You might remember I posted an article talking about the growing sense of discontent with Video Assistant Referees (VAR) amongst Norwegian football fans. Ever since VAR was implemented only a few years ago, the “VAR out” movement has grown steadily. A study of the 2024 season’s VAR was released by the Eliteserien, Norway’s top division of football, that showed the VAR was not as effective as it needed to be. VAR review times were extremely long, including one insane VAR review that took over 10 minutes. The calls made by VAR, when reviewed by the refereeing association after the matches, were not correct nearly enough. With this report, the facts were there for the Norwegian football fans to decide for themselves: is VAR worth keeping?

The major cons of VAR are the impact to the match day experience. The joy of celebrating a goal with fellow fans has been replaced by a hesitant wait to see if VAR will intervene and request a review. The lengthy wait times experienced in the Eliteserien caused consistent delays in the match. Fans were unhappy seeing the effects VAR had on their experience at the stadium. These very fans have voiced this disapproval in a significant way recently: at each club’s annual supporter’s group meeting, there was a vote held on whether or not they were in support of telling the club to vote in favour of removing VAR. Of the 32 clubs that made up Norway’s Topfotball (the top 2 divisions of Norwegian football), 19 of them voted in favour of removing VAR in Norwegian domestic competitions. While some clubs, Tromso, for example, openly appealed to their supporters to vote in favour of keeping VAR, their reasons for doing so were somewhat apparent. In the first season VAR was implemented in Norway, Tromso recorded their best ever league finish in club history. Coincidence? Perhaps.

Now VAR, in an ideal world where the vast majority of the calls it makes are correct, would be a welcome addition to any league. That is provided that the VAR review times are not extremely lengthy. Realistically, VAR should be aiming for a standard where they can complete their review within the period of time following a goal where play is stopped for celebrations and moving back to the centre circle to restart. So by this, I mean 30-90 seconds following the ball entering the net. If they are unable to definitively show that the call made on the field was incorrect within that time frame, then the call on the field stands. This would strike a good balance between being able to correct obviously incorrect calls, but to not ruin the matchday experience by delaying the game to check if a player is 1cm offside. (In the spirit of the offsides rule anyways, 1cm offside isn’t really offside. Its purpose is to stop players “cherry-picking” far behind the defence). However, that’s just my thoughts.

For now, I believe that if a league doesn’t have the budget to properly implement a quick and effective VAR system that can get the vast majority of the calls made correct, then the impact to the matchday experience shouldn’t be impacted with the addition of VAR. Norwegian fans seem to feel the same, but do their votes mean that VAR will be abolished? Not quite yet. This matter now goes to the Norwegian Football Federation (NFF), who will be faced with the choice of showing significant improvements to VAR, or abolishing it from the league entirely.

As someone who watches a lot of Norwegian football, the matchday atmosphere is really special. Fans sing and play music for the full 90 minutes, in some nostalgic style stadiums that rarely clear 15k capacity. Given the effectiveness of VAR that’s been shown in Norway, I think they would be better off removing VAR and preserving the atmosphere in the stadiums.

Thanks for Reading!

-LM