parts. The first is called What the Law Says, based on FIFA regulations and IFAB guidance. The second is called What the Fans Felt, recording social media reaction, including the reaction aimed at me. The two parts are never mixed. That boundary is the only thing that keeps me standing upright in a community that has little patience for detachment.

Two in the morning in Qatar, and 1.88 millimetres

On 1 December 2026, I was twenty-one, staying up to watch Japan versus Spain at the World Cup in Qatar. In the 51st minute, Ao Tanaka scored in a passage of play where the ball appeared to have gone out of play before Kaoru Mitoma cut it back. I opened my frame-cutting software, drew a reference line parallel to the goal line, measured the ball's position against the line, and wrote a piece at three in the morning with a title roughly meaning: the ball stayed in, evidence from the shortest of moments.

The figure the organisers later published was 1.88 millimetres. The ball was inside the field by exactly 1.88 millimetres at the moment the pass was made. A large fan page shared my piece. After six hours it had twelve thousand interactions. The community started calling me the Saigon VAR eye.

I saw what nobody saw, and I have to live with it. There was happiness. But from that day, every piece I wrote was scrutinised more closely, every comma, every number, every screenshot. I began to understand the price of being trusted.

Dissecting an evidentiary gap

This is the part I want to spend the most time on, because it is the part my twelve thousand members never want to read, and it is also the part that decides everything.

Let us start with the technical side. A standard European broadcast camera records at fifty frames per second. That means the interval between two consecutive frames is twenty milliseconds. A sprinting player can reach over thirty kilometres per hour, roughly eight metres per second. Multiplied by twenty milliseconds, that is sixteen centimetres. Between two consecutive frames, the foot of a sprinting player can travel sixteen centimetres. The entire collision that millions of people argue about, the moment that decides a match, can fit inside that sixteen-centimetre gap. In Vietnam, many broadcast feeds are still at twenty-five frames per second, and that gap doubles.

When V-League matches entered the VAR trial phase, I had the chance to watch how Vietnamese audiences responded to the same kind of gap. The response was very similar to Europe's, only faster, fiercer, and less patient with technical explanations. Vietnamese fans see a slow-motion replay, and they believe the slow-motion replay is the truth. They do not see the gap between the frames, because the gap makes no sound.

Next is the question of camera placement. At many stadiums, the camera used for offside is not square to the goal line. It sits in the stand, at a certain height, at a certain angle. The result is that the captured image has compressed perspective. The lines we see on screen are the product of a correction, and every correction carries error. When a system announces that the ball was inside the field by exactly 1.88 millimetres, that figure lies deep inside the error band of the measuring equipment itself. In other words, the certainty here is a constructed certainty, not a measured one.

I am not writing this to deny the result of the match. Japan won, the goal was awarded, and under the current interpretation of the law that outcome stands. I am writing this to point out a paradox modern football has not solved: we use technology to demand absolute precision, but the technology we use operates inside an error band we refuse to acknowledge.

In most controversial passages of play, what decides the outcome is not the evidence, but the decision-maker's tolerance for ambiguity.

A referee with a low threshold will blow. A referee with a high threshold will wave play on. Both can be correct under the law. That is why the same incident, placed in two different competitions, produces two different outcomes. Not because of refereeing standards, but because of decision-making culture.

Now let us talk about the hardest case: when the input data is entirely empty. In the course of analysing V-League situations, I have repeatedly encountered what I call a protocol gap. The camera at the required angle breaks, or is blocked, or was not switched on in time. The assistant referee raises the flag. The VAR tells the on-field referee: I have no picture. And at that moment, the match must continue, amid a crowd screaming for an answer the system is incapable of supplying.

A conclusion of insufficient evidence is not a failure of analysis. It is the accurate result of analysis when the input data is empty.

I learned this principle at the very start of my writing career, and it became the backbone of how I work with VAR situations. No basis means no conclusion. There are plenty of reports, plenty of frames, plenty of red arrows, but if the evidentiary foundation is empty, the whole building above it collapses. Based on my experience following matches, most serious errors in VAR analysis in Vietnam do not come from misreading the law. They come from misreading an empty frame and then filling it with imagination.

The counter-intuitive angle: the system rewards decisiveness, not caution

There is a very practical reason why an empty result is treated as a failure. Nobody pays for it.

A broadcaster needs a commentator to say clearly: this is a penalty or it is not. A fan page needs a decisive status line to farm engagement. An organiser needs an announcement to shut down the argument. A referee needs a decision so the match can continue. Across that entire chain, there is no room for the sentence: I do not know. The person who says I do not know is treated as lacking courage, lacking expertise, or worse, having an agenda.

So the system automatically generates pressure to produce decisive conclusions from indecisive data. And that pressure does not act only on commentators. It acts on referees. A V-League referee knows that if he waves a collision away, the stands will howl. If he blows, the stands will howl in a different direction, but only for a few minutes. Human beings respond to short-term rewards and punishments. A whistle may be wrong, but a whistle is an action. Silence is an emptiness. And human beings fear emptiness more than they fear being wrong.

That is why I argue that most of the VAR controversy in Vietnam, as in Europe, is not really about the law. It is about who must take responsibility for a gap. Nobody wants that responsibility, so it is pushed to the nearest person: the referee, standing in the middle of the ring, the one place where a person is forced to decide on behalf of everyone else.

A second counter-intuitive angle, and it runs against our most popular belief: more cameras do not reduce controversy. They increase it.

The semi-automated offside technology FIFA deployed at the 2026 World Cup uses twelve dedicated cameras mounted under the stadium roof, tracking twenty-nine data points on each player's body, at a frequency of fifty times per second. That is an enormous volume of data compared with anything football had ever had before. But every new camera angle, every new data point, opens one more surface for arguing about which angle is the authoritative one. Previously, an offside decision had one assistant referee and one pair of eyes. Now, an offside decision has twelve cameras, a computational model, a system error margin, a display interface, and a technical team. Each of those layers can be doubted.

Mathematically, increasing precision also means increasing the number of incidents that fall into the ambiguous zone. As the error band narrows, more incidents fall inside it. I once compiled a list of disallowed offside goals in several competitions with technological assistance, and what I found was that the volume of post-match controversy did not fall. It merely shifted from arguments about the referee's eyes to arguments about the software.

And that brings me back to the question I started with, the question I have carried from France versus Australia in 2026 to this day. When the screen is empty, what should we do?

The answer I have settled on for myself is not a return to the era before technology. Going back is a dangerous romance, because it means accepting preventable errors. Nor is the answer absolute faith in technology, because absolute faith simply produces a new kind of controversy.

Putting the match context back in, what I think we need is something more modest: publishing the gaps.

A forward-looking thought: print the empty results too

In Saigon, in my group of twelve thousand members, I run a poll every week. And every week, a significant proportion choose the third option I added after a long period of being criticised: I do not have enough information to decide.

At first I added that option purely to reduce the abusive comments. But I discovered something unexpected: the share choosing the third option hovers around thirty per cent, and that share is markedly higher in situations where the video is blurry, obstructed, or missing camera angles. My community, despite being seen as an angry mob, is still capable of recognising a gap. They are simply not given the language to talk about it.

That is the basis for the proposal I want to make. Instead of publishing only the decisions that were made, leagues and organisers should also publish the cases where no decision could be made because of insufficient evidence. A public list after each round, stating which incidents the VAR team checked, which were skipped, and of those, how many were classified as having insufficient basis for intervention.

This has three effects. First, it turns silence from a suspect behaviour into a recorded decision. Second, it generates data for evaluating referees, rather than judging them solely on the decisions they did make. Third, and most importantly, it forces fans to confront a reality they are rarely told: not every incident has an answer, and that is not a conspiracy. It is the physical limit of the camera, of transmission speed, of human beings.

The referee blows the whistle, but the fans are the ones who keep the final score. And if the fans are the ones keeping score, they have the right to see the whole sheet, including the empty cells.

In Vietnamese football, where each V-League match is watched by hundreds of thousands of viewers on screens and by tens of thousands in the stands, publishing the gaps may be uncomfortable for the first few seasons. Some will say it means exposing weaknesses. Some will say it gives teams an excuse to complain. I understand those concerns. But I also know that the alternative, continuing to let every gap be filled by a decisive conclusion resting on a fragile foundation, has quietly eroded the trust of Vietnamese audiences for years. A referee who errs can be corrected. A system inflated by empty conclusions cannot be corrected by any sanction.

I no longer believe a match ends when the final whistle sounds. A match ends when the community sits down and provisionally accepts a conclusion, even if that conclusion is a gap. The job of people in my profession is not to fill that gap. My job is to show the audience where the gap is, why it is there, and why leaving it empty is more honest than filling it with something I never saw.

That semi-final night in Saigon, I failed. I changed my conclusion out of fear of a crowd. Three months later, I reread the edited piece and found it colder, blander, and most importantly no longer mine. I keep it in a separate folder, undeleted. I leave it there to remind myself that fear can produce a piece that is emotionally powerful but cannot produce an analysis that is correct.

If next season in the V-League there is one small improvement I am permitted to suggest, it is not buying more cameras. It is a small line of text appearing on the post-match notice board, next to the scoreline, stating that at a certain minute of the match, the system checked and there was insufficient basis to conclude. A small line like that will please nobody. But a small line like that will teach a generation of Vietnamese fans something it took me years of standing at the edge of the ring to learn: that sometimes, the most honest answer a referee can give is to tell everyone waiting that he has not seen enough.