Football Fans Surprisingly Supportive of VAR

A couple of weeks into the 2023/2024 football season, we’ve already seen plenty of refereeing and VAR controversy. Whether it’s about penalties given or not given, handball rules that nobody seems to understand or red cards that can change a game’s entire dynamic in the blink of an eye – people have come to accept these discussions as a part of the game they love.

And despite hopes to the contrary, the introduction of the video assistant referee (VAR) has done little to silence these discussions. If anything, they seem to have become fiercer, because making a mistake as an on-field referee is one thing but making mistakes (or what is perceived to be a wrong decision) after studying a scene from countless camera angles appears to be much harder to accept for many football fans.

That’s why the debate surrounding VAR has been so lively from the start and why the technology’s opponents so vehemently dismiss it: we still have these discussions week after week, so we may as well get rid of VAR and return to simpler times. But not so fast: despite many loud voices calling for the abandonment of VAR, the majority of football fans appears to be in favor of the video assistant referee. According to survey data from Statista’s European Football Benchmark, the majority of football fans in Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the UK are actually in favor of keeping VAR, saying that it has made the game fairer.

While Italian fans are overwhelmingly in favor of VAR, British respondents were slightly more skeptic of it. Even in the UK, 57 percent of respondents were in favor of keeping it, however, versus just 12 percent who want to abandon it and 26 percent who were still undecided.